Too little, far too late for Walker to fix voter ID issues

One rule that I’ve learned over the last 5+ years is that if the Walker Administration is “doing the right thing”, it’s often a case of covering up for their own scummy behavior. Another example of that happened today, when Governor Walker announced a new emergency rule that goes into place on Friday that will try to clean up some of the problems associated with the WisGOP-approved voter ID law.

This week, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s Division of Motor Vehicles announced a new process to issue photo ID card receipts to those who need them to vote. These receipts will be issued to individuals who are in the process of obtaining photo ID cards for voting but are unable to produce the necessary documents in time for an election. The DMV has been offering free voter identification cards since 2011. This measure builds on that service, so that those who have difficulty accessing documentation needed for an ID card, and those who have errors on documentation, such as a misspelled name on a birth certificate, are still able to vote with a temporary photo ID card receipt.

Sounds good on the surface, as these moves give the benefit of the doubt to those who might be victimized by obnoxious errors that are beyond their control.

But Andrea Kaminski of the League of Women Voters said this move still doesn’t allow the Walker Administration’s numerous voter suppression measures to suddenly pass muster.

This proposal, which is clearly aimed at deflecting the current lawsuits in federal court, could help a small number of eligible citizens who are at risk of losing their vote because of the voter photo ID law. That is a small positive development. The provision will be more helpful if more people know about it, and that underscores the need for voter education.

People who are not sure whether they have, or can obtain, an acceptable photo ID need to know about this new provision as well as other aspects of the voter ID law. At the very least they need to know where to go online or whom to call to get answers for their questions.

And look at what just happened to come out this afternoon- the GAB’s formal request for that $250,000 in funding to go toward that voter education campaign. Now all the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee needs to do is approve releasing these already paid-for funds designed to let Wisconsinites know how to obtain a voter ID.

And did I mention that a trial on this voter ID bill starts on Monday, with new evidence of the effects of these laws now known, and with revelations from Congressman Glenn Grothman and a former GOP staffer at the State Capitol that showed voter ID was intended to give Republicans an advantage? What, you thought the timing of this emergency rule came because the Walker Administration was acting out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not!

I agree with Kaminski that this is clearly trying to head off damning evidence that Wisconsin’s voter ID law leads to suppression, which could get the law thrown out entirely, and what the Walker boys are trying to pull is the “see? We’re fixing the problem, let us handle it,” defense. That’s the last-ditch move sleazeballs try to do once they can’t get out of a mess by ignoring the issue or lying about it. Far too late, WisGOP. The evidence is obvious that people got their constitutional right to vote was denied in last month’s primary, and this band-aid in the form of a new rule won’t be nearly enough to make it OK by November.

The fact that the Walker boys are desperately trying to cover themselves ahead of this trial shows that they have a lot to hide, and that they know these rules are targeted towards certain, Dem-leaning groups. And this deception act from the Governor’s Office shows again that not only should Wisconsin’s voter ID law be thrown out for its one-sidedness, but also that the Obama Administration must step in and oversee November's elections in this state. At this point, you can’t trust the Fitzwalkerstanis to do anything that doesn’t slant the playing field for themselves or their allies.

$101 mil in unpaid debt = Wisconsin budget even more messed up than I thought

I certainly was skeptical on the future of Wisconsin's budget, as there are $726 million in unspecified cuts lurking in the 2016-17 Fiscal Year just to have the budget balance. But I also had looked at the revenues through March, and didn't think there would be any need for any changes to the budget in this fiscal year, which ends on June 30.

And then this piece of news dropped late this afternoon.

Gov. Scott Walker's administration has put off a debt payment for the second year in a row, this one totaling $101 million, which will cost taxpayers about $2.3 million in interest.

The state was supposed to retire about $132 million in debt on May 1, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Instead it reduced that amount by $101 million, which will help the state end the current biennium on June 30, 2017, in the black.

However, it will also increase interest on the debt payments by $2.27 million over the next eight years, in addition to pushing principal payments into future budget cycles. The fiscal bureau put out a memo Tuesday based on an earlier estimate that the deferral would total $50 million, but the Walker administration confirmed later in the day that the total was actually $101 million.

That is a bad sign, because it's basically the equivalent of not paying off your mortgage in favor of paying a lower amount for the next several years and paying more costs in the long run. It's a "hope and pray" kind of strategy that isn't done by anyone that's on firm economic footing.

So why did it happen? Let's see what Walker spokesmodel Laurel Patrick has to say.

Walker administration spokeswoman Laurel Patrick said the restructuring reflects "prudent fiscal management" that was done to take advantage of historically low interest rates in a process used under previous administrations. She didn't respond to a request for an explanation about why the state would rather pay more money in interest in the future rather than pay a lower amount now.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THAT SHIT? This isn't a refinancing of debt, where some form of debt is traded in for lower interest rates and costs over time. This was $101 million that would have been paid off and be off the books . What the Walker folks are doing is the equivalent of begging their creditors to restructure their debt because they can't pay them right now.

As the LFB paper on the skipped payment explains, the amount of principal on the debt doesn't change, it's still $101 million. It's just that it's paid off over 8 years, with interest added in, which means that more money will have to be used in each of the next 8 fiscal years to pay this off, including $13.1 million next year. This will raise the structural deficit in all of those years, and will crowd out spending on other needs.

The bigger red flag to me isn't the damage done to future year budgets, but what this skipped payment means for this year. If you flash back to January's revenue estimates from the LFB, this was the projected state of the state's General Fund for the two years of the 2015-17 budget.

Cash balance 2015-17 budget
2015-16 +$284.0 million
2016-17 +$135.2 million

So if we have to push $101 million in payments into the future just to make 2015-16 balance, we must be WAY behind that $284 million number. There'd be no reason to skip the debt payment and take on extra costs if you had $284 million to spare- you'd carry over the lower balance past the November 2016 elections and hope that things improve by the time budget season in early 2017 rolls around (or you repair the 2016-17 budget then). There's no reason to make a move to alert the public to your failing budget unless you absolutely have to, which tells me that April revenues (a key month due to the large numbers of tax returns that are filed) had to have been AWFUL, and we are likely in a revenue shortfall.

And the skipped payment and revenue shortfall also means that the 2016-17 budget will likely have to make several adjustments, barring an unforeseen economic boom. As you can see, a deficit of nearly $150 million is baked into that year's budget, and that's including those $726 million in lapses I mentioned above. Now add in a revenue shortfall, which means projected revenues for 2016-17 will also likely be lowered, and that deficit goes higher. Which means we are likely staring at a "shortfall-cut-shortfall" pattern that has plagued ALEC states like Kansas in recent years.

I knew Wisconsin's budget was jacked up under Walker and WisGOP. I just didn't think we'd see the deficits appear this year. In a way, it's a good thing, as we will know the mess in front of us before the voters go to the polls in November, which means maybe we can kick out some of the GOP vandals that caused these problems and put a block on some of this ALEC fiscal madness in the next budget. But that's the only good thing that comes out today's news of another skipped debt payment, and it proves Chris Walker at Political Heat correct- the claims Scotty is making of a "Wisconsin Comeback" are cherry-picked and bogus.

Wisconsin AG Schimel chooses Koch $ over safe drinking water

This story should shock and anger me, but it really doesn’t. Not these days in the Banana Republic known as Fitzwalkerstan, where the there is no such thing as a concept of working for the public good, and all duties of Attorney General Brad Schimel’s office are carried out solely for the benefit of the Republican Party and its donors.

A [GOP-headed] Assembly committee said a backlog of permit requests was created by a 2011 state Supreme Court decision. Republicans said the decision gave the DNR [Department of Natural Resources] too much power to consider wells' cumulative impact on state water quality.

The Supreme Court said Act 21 didn't affect its analysis of the Lake Beulah Management District versus DNR case.

The court ruled unanimously that the state constitution gives the DNR "the authority and a general duty ... to consider the impact of a proposed high-capacity well on waters of the state."

In a news release, Schimel highlighted a passage from the opinion:

"I have determined that the Supreme Court did not address the newly passed Act 21 in Lake Beulah Management District v. Department of Natural Resources. Lake Beulah, 335 Wis. 2d 47. I further conclude that neither Wis. Stat. § 281 nor the public trust doctrine give DNR the authority to impose any condition not explicitly allowed in state statute or rule. In addition, no other authority exists which permits DNR to impose the conditions enumerated by the Assembly." And since the State Legislature is run by Republicans beholden to the Koch/ALEC doctrine of “no restrictions on polluters unless restrictions might help our donors,” that means that Schimel’s edict claims that the DNR can do little to restrict any high-capacity wells, no matter how bad the effects are downstream or to an area’s drinking water.

I mean, why would we care about drinking water quality being fouled in Wisconsin? It’s not like any dangers have cropped up in recent weeks. Oh wait…

Eleven private wells in Kewaunee County that were being tested as part of a DNR-funded study showed the presence of salmonella and/or rotavirus, the Department of Natural Resources announced late Monday.

Property owners have been notified of the findings, which are typically associated with fecal contamination, said James Dick, spokesperson for the DNR. In addition, the Kewaunee County Health Department Tuesday was mailing letters to all property owners with private wells within a half-mile of each of the contaminated wells, according to Cynthia Kinnard, Kewaunee County public health nurse.

"The wells are all over the county – all the way from Lincoln to Kewaunee to Carlton," she said.

The samples were taken April 18, according to Mark Borchardt of the USDA Agricultural Service, who is conducting tests as part of a larger DNR study of the county's wells. The 11 wells were among 30 that were randomly selected from 110 wells that were found to be contaminated in samples taken last November, Borchardt said.

Sounds healthy. I’m sure that’ll help property values in the area.

This is where I mention that Kewaunee County voted 59% to elect Brad Schimel Attorney General in 2014, and voted (62%) for Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley, who was endorsed by the Dairy Business Association to allow this type of pollution to continue unabated. You see the result. How’s that “voting GOP because of Jesus and rural resentment” working out for ya, Kewaunee.

Also note that Schimel’s “let em do what they want” response goes public less than a week after this article hit the newsstands relating to another pollution incident in Wisconsin.

A large dairy operation that spilled manure into Castle Rock Creek in February has also failed for an undetermined length of time to prevent rainwater and snow melt from carrying potentially harmful pollutants down steep hillsides toward the popular trout stream.

The owner of Misty Morning Dairy near Fennimore in southwestern Wisconsin has told state regulators that he has fixed most of the smaller problems they documented in a March 17 inspection, a Department of Natural Resources spokesman said Friday.

But the owner still has not built long-promised concrete structures to keep nutrient-laden stormwater from leaching out of feed stored on the Wood Road property for the more than 1,700 animals it was estimated to house, DNR wastewater engineer Mark Cain said Friday.

“He has told us he just can can’t afford to do it right now,” he said.

The DNR’s reaction to defying their request? They told him the owner they might need to fine him $10,000 and pay damages related to the hundreds of trout that were killed due to the 2-mile river of manure that came from the Misty Morning farm. MIGHT have to pay, because the “please do the right thing, Mr. Agribusiness” strategy was apparently worth another shot. How are these people not getting the book thrown at them?

As I stated yesterday, it’s amazing how the Fitzwalkerstanis can spend tons of time and energy suing the Feds on any kind of environmental regulation, and can make the poor and unemployed jump through numerous hoops to get benefits that allow them to stay afloat. But when other groups actually break environmental laws, cause real damage, and require large amounts of taxpayer dollars to be thrown away to fix the damage, then the Walker boys shrug and do as little as humanly possible. This is true whether it involves the WEDC slush fund, or in letting businesses like Misty Morning Dairy or Herr Environmental in Oconomowoc off the hook for their negligence.

It literally pays to be on the side of the Koch/ALEC agenda in Wisconsin these days, and it gives you a “get out of jail free” card. That message from WisGOP rings through loud and clear.

UW President uses false GOP talking points on tenure. Sickening

We already had an idea that UW System President Ray Cross was a lackey for the Walker Administration who deserved the votes of no confidence that faculty at multiple UW campuses have drawn up. But a story in today's Capital Times indicates that Cross's apparently spinelessness may be an act, as instead he seems to be a willing accomplice to the damage being wrought on the UW.

Faculty undermined their position against policy changes by arguing that tenure should guarantee their jobs when a program is discontinued and they are no longer needed in a discipline, Cross wrote in a March 7 email to [UW Regent John] Behling obtained by the Capital Times as part of an open records request.

"That is a "union" argument," Cross said.

Cross compared faculty to railroad brakemen, kept on the job for years after they were no longer needed, he said. "It was for the same reason - a job for life even when that job was no longer necessary."

NO RAY, NO! The "job for life" line is a dead giveaway, as it is the same right-wing BS talking point that Assembly GOP Majority Leader/ UW dropout Jim Steineke tried to sell in his ridiculous ranting about faculty "arrogance" last week. Tenure does not guarantee a job for life, and never has, but those facts don't matter to WisGOP hacks playing the "divide and conquer" game to the rubes in rural areas who aren't familiar with the concept.

Strangely, Cross correctly admits later in the email that tenure also exists to guarantee academic freedom and the exchange of ideas independent of political pressure. But the fact that he makes derogratory references to "brakemen" and "union arguments" gives away where Cross is coming from, and it is telling that he did not demand the UW Board of Regents or the State Legislature to maintain those intellectual freedoms, and limit any tenure restrictions to getting rid of the "job for life" image.

Cross's point about programs being discontinued is the other danger with this new tenure policy- who decides what UW programs aren't worth continuing? It's the same question UW-Madison professor Dave Vanness was asking in the article. Vanness also serves as the president of the Madison chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and he says that his organization's bylaws already allowed for layoffs in extraordinary cases, which makes Cross's "job for life" comment all the more BS.

"When there is a bona fide financial emergency or a program is failing to meet educational quality standards and faculty cannot be retrained or reassigned, then even the AAUP agrees that layoffs can legitimately happen," [Vanness] said.

"Under the new UW tenure policy, a high quality (say, climate science) can be shut down and its faculty laid off so that other programs (say, petroleum engineering) deemed of priority can expand," Vanness said. "Should we shut down African studies to fund accounting? Or how about shutting down philosophy to fund marketing?"

Exactly. Especially when climate science or philosophy or economics classes might not give conclusions and ideas that work with the Koch/ALEC agenda. That's the real reason Cross and the ALEC/GOP crew want to shut down tenure- to weaken the independence of thought and ideas being generated from the UW and the young workers who graduate from it. That is a threat to the Wisconsin business oligarchs that call the shots on the state's economic strategy, as those guys want a low-wage, low-innovation state to keep their high status in place. And they prefer the status to actual competition and excellence.

Now that it has become obvious that UW President Cross and many Regents are nothing more than hit men and women for the anti-public education thugs at the Capitol, it shows that UW-Madison's faculty was right in passing the vote of no confidence last week, and others must follow suit. If Cross has any sense of decency and respect for the UW System, he will step aside and cash in his sizable pension. And if he doesn't, he will prove himself to be the GOP puppet his disgusting, wrong-headed email indicated him to be. Either way, today's revelation makes it all the more critical to remove the GOP element from the Capitol as soon as possible, if you give any type of a damn about the UW System's quality and independence.

In Fitzwalkerstan, fraud is fine if you're WEDC, but not if you're poor

Recent revelations illustrate just how slanted things have gotten here in Fitzwalkerstan, where it pays to be in the "inner circle" and you are penalized if you are not. It is so slanted that federal action may be warranted in both cases, to bring the true fraudsters to jail, while guaranteeing the rights of those who have fallen on hard times.

The first example of this came as part of an in-depth article in Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal about the cover-ups and shielding of information going on at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). Here’s just a taste of what Matt DeFour found, where WEDC’s overwhelmingly pro-GOP board is stalling and hiding details of millions of dollars in taxpayer handouts from the two Democrats on the WEDC Board- Rep. Peter Barca and Sen. Julie Lassa.

The dispute involves a request for records related to 28 economic development awards totaling $126 million for which the agency announced last June it could not find staff underwriting documentation. At one point the agency estimated the records totaled more than 462,000, but the Democrats said many of those documents had little or nothing to do with their request.

Agency CEO Mark Hogan and other board members pushed back against the Democrats at a February public board meeting, raising concerns that their request was a waste of taxpayer resources for a problem that has already been resolved, and that the tenor of the discussion has negatively affected employee morale. The Democrats argued their attempt to carry out their duties as board members had been met with stonewalling.

Awwww, it hurts the feelings of WEDC workers to be reminded that their organization is a Walker-created slush fund for the Wisconsin GOP and its donors? I’m guessing the corruption and cover-up factor is what really is hurting morale there, more than being reminded of it.

The article goes on to mention that after it was revealed last July that over $124 million in potential tax breaks were given out between 2011 and 2013 without a formal WEDC staff review, and then-WEDC CEO Reed Hall told Lassa and Barca they should submit a formsal records request to the organization, WEDC sat on the request for months. Then when WEDC staff did respond to the Dems’ demands for information, they pulled the old “drown them in detail” maneuver, and tried to blame the Dems for making them pull such a stunt.

In late January, the agency provided nearly 20,000 pages of documents for one award. [WEDC Legal Counsel Hannah] Renfro wrote to the lawmakers that the cost to taxpayers to provide the material totaled roughly $5,000, including 84.5 hours of staff time to review the documents for anything needing to be marked confidential. The records filled eight boxes.

Barca and Lassa wrote back that Renfro “needlessly wasted taxpayer funds and WEDC and legislative staff time” by printing any document that mentioned the company, rather than “all staff communication” as they had specified in November.

“It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that you are deliberately concealing public information that should be rather straightforward to provide,” they wrote.

But if WEDC staff actually got to the heart of what they did, then the pay-to-play tax handout's criteria might become clearer, and apparently they don’t want Dems or the public to see that. Guess we now know why Gov Walker wanted to exempt WEDC from parts of open records laws in his original 2015-17 budget, a move that was so odious that even the WisGOP-led Joint Finance Committee removed it out of the budget this time last year (before JFC GOPs tried and failed to gut the open records law themselves in early July).

Now compare that reaction (or lack thereof) at WEDC with recent press releases the Walker Administration have been sending out in relation to “getting tough on entitlement fraud.” This includes a note from the Walker-created Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Health Services which claimed that using tax dollars to go after Medicaid and Food Stamp fraud was a worthwhile investment that pays itself back with the amount of “improper” benefits that it recovers. In late March, the Capitol Times followed up with an article noting that the number of Wisconsinites who had their FoodShare benefits suspended for rules violations went from just over 100 in 2011 to nearly 1,200 in 2014 as part of this effort.

What’s not mentioned in that release is another one of these “tough on welfare” initiatives led to nearly 41,000 Wisconsinites having FoodShare benefits taken away from them as the Walker Administration claimed they did not search for work in Wisconsin. Notable is the lack of strictness to require employers to hire such people, nor in the desire to raise the minimum wage past its paltry $7.25 an hour to make it worthwhile for people to work and/or acquire skills to meet employers’ needs. In addition, the burden of proof is put onto the FoodShare recipient to prove they have looked for work, and for the state to agree he or she has done so, instead of having the state or employer prove that the FoodShare recipient wasn’t looking for work.

Along the same lines, Walker’s Department of Workforce Development released a statement last week crediting a better jobs market (What, no "Thanks Obama”?) and tougher oversight of people asking for unemployment benefits with the state’s unemployment trust fund turning from a deficit to a surplus. That statement also includes quite a bit of tap-dancing around a recent Wisconsin Appeals Court ruling which said the state had gone too far in denying unemployment benefits for a Walgreen’s service clerk fired for mistakes on the job.

A state appeals court ruled Thursday that employees in Wisconsin cannot be denied unemployment benefits for inadvertent errors, even if the worker has been repeatedly warned about such errors.

This is the 4th District Court of Appeals' first look at interpreting "substantial fault," a new threshold the state Legislature established in 2013 to tighten eligibility for unemployment.

That law says employees can't get benefits immediately if they're terminated for misconduct or "substantial fault," defined as acts that violate reasonable employer requirements. Misconduct is defined as "wanton disregard" of an employers' interests, and includes offenses like drug and alcohol use, theft or falsifying business records.

My guess is that the Walker Administration will spend more time and effort to appeal this case to the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce-owned Supreme Court, in an effort to expand the definition of “substantial fault”, and allow more people to be cut off of unemployment benefits.

I have no issue with cracking down on fraud of any sort if fraud is indeed occurring, but it’s worthy to compare the “tough on entitlement fraud” claims from the Walker Administration with the stonewalling and cover-ups that have followed stories of WEDC fraud. Also note that GOP Attorney General Brad Schimel seems uninterested in investigating and charging WEDC fraudsters for ripping off Wisconsin taxpayers, but he has no problem throwing out huge amounts of money to suing the Feds if they dare to go against the Koch/ALEC agenda. It tells you that the Walker Administration and WisGOP really don’t care about the rampant waste of taxpayer dollars, if such waste comes to the benefit of their campaign contributors and allies. They just fear the political damage from being caught and exposed - a dead giveaway of the corruption and one-sidedness of their "governance", and should outrage anyone with a sense of decency.

But it’s really not too surprising when you think about it. The poor and the jobless don’t give campaign contributions, and don’t have the disposable income to hire lawyers and lobbyists to defend themselves to give their side of the story. Plus, poor people make for excellent scapegoats to crack down on, and distracts dimwitted white guys from being outraged at the real criminals in this state- the oligarchs at WEDC, WMC and WisGOP that skim their cut from what taxpayers like you and I pay for.

Since we can’t count on GOP hacks or the Attorney General’s Office to police WEDC, this requires a Federal investigation of WEDC’s practices, handouts and accounting, to get this information out to the public, and to have us get our money back from these fraudsters. And it’s far from the only place that the Feds are needed these days in Fitzwalkerstan.

A sunny, positivity Sunday

Lots of Springtime positivity today.

Happy Mother's Day, for whatever percentage of my 4 readers hold such status, or have a loved one who does.

71 degrees and not a cloud in the sky is always a good Sunday. As is the prospect of this place opening up next weekend (even if it seems like there's still a long way to go on this product).



Oh, and we're even seeing this state's media be a little less paid off these days, as noted by this in-depth article on how WEDC officials are trying to hide their corrupt practices from the two Dems on the WEDC Board. Hmmm, wonder why Attorney General Brad Schimel is wasting all his time suing the feds when millions are being wasted and hidden in his backyard? Almost like he doesn't want people to know what's going on with his GOP buddies (and likely the same WMC businesses that got him elected).

More to come later this week, but I'm gonna get back to the sun before I have to get back to work tomorrow.

April jobs slowdown concerning, but still growth

I mentioned earlier this week that a good indicator whether the tepid economic growth of the 1st Quarter of 2016 was a seasonal fluke would come with the April jobs report. Well, that jobs report dropped yesterday, and the signs aren’t great.

The U.S. labor market grew in April at its weakest pace in seven months, new government data showed Friday, as more firms held off on hiring amid anxiety about broader economic weaknesses.

Employers added 160,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate held steady at 5.0 percent.

The latest jobs data provided an unexpectedly downcast signal about the nation’s labor market: A surge of Americans dropped out of the workforce and hiring in several key industries, including construction and manufacturing, all but stalled. The Department of Labor also revised downward jobs gains in the prior two months by a combined 19,000.

Ugh. The 160,000 jobs added (141,000 with the downward revisions) comes after Q1 2016 had the slowest 3-month growth in jobs in over 2 years. And as the article alludes to, the unemployment rate sticking at 5.0% was more a function of 362,000 people dropping out of the work force than it reflected more people working. Granted, there had been a large run up in the work force and “employed” status in the last 3 months (the participation rate rose by 0.4% in that time), so maybe some of this is a simple one-month correction. But it’s still not a good number, and it needs to be turned around next month to calm concerns.

Drilling down into the numbers of the BLS’s job report shows that a couple of sectors continued to show gains in April, while one sector in particular continued to suffer in light of low oil prices.

Professional and business services added 65,000 jobs in April. The industry added an average of 51,000 jobs per month over the prior 12 months. In April, job gains occurred in management and technical consulting services (+21,000) and in computer systems design and related services (+7,000).

In April, health care employment rose by 44,000, with most of the increase occurring in hospitals (+23,000) and ambulatory health care services (+19,000). Over the year, health care employment has increased by 502,000.

Employment in financial activities rose by 20,000 in April, with credit intermediation and related activities (+8,000) contributing to the gain. Financial activities has added 160,000 jobs over the past 12 months.

Mining employment continued to decline in April (-7,000). Since reaching a peak in September 2014, employment in mining has decreased by 191,000, with more than three-quarters of the loss in support activities for mining.

Another minor bright spot is that manufacturing showed an increase of 4,000 jobs after shedding 45,000 jobs in that sector in the previous two months, although those gains were heavily concentrated in cars and auto parts. With the dollar starting to weaken but consumption of autos also weakening, it’ll be intriguing to see which direction manufacturing employment takes in the coming months.

What is more encouraging in this report is the tick up in hourly and weekly wages. Hourly wages were up 0.3% in April, and hourly and weekly wages are both up nearly 2.5% year-over-year, about double the rate of inflation over the last 12 months. Obviously, the distribution of those increases are also a key, but at least we are starting to see a bit of overdue positive movement for wages. We'll see if wages continue to beat the rate of inflation as gas and housing costs climb in the coming months.

And while the jobs number is below-trend, let's not panic button too much in this presidential election year. While the unemployment rate is at the same 5.0% that we were at in 2008, it's still a positive direction for jobs in 2016. That's very different than what was starting to unravel 8 years ago.

Total job change
All jobs
April 2016 +160,000
April 2008 -210,000

April 2015-April 2016 +2,692,000
April 2007-April 2008 +194,000

Private sector job change
April 2016 +171,000
April 2008 -217,000

April 2015-April 2016 +2,586,000
April 2007-April 2008 -81,000

So while it does seem that things are stalling out a bit compared to the strong job market of 2015, let’s not warm up the red lights of “RECESSION” yet. Maybe these numbers reflect an expansion near or at its peak after nearly 7 years, but there also isn’t a clear sign that things are going south like we had in the months before Wall Street blew up in the Fall of 2008. Just keep your eyes peeled for other data in the coming months, as that’ll give us a better idea whether the recent slowdown is a minor soft patch between bouts of the relatively steady growth we’ve grown accustomed to under President Obama, or if something truly different and worrying might be coming our way.