Thursday, November 7, 2019

Trump's "booming economy"? Not in the Midwest, and especially not in Wisconsin

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released their report on Real GDP by state for Q2 2019, and you’ll notice some significant geographic differences in this country when it comes to economic growth.


That’s not a good look for our part of the country, and sure puts a crimp into Donald Trump’s plans to tell the Rust Belt “Look at my booming economy!”

Wisconsin is among those pale blue states in the bottom 10 for GDP growth, placing 43rd in the nation, with only Indiana faring worse than us. And it continues a bad trend for economic growth in the state, as evidenced by the last 5 quarters of Wisconsin GDP, through June 2019.

GDP growth, Wisconsin
2018 Q2 +1.0%
2018 Q3 +2.2%
2018 Q4 +1.4%
2019 Q1 +1.1%
2019 Q2 +1.1%

Let me remind you that Governor Evers’ first budget wasn’t signed until July 2019, meaning we were under Walker/WisGOP fiscal and economic policy through this whole time period.

And it’s not like things went great guns in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan before early 2018. If you start from when Walker’s first budget was signed in July 2011 and go through this last report, we lag most of the Midwest and are way behind the country as a whole. I marked Wisconsin in the Badger Red.


Yes, that is Minnesota at the top of Midwestern states, with their economy growing 1/3 faster than Wisconsin’s over those 8 years. Although we just passed Indiana for 5th out of 7 in the Midwest so….winning?

You look at these numbers, and it’s no surprise that Dems won statewide in Wisconsin last year, as voters wanted a change from this stagnation and second-class results. But the gerrymandered GOPs in the Legislature won’t let it happen, and so would we be surprised if we continue to be left in the dust for the rest of 2019 and 2020? I wouldn’t be.

Again, good luck on having Donald Trump try to sell the GOP’s Tax Scam and other economic policy in this part of the country next year. Reality shows that the very part of the country that Trump was supposed to revive is one that’s doing worse than most. And Wisconsin is lagging even among that lesser group.

1 comment:

  1. And what exactly is the state GOP doing to un-rig the state economy and allow ordinary Wisconsinites to pursue prosperity?

    Why, they're refusing to allow well-qualified candidate Brad Pfaff to serve the governor and the state as Agriculture Secretary, despite calls from farmers themselves and from industry groups such as the Wisconsin Corn Growers Association, the Dairy Business Association, the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association, and the Wisconsin Agri-Business Association.

    Another move calculated to improve the state economy included attempts to prohibit Democratic State Rep Jimmy Anderson from participating in committee meetings by phone. Anderson requested this accommodation because of disabilities he suffers after a car crash left him partially paralyzed.

    Clots like Fitzgerald and Vos waste taxpayer time and money looking for ways to be dickheads, merely to indulge the whims of their one-percent handlers. Yes, Fitzgerald and Vos ARE dickheads, petty, infantile and weak, and their misbehavior points backwards to the megalomaniacs and sociopaths who pull their strings.

    Such profound absence of any, any sense at all, of civic duty, of any remote notion that they have ordinary constituents to serve, of any ability to look beyond personal enrichment and immediate gratification, spotlights how infantile, immature and sociopathic these petty tyrants are.

    Such unfiltered displays of pathological behavior prove that these creatures need therapy, not any public office duties and certainly not any of the responsibilities that they reflexively, addictively, flagrantly ignore and abuse.

    ReplyDelete