You want to talk JOBS! in Wisconsin, Mike Pence? Go for it. Your record sucks

Apparently our Vice-President decided to parachute into a donor's Walworth County business to try to talk about, well....

And this was the general theme of Pence's bullshit words to the assembled "crowd" of dozens.

Today's unemployment math: "We added more jobs back to this economy in three months than Joe Biden and Barack Obama added in eight years."

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 19, 2020

Is that what they're going to go with? Are they going to assume the 2 months before then didn't happen, and that the world outside of Cult 45 doesn't know that we're still down nearly 13 million jobs?

It's especially interesting that Pence chose today to try to pull this BS on jobs, because right before he spoke, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest update of the "gold standard" Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. This report went up to March 2020, so the 12-month totals only reflect a small amount of the damage that happened once COVID-19 broke out. But it accelerated a slide in growth that happened in 2019.

The March QCEW report is especially big because it is used by the BLS to give their preliminary revisions for several months of jobs reports. That was released as well, and while not as severe as last year's downward revision of more than 500,000 jobs, it still was a notable drop from the numbers that were originally reported.

Put that loss of 223,000 private sector jobs on top of previous jobs reports, and you have less than 400,000 jobs added between March 2019 and March 2020, the smallest year-over-year growth level in nearly a decade. And it's especially bad for a couple of types of blue-collar sectors that Pence claimed Trump was saving during today's dog-and-pony show in Darien.

12-month change in jobs + revisions, March 2020
Mining
Jobs reports -40,900
Benchmark revisions -26,500
TOTAL CHANGE -67,400

Manufacturing
Jobs reports -21,000
Benchmark revisions -70,000
TOTAL CHANGE -91,000

Again, this is before COVID hit the economy full-force in April, with not even half of those losses gained back in the 3 months since.

It's also odd that Pence tried to pull this "JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!" routine in Wisconsin, because our state lagged the country for job growth when Republican Scott Walker and his fellow Republicans ran the state, and it got worse in the last two years under Trump. Q1 2020 was only an "improvement" in the sense that several other states had larger losses.

In fact, today's QCEW report said every state in the Midwest lost jobs year-over-year. In fact, Wisconsin's loss of 1,800 was the smallest out of those 7 states in that time period.

The next QCEW report won't be released until after the 2020 election, so we won't see how severe the losses were by the end of June. But Q1 was bad enough, and I can't tell whether I should laugh at Mike Pence for trying to convince Wisconsinites that the economy was fine today, or if I should be infuriated that he tried to pull over such a lie on people because he assumed they were too stupid to know the truth.