Wis Dems have ideas on lowering unemployment backlog. But record claims keep getting filed

After months of complaints from Wisconsinites regarding the inability of people to get unemployment benefits after getting laid off, and with 1 in 10 claims still to be decided, Assembly Democrats came out with a list of changes that would remove some of the barriers that has kept people from getting their money.

Seems like we needed to see more legislation on this subject from legislators from both parties sometime in the 4 months since COVID-19 broke out. But regardless, it's something, and here's a good rundown of what these bills would do.

Here are the eight bills Assembly Democrats are proposing to expand eligibility for unemployment benefits: pic.twitter.com/sm3lgq786z

— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) July 16, 2020

The waiting period, $500 wage threshold, suitable work, and a version of the work search changes were part of Tony Evers' 2019-21 budget proposals for DWD. The WisGOP Legislature took those items out of the budget, and kept the barriers that are in place.

Naturally, the WisGOPs also are planning to reject the Dems' proposals for changing unemployment rules in 2020, and it led to this gaffe from Assembly Speaker Robbin' Vos.

In a statement, @SpeakerVos says the package is "admitting that the governor's UI response has been a failure."

It goes on to say, "Democrats are trying to reinstate failed policies when their elimination contributed to record low unemployment." pic.twitter.com/jnDilhP1hG

— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) July 16, 2020

In addition to the garbage partisanship of the statement, Vos is bascially admitting that the barriers put in place were done with the intent of keeping Wisconsinites from getting unemployment benefits they were entitled to. And by proxy, keeping the taxes that employers pay into the unemployment fund artificially low.

As former UW professor Pamela Herd noted a couple of months ago, WisGOP's "reforms" were quite successful in turning deserving beneficiaries away.

Here’s the trend in fraction unemployed receiving UI in WI compared to national trends. WI fell from a 46% rate to 31% between 2010-19, while US rate was stable. Walker reforms were largely administrative, making it harder to get and keep UI 2/ pic.twitter.com/nGluj6PyO0

— Pam Herd (@pamela_herd) May 23, 2020

And while ex-Governor Walker gives typical BS evasions on why he signed off on all of these added paperwork, the marginally employed college dropout is at least recognizing another big reason claims aren't getting paid.

Walker said, "there's changes they can make but the changes aren't because of policies made in the past, it's changes because it's just such an incredible backlog."@Emilee_WKOW followed up on the issue and Walker maintained the real issue is people unable to get through to DWD.

— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) July 16, 2020

Let's not forget that still have an unprecedented amount of unemployment claims, both in Wisconsin and nationwide. There have been at least 1 million new claims filed in each of the last 17 weeks in America, and more than 30 million continuing claims have filed every week since early May.

Likewise, there have been 17 straight weeks in Wisconsin that have had new claims of 24,000 or more, and there are still more than 200,000 continuing "regular" claims a week, well over what we had at the start of March.

And with the state setting records for new COVID-19 claims in each of the last 3 weeks, it doesn't seem like the onslaught of unemployment payments will subside any time soon.

That bad jobs situation helps explain why Republicans in Wisconsin are spending so much time whining about the lack of unemployment payments. Better to play partisan games by complaining about the lack of payments instead of dealing with the Trump/GOP failures on COVID-19 that are a big reason behind all these added claims, and the huge amount of paperwork that claimants have to fill out, and DWD workers have to slog through.

We gotta continue John Lewis' work. Especially in Wisconsin

America lost a true national hero yesterday in John Lewis. And while there are a lot of tributes pouring in, I want to choose this statement from a white Milwaukee Brewer for giving the right tone.

RIP John Lewis, a giant of a man who helped make this world a better place for everyone. May we honor his legacy with how we go from here https://t.co/77vnBC70tP

— Brent Suter (@bruter24) July 18, 2020

"How we go from here" is the real way to honor John Lewis. And there's one simple way to do that, if Ron Johnson, Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Senate GOP would simply do their jobs.

In December John Lewis presided over House vote to restore Voting Rights Act. Bill has been sitting on McConnell's desk for 225 days. Best way to honor Lewis is for Congress to revive law he devoted his life to & call it John Lewis Voting Rights Act pic.twitter.com/bayhHCjAso

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) July 18, 2020

And few places have turned back the clock on voting rights and legitimate representation than Wisconsin, as Berman accurately broke down last year.

How Wisconsin became most rigged state in the country:

Extreme gerrymandering

Voter suppression

Lame duck legislative couppic.twitter.com/xLUB4oCUbo

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) July 2, 2019

Former One Wisconsin Now leader and Dem operative Scot Ross pointed out that the WisGOPs that allowed this election-rigging must be held responsible for what they've done to voting rights in this state.

For not one second should anyone here forget today Wisconsin Republicans, led by @scottwalker, @repvos & @SenFitzgerald and aided and abetted by its state legislators, used their power to attack the voting rights the late John Lewis gave his blood for.

— Scot Ross (@rossacrosswi) July 18, 2020

To those guys' "credit", they didn't say anything about John Lewis yesterday. Vos tweeted and retweeted whiny, cultural BS (in fairness, it's all they got at this point), and Fitz was showing himself at some Waukesha County GOP event (a place where the work of John Lewis was likely not discussed).

I'll leave you with the words of the young John Lewis himself, where he describes problems that are no different now than in 1963 (and this clip doesn't mention Lewis calling out police brutality against people of color in this speech).



We gotta do better.

Reopening stores doesn't mean that our retail spending has returned to what it was

A key to getting the economy back on track is restoring consumer spending to the pace that it was at before COVID-19 broke out. June's retail sales report loomed as a big indicator of that, since that was the month where many restrictions closing businesses had been relaxed...and right before COVID resurged to the record levels that we are seeing today.

If you dig into the retail sales report, the topline sounds pretty good, although the April through June shows the damage that was done.

Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for June 2020, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $524.3 billion,an increase of 7.5 percent (±0.5 percent) from the previous month, and 1.1 percent (±0.7 percent) above June 2019. Total sales for the April 2020 through June 2020 period were down 8.1 percent (±0.5 percent) from the same period a year ago. The April 2020 to May 2020 percent change was revised from up 17.7 percent(±0.5 percent) to up 18.2percent(±0.3 percent).

And if you just looked at the totals, you might think we had mostly recovered from the COVID-related shutdowns, as total retail spending was back near where we were at the start of 2020, especially if you look at "core" retail sales.

And June's sales reflected the switching in where Americans chose to spend money at, as more options were made available to them, as well as more travel to/from work and other places.

Retail sectors up in June
Clothing and accessory stores +105.1%
Electronics/appliance stores +37.4%
Furniture/home stores +32.5%
Sporting goods, hobby, music, book stores +26.5%
Bars and restaurants +20.0%
Gasoline stations +15.3%

Retail sectors down in June
Non-store retailers -2.4%
Grocery stores -1.6%
All food/beverage stores -1.2%
Building material/garden stores -0.3%

But the numbers from June don't come close to taking us back to the pre-COVID world of retail. Several brick-and-mortar retailers were still down between 10 and 30% compared to where they were in June, while the Amazon-type retailers, Menard's-type stores and grocers continued to benefit from higher sales to people that still were still staying in more than they were at the start of 2020.

This is before COVID re-emerged as widespread as ever, and caused more cutbacks and shutdowns in these depressed sectors across several states. I have no reason to think those sectors grew in July (except for maybe gas stations, and only because the price of gas has gone up), and these charts indicate the two-tier economic reality that has gotten much worse in America since March.

If you make most of your money in offices and by trading paper, you have likely been able to continue in your job with few disruptions to your income. You may even be better off, given the Bubbly stock and home markets. But if you work a job that requires a physical location, particularly a low-wage restaurant or store clerk job, you are working in a much more stressful environment due to higher exposure to COVID...if you're even working at all.

And yet, it's the office jobs and corporations that have gotten the bigger bailouts to this point, with a major cliff of cutoffs looming for the groups of people that have gotten the short end of the stick. The retail situation and the worsening COVID outbreak that's happened since then underscores the need for these depressed businesses and their workers to get more assistance from Congress ASAP. Or else many more jobs are going to go away in these sectors, and a lot of retail space/tax base is going to get vacant in a hurry.

June had more jobs in Wisconsin. But we were still far in the hole

Today we got another update on the jobs picture in Wisconsin, as we try to climb out of the depths of the COVID-19 induced recession that hit in the Spring. And the numbers ended up being pretty good.

Wisconsin's unemployment rate dropped to 8.5% in June — a bit of good news that came Thursday as Democratic lawmakers released proposals to remove obstacles and broaden access to unemployment benefits.

The jobless numbers also came as Gov. Tony Evers' administration temporarily reassigned 100 state workers to help address a backlog in claims.

Wisconsin's unemployment rate last month was far below the national rate of 11.1% and was down from the state's high of 13.6% in April. That figure reflected the height of businesses closing across the state in response to a “safer at home” order issued by Evers to slow the spread of the virus. Wisconsin's unemployment rate was 12.1% in May.

It’s definitely good news to see Wisconsin’s unemployment rate drop by as much as it did in June. But if you look at the numbers in the report, you’ll notice this stat.

Wisconsin labor force
May 2020 3,103,200
June 2020 3,056,900 (-46,300)

That means it’s almost a 50-50 split for why the unemployment rate went down in Wisconsin. Half was due to people getting back to work, but the other half was due to people dropping out of the labor force. Some of this "reduction" is likely due to fewer people heading into Wisconsin for Summer tourism jobs because outside travel has been greatly reduced in the COVID world. In fact, 12,200 more people were listed as being in the Wisconsin work force in June 2020 vs May on a raw number basis, but that's way below the additional workers that come in for a normal year, so it becomes a seasonally-adjusted loss.

Interestingly, Wisconsin’s drop in the labor force was different than what was happening nationwide, where 1.7 million were listed as returning to the labor force. This could simply be the national survey correcting in June as things (temporarily) settled down, because Wisconsin’s participation rate is still well higher than the US’s – we were 4.2% above the US rate in June 2020 and 4.0% above the US rate in June 2019.

On the payrolls side, we also bounced back, with a bigger increase from May's jump of 71,400 jobs.

The report shows that Wisconsin added 99,300 private sector jobs in June.

Winters said industries hardest hit earlier in the pandemic, such as leisure and hospitality, were the ones driving the recovery as businesses began to reopen.

But the leisure and hospitality sector was still down more than 88,000 jobs compared to its February peak. And that underscores the jobs hole that this state and this country is still in. Nearly 1 in 10 private sector jobs are gone compared to what we had in Feburary, and Wisconsin has a higher rate of job loss than the rest of the US has.

The other is that goods-producing industries hadn't done as much seasonal hiring as they usually would for June in Wisconsin. Which translates into a seasonally-adjusted LOSS of jobs in this jobs report.

Job change, Wisconsin June 2020
Construction
Non-seasonally adjusted +6,800
Seasonally adjusted -200

Manufacturing
Non-seasonally adjusted +7,400
Seasonally adjusted -400

And remember that this survey was taken in a time period in mid-June when new COVID-19 infections were at their lowest since the pandemic first broke out and businesses were reopening. Things look a lot different a month later, both in Wisconsin and in America, and I have to wonder if June is the last month of significant rebound in the job market for a while.

If that's true, then things will get dark very quickly for a lot of Wisconsinites, especially if there's no help coming down from DC to keep people afloat like there was in March. As these numbers show, even with 2 months of sizable job gains, there is still a massive gap in the Wisconsin jobs market.

COVID-19 keeps rising in Wisconsin communities large and small

Another week, and COVID-19 numbers keep rising in Wisconsin, to its highest level yet. Between July 6 and July 13, there were nearly 4,900 new positive tests for the coronavirus in the state. Nearly 35% of those positive tests came in Milwaukee County, and the two largest counties in Wisconsin have both seen sizable jumps in cases in late June and early July.

Those recent breakouts help to explain why both Dane County and the City of Milwaukee have put in mandatory mask requirements that took effect this week.

But the COVID-19 increases are happening in several parts of the state outside of those 2 populous counties. For example, 5 mid-size counties in southern Wisconsin each had more than 100 new cases in the most recent week.

And while Brown County continues to have the highest rate of infections in Northeastern Wisconsin, the other two large-population counties in the Fox Valley are having significantly more cases than they dealt with in April and May.

COVID-19 is also increasingly prevalent in smaller communities of Wisconsin. Here's a sampling of stories that were on the Wheeler Report today.

"COVID-19 hospitalizations rising in Rock County."

"Testing in Abbotsford identifies 31 positive coronavirus cases."

"Marinette County: Area experiencing ‘surge’ of COVID-19 cases."

"COVID-19 numbers rise in Sauk County."

Boy, sure seems like it would be a good time to have a coordinated, vigorous response with statewide standards to crush this resurgence of COVID-19. And possibly some kind of ability to keep people at home as much as possible in all corners of the state. Oh wait, OUR SUPREME COURT SAID WE COULDN'T DO THAT.

How's this working out for us? You think this COVID resurgence and the related drop in consumer spending is going to help our economy going forward? C'mon WMC, C'mon Bradleys! You wanted the companies "free market" to decide this instead of the professionals. Well whaddya have to say about our COVID and economic situations now?

US deficit blows past $2.7 trillion with 3 months to go. But should we worry about that?

We know that the Federal budget deficit has blown up to record levels in these last few months. But even so, today's figures still had to make you step back and say "WHOA!"

The Treasury Department reported Monday that the deficit hit $864 billion last month, an amount of red ink that surpasses most annual deficits in the nation's history and is above the previous monthly deficit record of $738 billion in April. That amount was also tied to the trillions of dollars Congress has provided to cushion the impact of the widespread shutdowns that occurred in an effort to limit the spread of the viral pandemic.

For the first nine months of this budget year, which began Oct. 1, the deficit totals $2.74 trillion, also a record for that period. That puts the country well on the way to hitting the $3.7 trillion deficit for the whole year that has been forecast by the Congressional Budget Office.

That total would surpass the previous annual record of $1.4 trillion set in 2009 when the government was spending heavily to lift the country out of the recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis.

In fact, June's deficit of $864 billion isn't far off of the $984 billion deficit for all of FY 2019.

If you dig into the Treasury's statement and then compare the numbers back for the last 6 months to the same months in 2019, you can see where COVID-19 and the recession blew up, which then blew up the deficit.

Part of the reason behind the explosion in the deficit is revenue-based, with that decline coming from COVID-19 fallout. And not just because there are millions fewer people working at this point in 2020, but also because of legislation that delayed the 2020 tax deadline to July 15 (aka, "Wednesday"). This means that people like me and my wife weren't paying our $3,000 tax bill in April, as we did in 2019, and that's reflected in the huge difference in April revenues between those 2 years.

But you'll see that the difference in revenues for June is only $94 billion, while the total deficit for June 2020 was $855 billion more than it was in June 2019. Which means the big blowup was on the spending side, and the Treasury Department pinpointed one big payout in particular.

...More than half of this increase [in the deficit vs 2019] was due to a $511 billion increase in Small Business Administration budget outlays, primarily for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Cash expenditures for loan forgiveness under PPP will occur in subsequent months.

PPP payments caused a huge one-time jump in expenses for the country as a whole, much like we saw in April when hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus checks went out to everyday Americans.

One other big number that's driving up expenses is the $600 federal add-on for unemployment benefits, in addition to the tens of millions of additional people getting benefits in 2020. That was $260 billion more than what was spent for unemployment in June 2019, and that and the PPP funding illustrate the level of money that has been going out of DC to keep people afloat.

Which also illustrates the danger in using the exploding deficit as an excuse to cut off this additional aid in a time when COVID-19 is as widespread as ever, and states and communities feel that they have to re-institute restrictions on businesses to slow that spread. There's nothing coming that's going to replace that loss of income from the Feds, which makes it increasingly likely that the recession resumes and gets deeper in the second half of 2020 if Congress doesn't continue to spend on Americans.

Yes, that'll send the deficit spiraling higher. But with little to no inflation (well, other than the stock market and the grocery store), and with 10-year bonds still fetching an annual yield of 0.62%, our record deficit hasn't had any effect on our economy beyond allowing some semblance of demand to continue. So outside of the absurd number on the paper (which does have its shock value), our deficit really isn't a economic problem for us in Summer 2020. And we certainly shouldn't look at the deficit number to guide policy at this time.

No, Miller Park is not getting "extra" money. But it still could be redirected to a better place

When you want someone to make a big story out of something very little, the Journal-Sentinel's Dan Bice is your man! Like with this Bice column from last week that had the headline of "Miller Park board left holding an extra $4.3 million after ending regional sales tax."

Members of the board for the Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District — the landlord for the Milwaukee Brewers' retractable roof dome stadium — voted unanimously in March to end the tax. The 0.1% sales tax had been in effect in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington, Waukesha and Racine counties.

But then something funny happened.

After the controversial tax was officially over, the Miller Park district received two payments for $4.3 million from the state Department of Revenue, which collected funds generated by the sales tax for the district.

This was not money the Miller Park district was expecting.

We're not paying for this any more!

"Windfall?" If you look at typical FY 2020 Miller Park tax distributions, around $2.5 million to $3 million was collected in a typical month. So why wouldn't 1-2 months of lag be expected?

Especially if you read the Wisconsin Department of Revenue's bit of information on the now-defunct Miller Park tax, the $4.3 million looks like a typical lag.

The monthly distribution is the sum of all completed transactions posted in our processing system from the 16th of one month to the 15th of the next month. For example, the sales tax on a transaction in December should be reported on a sales tax return due by January 20 or 31. If the return is processed by February 15, the tax would be included in the February distribution to the stadium district.

So if retailers were collecting the 0.1% Miller Park tax until the end of March, then maybe all of the totals were figured by April 15 and sent on to DOR, then the Miller Park district would get that money at the end of April.

But what if they took a while to send that information in (especially as COVID-19 broke out in March), or if the firms and/or individuals chose to file sales taxes in each quarter, and then took until April 30 to send their stuff in? Seems like it would make sense that there would be some residuals that would make up a May distribution along with the regular April collection.

However, that's not going to stop anti-tax yokels in the 262 from complaining, with an example being Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann.

Last fall, the legislature finally ensuredthe baseball district wouldend this tax in 2020. Act 28 was intended to ensure the Department of Revenue could properly sunset the tax.

Washington County taxpayers have waited too long for this tax to sunset and now Madison bureaucrats cannot figure out how to end the tax. Mike Duckett and the park district board are trying to do the right thing by returning the money the taxpayers.

If the Department of Revenue cannot figure out how to properly return the money, first thing next session, legislators should introduce a bill which would require the overpayment returned to the taxpayers of the five counties in the most efficient way possible.

Actually Josh, it looks like that money was properly collected by DOR through March 31, and worked its way back to the Miller Park district. So don't worry about that part. That being said, maybe the state legislators and the Miller Park district were thinking they should stop getting payments in March, and weren't thinking about the 6-8 week lag.

And if they want to give that $4.3 million back to the 5 county governments, especially in a year where budgets are going to be difficult to balance, it might be a smart way to deal with any of these residuals, now that the Home of the Brewers has finally been paid off.