Govt says prices up in May, but up even more in the real world. With real wages now falling

Today featured an anticipated update on the Consumer Price Index for May. I figured that it may feature a sizable increase due to the runup in gas prices last month and home prices continuing to gain. So I was a bit surprised to see the following figures come out today.

The consumer price index increased 0.2% in May, the government said Tuesday, in line with Wall Street’s forecast. The report came out one day before a Federal Reserve meeting in Washington that’s expected to result in another increase in U.S. interest rates.

A more closely followed measure that strips out food and energy also rose 0.2% last month. It’s known as the core rate of inflation.

The consumer price index has risen 2.8% in the past 12 months, up from 2.5% in April. That’s the fastest rate since early 2012.

The yearly increase in the core rate edged up to 2.2%.

Yes, that's the highest inflation in 6 years, but I predicted last month that inflation would be at or above 3% year-over-year. So what happened? Well, if you go into the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, here’s a big reason why.

The energy index rose 0.9 percent in May after rising 1.4 percent in April. The gasoline index rose 1.7 percent following a 3.0-percent increase in April. (Before seasonal adjustment, gasoline prices increased 5.9 percent in May.)

Gas only went up 1.7%? The prices that I saw at the pump sure went up a lot more than that. What gives?

The “seasonal adjustment” part is key, because it means that the BLS expects gas to go up by around 4 % every May, and they build that into the CPI. A quick check of last June’s report indicates that a rise in gas prices in that month also gets deflated down.

But there’s always a flip side to this, and it means that gas prices get inflated on a seasonally-adjusted basis for months like July, August and September. Given that June and July had a combined CPI increase by 0.1% total in 2017, that 3% inflation figure should be coming soon enough.

Even with inflation staying relatively lower than you’d think, the 2.8% year-over-year increase is still the most in 6 years. When you combine it with the tepid 2.7% increase in average hourly wages in the same time period, it means that real wages are now falling.



So much winning! Can't you feel the difference from the end of 2016? (you know, other than prices going up faster)

One thing that has kept inflation from being even higher is the fact that food prices have barely changed at all in the last year, especially when it comes to buying food at the grocery store to be used at home.

Over the last 12 months, the index for food away from home increased 2.7 percent, and the food at home index rose 0.1 percent. The index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs increased 2.3 percent over the last year; the only one of the six major grocery store food group indexes to increase. The remaining indexes declined over the last 12 months.

Which is nice if you’re shopping, but it’s not so good if you’re a farmer trying to get a decent price for your product. And getting into a trade war with Canada that results in even more dairy and other ag products staying in America will likely drive those prices down further in the near future. Not a good sign when you recall that Western Wisconsin led the nation in farm bankruptcies last year.

Food prices aside, I think it is safe to say that we are now at a place where inflation will be at or above an annual rate of 2-3% for the foreseeable future. The story now is whether wages will keep up with that (as it is starting not to), or if interest rates rise and/or the economy stalls out, which might help to pop the mini-Bubble in housing and lower inflation. As with other statistics, it feels like some other shoe is about to drop that leads to higher wages, or a slowdown. Things can't continue to stay as they are.

Poverty rises in Wisconsin - and Walker policies will keep it rising

While Governor Walker does his taxpayer-funded campaign stops around the state to try to convince Wisconsinites things are great in the state, we keep seeing reality tell us otherwise. Even with minor job growth in 2016, UW-Madison released a report showing that poverty increased in Wisconsin at the same time.

The 10th annual Wisconsin Poverty Report was released Friday by the university’s Institute for Research on Poverty.

It found that, by three measures, poverty rates in Wisconsin went up in 2016.

According to “Wisconsin Poverty Measure” developed by the institute, the state’s poverty rate rose to 10.8 percent in 2016 from 9.7 percent in 2015. That measure also found child poverty up in the state to 12 percent in 2016, from 10 percent in 2015. UW-Madison released a report last week saying tht poverty increased in Wisconsin at the same time.

The UW-Madison report constantly compares the numbers of the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), which is put out by the US Census Bureau and widely reported, to go along with their Wisconsin Poverty Measure (WPM). The WPM ends up lowering the poverty rate from the Official rate, but both measures rose by around 1% in 2016. Poverty also rose by the "market-based" measure, which only looks at limited types of income.



The UW-Madison researchers explain the difference between OPM and WPM accordingly.

While the OPM considers only pre-tax cash income as resources, the WPM incorporates a more comprehensive range of resources. These include federal refundable tax credits (the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC, and the Additional Child Tax Credit or ACTC), and noncash benefits such as SNAP and housing subsidies. The WPM also adjusts for household needs, such as out-of-pocket medical costs and work-related expenses that include child care and transportation costs. Consistent with our goal of measuring poverty in Wisconsin, we include Wisconsin-specific public resources, such as the Wisconsin Homestead Tax Credit and the Wisconsin state EITC, in addition to the federal EITC.

To consider need, our poverty thresholds are based on food, clothing, shelter, and other expenses, which are set at roughly the 33rd percentile of national expenses for a two-child, two-adult family, with adjustments for prices in Wisconsin. This approach differs from the OPM, which is based on three times the cost of a minimally adequate diet in the 1960s, with adjustments for inflation, but with no adjustments for price differences across states. To estimate the poverty threshold specific to Wisconsin, we begin with the current experimental federal poverty threshold published by the Census Bureau (which includes tax credits, food stamps, and other federal assistance. In 2016, the national threshold was $29,380. Our baseline poverty threshold (i.e., the threshold for a two-child, two-adult family) for Wisconsin in 2016 was $26,511, $968 more than the 2015 level of $25,543. The Wisconsin line is lower than the rest of the nation because the cost of living in Wisconsin is about 8 percent lower than for the nation as a whole. For comparison, the official U.S. poverty line for a two-child, two-adult family in 2016 in the United States (including Wisconsin) was $24,339. Hence, the WPM poverty line, which reflects national purchases and consumption of necessities among low-income families as well as Wisconsin’s overall lower living costs, exceeds the OPM by almost $2,200. If Wisconsin families at these lower income levels are not doing as well as other similar families in the United States, the higher poverty line ought to help explain some of the increase in poverty that we see in this report…

Much like with the overall poverty rate, child poverty is also lower under the Wisconsin Poverty Measure compared to the official rate. But it rose by significant levels in 2016 under both measures.



So why did we see an increase in Wisconsin poverty in 2016, according to UW-Madison?

...Changes in market income, which essentially captures changes in employment and earnings, no longer drove down child poverty in 2016. Families with children appear to have gotten some boost from the recovering economy in 2015, but for 2016, earnings gains slowed and market-income poverty was flat for families with kids. While families with children continued to benefit from some of the public program increases under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the effect of benefits on child poverty was less in 2016 than in 2015.

At the start of the recession, the WPM showed different trends than the two cash-based measures overall (Figure1) and for families with children (Figure 5). Between 2009 and 2010, earnings fell sharply, but SNAP benefits rose as more families qualified for assistance, and as SNAP, the federal EITC, and other refundable tax benefits were expanded under the ARRA. Because the state EITC is tied to a percentage of the federal EITC, the state EITC also increased. However, the growth in the state EITC was offset by state action (by Walker and WisGOP) to reduce the state EITC, effective in tax year 2011 and continuing. As these programs expanded, child poverty as measured by the WPM declined, despite the worsening economy and the accompanying increase in market-income poverty in the aftermath of the recession (see Figure 5). As the economy expanded, the improving labor market translated into lower WPM child poverty as earnings replaced income support programs in 2015. But these effects from earnings gains decreased in 2016, while the effects of SNAP on child poverty fell, as seen below in Figure 8.

The UW researchers said that a main reason why Wisconsin’s poverty rate rose is because of reductions in benefits and tax credits that give their largest benefits to low-income working families.

Among benefit programs examined in this analysis, SNAP benefits had the greatest impact on reducing overall poverty in 2016, reducing the percentage of people in poverty by approximately 1.4 percentage points (Figure 7). The program’s anti-poverty impact has fallen over the past few years, especially from 2015 to 2016 as SNAP benefits rapidly contracted in Wisconsin (Figure 3 above). Tax provisions such as the EITC had the second largest antipoverty effect, and here the effects were lower in 2016 than in 2014 or 2015. The Making Work Pay tax credit (which was in effect in 2009 and 2010) and the 2 percentage point reduction in payroll taxes (which was in effect in 2011 and 2012) increased the antipoverty effect of tax provisions in earlier years. Neither the Making Work Pay tax credit nor the cut in payroll taxes have been in effect since 2013, and as a result, the net effect of taxes and tax credits was less likely to lift the working poor out of poverty in 2016 than in earlier years.

Both taxes and SNAP had a larger impact on reducing child poverty than overall poverty. The larger impact of these programs on children than on overall poverty can be seen in 2016, where tax-related provisions reduced child poverty by 4.4 percentage points and SNAP benefits reduced child poverty by 3.2 percentage points as compared to 1.3 and 1.4 points for overall poverty (see Figure 8 and compare to Figure 7). As noted above, various tax and SNAP provisions have changed since the end of the recession especially following the end of ARRA expansions, and in 2016 SNAP’s impact on child poverty was at the lowest level since 2009.

By comparison, the UW researchers say that food stamps and tax provisions do little to change elderly poverty rates, but what does help the elderly is housing programs to offset those expenses.

On the down side, the UW researchers say the elderly are more susceptible to be driven into poverty by out-of-pocket expenses for medical care, while children are more susceptible these days to an offshoot of more people (and especially parents) working – more of a need for child care, whose costs keep going up above pay increases for parents and other guardians. Combine that with increased medical expenses taking a bigger bite out of people’s take-home pay, and that helps explain how you can get more poverty despite more employment.

And the recent direction of Scott Walker and other Republicans isn't helping. Walker wants to impose barriers to receiving SNAP benefits and make recipients pee in a cup in order to get help from the program that does the most to reduce child poverty in Wisconsin. The GOPs in Congress also want to cut SNAP benefits in the latest Farm Bill, with a "cliff" that has little to no phasing out of those benefits, basically causing a back-door disincentive to work in a low-wage job.

On the flip side, Walker is doing nothing to defray the increasing cost of child care, which is a large reason behind the 2016 increase in Wisconsin poverty. Nor has Walker done much to defray rising out-of-pocket costs for medical care. The Kochs' errand boy has sabotaged the ACA for several years and refused to expand Medicaid for low-income individuals, and even tried to cut the popular Senior Care program that helps to pay for prescription drugs in 2015, before pulling it back after public outcry.

Lastly, neither Walker nor WisGOP have done lifted a finger to raise the minimum wage above its paltry $7.25 an hour level in Wisconsin, and have actively repressed wages through measures like Act 10, right-to-work, and repealing prevailing wage. You want to know why "earning gains slowed" in the state? Because Walker and WisGOP have gone out of their way to try to keep wages as low as possible to please their WMC puppetmasters.

And given that Wisconsin dropped from 7th to 15th last year when it came to its residents having health insurance, I'm not counting on this poverty figure being much better when UW releases it this time next year. Hopefully by that point, we'll have a new governor and new legislators who actually care about putting in policies that are effective in reducing poverty, instead of trying to make things tougher for the most vulnerable of Wisconsinites.

On eve of SCOTUS - How GOP gerrymandering shortchanged MIlwaukee County, and Wisconsin

With the US Supreme Court likely to hand down its decision on Wisconsin's redistricting case tomorrow or next week, it's important to remember how the Republicans messed with our state's maps to try to lock in a hold on power no matter what Wisconsinites thought. WisContext (a collaboration of UW-Extension, Wisconsin Public Broadcasting) put together some figures which illustrated how the choices made in the off-site rooms where the maps were drawn up have had a notable effect on who represents the Milwaukee Metro Area in the Legislature.

The WisContext article has links to a neat website drawn up by UW Population Health where you can overlay the 2000s legislative districts with the one we have in the 2010s, This site also use results from the 2016 presidential election to see where the votes came from for each parts in a state Donald Trump won 47-46. But the article centers on Milwaukee and how a few subtle tweaks to the map made several districts in the Milwaukee suburbs GOP strongholds for much of this decade.

Evidence of cracking is a bit more obvious upon examination of the 2011 map for the Milwaukee region. A close look at the suburbs shows a ring of districts which each have a little piece of the city of Milwaukee, rich in Democratic voters, and a large piece of the surrounding suburbs, which are strongly Republican-leaning. This ring includes districts 13, 14,15, 20, 22, 23, 24, 82, 83, and 84 — all but one of these 10 seats was held by a Republican in 2018.



How different is the 2011 map from the previous set of legislative districts? The 2001 map reveals a radically different political geography in the Milwaukee suburbs. It is so different from a geographic perspective that it’s not possible to directly compare districts according to their numbers and say definitively whether a seat "flipped" following the redistricting process. The most notable difference is that in 2001, districts were by and large drawn to respect the Milwaukee County boundary, the vertical line that runs down most of the center of this map view.



The creators of the 2011 districts did not follow the Wisconsin Constitution's directive that legislative districts should respect county boundaries whenever possible, and created a map that cracked the central and near-suburb bloc of Democratic voters across many districts that reach into the far-flung and deeply conservative suburbs of neighboring Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties. These suburbanized areas are populated in large part by affluent, white conservative voters.

In the era of white flight, whites left Milwaukee, city and county, in favor of neighboring counties. The historical suburbanization process itself led to counties with very different political profiles. Given the state constitution's requirement that districts preserve communities of interest, Assembly members who represent constituents across a county boundary are potentially problematic.

Also note that State Senate seats are made up of 3 Assembly districts, with 13, 14, and 15 making up Senate District 5 (Leah Vukmir R-Brookfield), 22, 23, and 24 are Senate District 8 (Alberta Darling, R- River Hills), and 82, 83, and 84 are Senate District 28 (David Craig, R- Big Bend).

ALEC Queen Vukmir is Exhibit A of how this type of gerrymandering can allow legislators to ignore the wants and needs of a large number of the constituents they "represent," as was illustrated in a 2016 prpfile of Vukmir for Milwaukee Magazine.

In some quarters, Vukmir has also developed a reputation for walling herself off from debate and anyone who disagrees with her. Perhaps more than any other legislator, she’s known for avoiding the Capitol press corps and communicates primarily through statements and interviews with friendly conservative outlets such as the MacIver Institute or Sykes’ show. Multiple calls and emails requesting comment for this story were ignored.

A Wauwatosa-based parent group called Support our Schools (SOS), formed in 2014 as a sort of mom (and dad) lobby, tried and failed for months to get an in-person meeting with Vukmir. SOS is in many ways the diametric opposite of PRESS and supports halting the expansion of voucher programs in the state while lifting the revenue caps that prevent public school districts from raising property taxes. In late 2015, Vukmir agreed to meet with one of SOS’ members but only if she selected the location, the Colectivo Café on North Avenue, and the SOS member agreed not to record the conversation or take notes. “The point of the meeting was to come to an agreement on where she stood,” says Mary Young, SOS’ president, but no such pact was reached. The SOS representative, also hand-picked by Vukmir, “was very frustrated by the conversation.”

Which gives an illustration of why Vukmir abandoned her State Senate seat to become Diane Hendricks' candidate for US Senate this year. See, the flip side of gerrymandering is that if there is a wave election and/or a hated legislator, a lot of previously-safe districts can be turned. But in Wisconsin, that would likely take a year where Dems win the state 56-44 or 57-43, while by comparison, Republicans held more than 60% of the seats in the Legislature after November 2016, despite 53% of Wisconsinites voting against Donald Trump, and barely 50% voting for Ron Johnson in the Senate race.

There's a fairer way to have Milwaukee County be represented in the Legislature. I messed around with the Dave's Redistricting app a while ago, and here's what my Assembly map of the Milwaukee area looks like.



The numbering is a little goofy on the app, but you get the idea. This basically creates one district almost entirely in Wauwatosa, and another almost entirely in West Allis. It also gives a lot of the south burbs their own districts, instead of having them shared with New Berlin or other parts of Waukesha County. And the Senate districts are even more competitive than the Assembly ones.

Gerrymandering can also play a role in the soecial election to fill the Walker-caused vacancy in Wisconsin Assembly District 42. Because the Dem-voting cities of De Forest and Portage were removed and replaced by rural Dodge and Fond du Lac counties, the seat will ended up 50-50 in April's SUpreme Court election, despite Rebecca Dallet winning statewide by 11 points.


If you have a better shot if this red-blue map, I'll take it.

Despite the map above, lots of red-drawn seats are flipping despite gerrymanders in Wisconsin and other states, and it'll be interesting to see if both AD-42 and Senate District 1 continue that trend (if so, I expect a full-on meltdown by Gov Dropout and his spokespeople on AM radio).

I'm not counting on the Supreme Court ordering Wisconsin's districts to be redone before this November's elections, which means the GOP will continue their slanted field through November no matter what happens in the statewide offices. As WisContext shows, this gerrymandering has been especially severe and detrimental for Milwaukee County, which has seen its job growth and population stagnate in the 2010s while much of the rest of the country has rebounded from the Great Recession.

And even if the Supreme Court weasels out and refuses to strike down Wisconsin's maos, this scourge of gerrymandering can go out the window if we boot out the pro-gerrymandering Scott Walker in the Governor's Office.

The Budget Guy has a new home, and he's laughing at Trump

Stan Collender is a must-read if you ever want to get inside the nuts and bolts of the federal budget and the processes on Capitol Hill that go into developing it. He's now started a new blog site that's naturally called "The Budget Guy," and his first post is fittingly titled "Trump Again Shows He's All Talk on the Deficit and Debt."

Collender concentrates on this week's vote by House Republicans to rescind $15 billion in already-allocated spending, with half of that money coming from the CHIP health insurance program for children. Collender rips Trump's attempts to talk this up as an empty gesture because that "cuts" are for funds that weren't going to be used, so there's no effect on the overall deficit, and the Senate won't send it to Trump's desk before the end of the Sept. 30 fiscal year.

Trump is actually mostly proposing to cut appropriations that were never going to be spent anyway. Even if its enacted, the real impact of the Trump rescission on the federal deficit and national debt will be about 93 percent less than he’s claiming, or only about $1 billion.

A billion dollars is definitely worth saving. But even this much smaller amount overstates the savings from the Trump proposal because it’s not going to be enacted. The Senate GOP leadership has already indicated it has no plans to consider the rescission bill and the legislation would face a virtually certain filibuster anyway if were debated.

Silly enough, but the one thing a recissions bill does do is to lower the budget "authority", or base amount of spending in programs. Which means that CHIP starts off from a lower amount for next year, making it more susceptible to being cut in the FY 2019 budget - an awful "own goal" by the GOP ahead of an election where one of the last things people want to hear about it health care cuts.

In addition, Collender notes that Trump's new talk about "fiscal restraint" is latest in a series of stunts from Don the Con that have no connection to what actually needs to be done. As The Budget Guy notes, even his fellow Republicans in Congress don't take Trump's words and proposals seriously when it comes to the budget.

Trump’s first full 2018 budget, which was released with lots of fanfare, was also ignored by the Republican House and Senate when the White House walked away from it just a few days after it was released.

The fiscal 2019 budget Trump sent to Congress earlier this year was abandoned so quickly by the White House that it wasn’t even a topic of discussion on that weekend’s political talk shows.

And who could ever forget the spectacle from this past March when Trump signed the fiscal 2018 omnibus appropriation and then minutes later angrily announced that he should have never done it.

Maybe our next president should have a clue about how things actually work before taking office, just a thought. Meanwhile, enjoy the pre-election budget crisis that you know will hit in 3 months as the 2018 Fiscal Year closes.

Walker's DWD tries to deceive public, ends up showing another way Wis is losing

I was cruising the WHeeler Report when I saw this pop up from Scott Walker's Department of Workforce Development.

Great News: Since Dec. 2010, #Wisconsin's private sector wages are up 25%: https://t.co/N87YGK9PAe #WIWorking pic.twitter.com/8TfPQEgcRn

— Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (@WIWorkforce) June 8, 2018

Wages are up 25% in Wisconsin since December 2010? Which would be twice as fast as the CPI increase of 12.5% in that time? That seems like BS on its face, but let’s go back to the trusty QCEW map site, click on Wisconsin’s private sector wages and see where they’re getting it from.

Average private sector weekly wage, Wis
Q4 2010 $835
Q4 2017 $962 (+15.21%)

So yes, we have had an increase in real wages in Wisconsin since the end of 2010 (by a whopping 2.4% total over those 7 years), but it sure isn’t 25% on either a nominal or inflation-adjusted basis. So where are they getting this number from?

Here’s where. They’re going on the total amount of money that was paid in wages to private sector workers. This basically multiples the added jobs that Wisconsin saw during 7 years of the Obama Recovery with the higher weekly wages that were paid in 2017 vs 2010.

Wisconsin
Total private sector wages paid Q4 2010 $24.73 billion
Total private sector wages paid Q4 2017 $31.08 billion (+25.66%)

The Walker DWD is trying to peddle the impression that the average person is making 25% more than he/she was making in December 2010. THAT ISN’T TRUE, and they know it isn’t true. It is disgusting deception.

You know what is factually true, that this “25% growth” figure in Wisconsin is well below what the nation’s wages have “grown” by in those 7 years. You can find the national QCEW figures at this site, and while Wisconsin has slightly outpaced the US’s gains in average private sector wages (+15.21% vs 14.49% for the US), the US has added a much higher rate of jobs (+15.21% vs +9.40% in Wis). Which means we are losing in the stat that Walker's DWD was propping up.

US
Total private sector wages paid Q4 2010 $1,361.25 trillion
Total private sector wages paid Q4 2017 $1,793.98 billion (+31.79%)
Wisconsin change private sector wages Q4 2010 – Q4 2017 (+25.66%)

So the increase in total private sector wages isn’t anything to crow about, and in fact is yet more proof that Wisconsin has badly underperformed the nation when it comes to creating prosperity under Scott Walker.

Hey DWD – your job is not to be an outgrowth of the Walker 2018 campaign. Stop cherry-picking various stats and portraying them as “analysis”, and actually DO WHAT WE PAY YOU TO DO – help people who have been laid off, connect job-seekers with employers needing workers…and maybe tell Scotty’s buddies at WMC to pay some fair wages to move the pipeline along.

But I guess if I was a political hack in the Walker Administration, I guess I’d be worried about having to file an unemployment report with the DWD in early 2019. So I suppose that explains why they spend more time BSing about jobs numbers than actually trying to improve Wisconsin’s economy.

2017 better than 2016 for Wis job gains, but it doesn't bail out a bad Walker era

Now that I have a bit more time, I wanted to expound on the full release from the “gold standard” Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages on Thursday. This came out after getting a topline figure of total jobs a couple of weeks ago (as always, go to the great QCEW map site to take a look at the various state and county information).

These new figures, which broke down both private sector and total job growth, made Wisconsin look better than the subpar total jobs and wages figures we saw in that earlier report.

Wisconsin added 32,259 private sector jobs in 2017, for a growth rate of 1.3 percent, which was 26th in the nation.

That topped Minnesota (1.2 percent), Illinois (1.0 percent), Michigan (1.0 percent), and Iowa (0.5 percent).

But it trailed the national economy, which added private sector jobs at a rate of 1.7 percent in 2017.

Oooh, we almost got out of the bottom half in the US for job growth for the first time since Act 10. ALMOST.

That 1.3% was a good recovery from the awful job growth the state had in 2016, and while we’re still not back to where we were for 2014 and 2015, it’s at least caused the trend line to reverse.



Naturally, Governor Walker tried to spin the results to claim that this meant Wisconsin is in great shape.

WI ranked #2 in the Midwest for job growth in 2017 and more people are employed in WI than ever before, according to @BLS_gov. 😎#WIWorking

— Governor Walker (@GovWalker) June 7, 2018

Yes, the numbers are nice for 2017. The problem is that it doesn’t come close to erasing the horrible record of job growth in Wisconsin under Walker in the 6 years before then.

If you look at the updated figures from you’ll find that 2017 marks the first time that Wisconsin was not dead last in the Midwest for private sector job growth since Walker and WisGOP came to power. We finally passed Iowa, who flatlined after giving full control to the GOP in the 2016 elections. And we’re still a lousy 6th out of 7 for the Midwest over the last 7 years.



In fact, what that chart shows is that Wisconsin’s 2nd-place finish in the Midwest for 2017 isn’t as much because the state had its job growth kick into a higher level, but because other states fell back to us. Also, we were in such a hole from the first 6 years of the Age of Fitzwalkerstan that the same amount of jobs added for us in 2016 is a higher % over than what you’d see in a state like Michigan or Minnesota.

Going further inside the numbers, I note that another bad trend continued for Wisconsin in 2017 – low manufacturing wages. While the state benefitted from the nationwide resurgence in manufacturing employment last year by adding more than 8,000 jobs in the sector (I hate Trump, but this has happened so far), the wages those workers make are still at the bottom in the Midwest.

Average Weekly Wage, Manufacturing Dec 2017
Ill. $1,403
Mich $1,333
Minn $1,297
Iowa $1,243
Ind. $1,187
Wis. $1,150

Gee, and you wonder why we keep hearing stories about Wisconsin manufacturers struggling to hire people? Maybe you should PAY BETTER! Instead, more Wisconsin employers are looking at prison labor as a way to get their work done - not a bad idea in itself if you’re into rehabbing prisoners, but it sure is telling that they don’t want to offer more money to people “on the outside.”

I also wanted to break down the trends by county, as the job gains in 2017 were heavily concentrated in a few areas of the state. Notably, the Milwaukee area finally started to gain jobs (doubly interesting that it happened in a time when the metro area’s population is stagnant at best), while Dane County may be maxing out after having very strong growth throughout the 2010s.

Largest private sector job gains, Wis, 2017
Milwaukee Co. +5,264
Waukesha Co. +4,708
Dane County +2,388
Kenosha Co. +1,949
Brown County +1,808
Washington Co. +1,474
Eau Claire Co. +1,216
Rock County +1,154
REST OF THE STATE +12,298

Those 8 counties made up more than 60% of the state’s job gains in 2017, and 6 of those 8 leading counties are in the southern 1/3 of the state.

On the flip side, 14 of the 71 counties measured lost private sector jobs in 2017, and 8 of those 14 were located north of Highway 29, and another 4 were located on or north of Highway 10. The biggest losers were also largely in central and northern Wisconsin.

Largest private sector job losses, Wis, 2017
Calumet Co. -307
Waupaca Co. -248
Tremepealeau Co. -208
Oneida County -146
Price County -74
Crawford Co. -74

Not coincidentally, many of the areas that aren’t gaining jobs are also areas that have been losing population in recent years. Scott Gordon from WisContext had a good report on that this week, and this illustration of population growth/loss since 2010 was telling. The darker shades are counties that have fewer people now than in 2010.



And having Walker and the WisGOP Legislature defund K-12 public schools and roads has been especially bad for those rural communities that don’t otherwise have the tax base to compete with the richer Milwaukee suburbs and Dane County when it comes to having top-notch services. Funny how that happens. Also allowing the Walker/WisGOP donors at Hi-Crush to turn the Trempealeau River orange with pollution isn’t exactly going to make people want to live and work there. Just a thought.

In summary, 2017 was a decent year for Wisconsin job growth, especially considering that much of the rest of the Midwest backslid in the first year of the Trump Administration. But that doesn’t come close to wiping away the failures of Scott Walker’s first 6 years in office, which left our state behind everyone else in the Midwest, and we’re still well behind many of our neighbors for the 2010s.

The fact that Wisconsin has so badly lagged the Midwest and the nation since 2010 is one that cannot be ignored between now and November. That situation is true no matter how many tweets may come from Scotty and his lackeys at the Department of Workforce Development to convince you otherwise, and it will not change until they are removed from power.

Even with minor 2017 improvement, Wisconsin still falling short in jobs

A quick update on the full release of the "Gold Standard" Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages (QCEW).

"Gold standard" jobs report shows Wis was 26th for private job growth in 2017, 32nd for private wage growth, and still the lowest manufacturing wages in the Midwest.

Same old subpar crap under Walker.#wigov #wiunion #BlueWave2018 #wiright

— JakeEdwards (@JakeMadtown) June 7, 2018

The private sector job growth numbers are a bit better than the "all jobs" figures, as Wisconsin added a little over 32,000 jobs in the private sector for 2017.

BUT, that's still 26 straight quarters of being in the bottom half for job growth, and our wages still lag behond our neighbors.

In other words, same ol' disappointment. And that weak record of the last 7 years is far from what Scott Walker sold when he claimed Wisconsin would be "open for business."

Walker misses goal of 250,000 new private-sector jobs in his first seven years in office https://t.co/nkXMhe9gqU pic.twitter.com/rTZu6UVzSl

— JSOnline - Business (@js_biz) June 7, 2018

And Scotty said we'd get there in 4 years. We will likely not get there in 8.