9 years in Fitzwalkerstan show Dane County winning, rural Wis losing, and state falling further behind

Now that the "gold standard" Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) has published its year-end totals for 2019, I think it's a good time to look at how Wisconsin shapes up for 2010s, and which areas did well for jobs, and which didn't.

After 2010, Wisconsin was used as a lab rat for many right-wing policies, including busting public sector unions, installing right-to-work and other wage suppression measures, and a reallocation of tax dollars away from public services, and into tax incentives. So let's see how that worked out for us, shall we?

Compared to the rest of America, it certainly didn't make us an economic powerhouse. The country as a whole added jobs at a rate nearly double the rate that we added them in Wisconsin.

When it came to wages, Wisconsin actually improved better than the US rate on a percentage basis. Not by much, and neither the US or Wisconsin ended up much better than the 17% total inflation over those 9 years. But hey, it counts, right?

However, that larger percentage increase is only because Wisconsin's wages have been persistently lower than the rest of the country's. In fact, the already-sizable gap grew even larger by $20-$25 a week over those 9 years, indicating that "open for business" didn't mean that Wisconsin companies were any more willing to pay to compete for talent, despite allegedly having more money available due to corporate tax cuts.

Let's also look at where the jobs were added (or lost) over the 9 years of ALEC/WisGOP policies have been in place. And to no one's surprise if you've paid the least bit of attention over the last decade, Dane County sets the pace, largely by doing exactly what the WisGOPs don't want - offering a highly-educated labor pool and promoting their quality of life. Madison's county added more than 20% of the state's jobs from 2010-2019, and beating the 2nd-closest county for job growth by more than 21,000 jobs.

On a percentage basis, Kenosha County led a mismash of places in the top 10. Half of these counties (including the top 3) have some exurban influence of larger cities in other counties, 3 counties are in S. Central Wisconsin (including the two largest), and there a couple of rural northern counties that combined for a total of 1,900 total jobs.

Where rural Wisconsin really shows up is among the 17 Wisconsin counties that lost jobs after the Age of Fitzwalkerstan began in 2010. 4 counties lost more than 1 out of 10 jobs in those 9 years, with the biggest loser being Buffalo County, who nearly lost 1 in 5.

But the starkest graph is the one that shows most jobs lost by county, where Wood County stands out in a notorious way.

And yet Wood County got redder on the state level, voting for Scott Walker 55-43 when he won by 6 in 2010, but voting 57-41 for Walker in 2018, when Scotty lost by 1 statewide. Maybe that's not the direction for you (and much of the rest of rural Wisconsin) to go. Just saying.

Feel free to mess around with the QCEW numbers yourself, but the story seems pretty straightforward to me.