inquiries welcome
Ouch.
Wisconsin lost another 6,000 private sector jobs last month. Cumulatively, Wisconsin lost 12,900 private sector jobs since Scott Walker took office.
The promised jobs line reads like “Schwiinnng!!!
The actual jobs line: waa. waa. waa.
Off the Rails: Wisconsin is Just 2.4% of the Way to Walker’s 4-Year Job Creation Goal
Graphing what Politifact calls Gov. Walker’s “biggest promise of all.”
(thanks for the encouragement, tumblroos)
Badger Stat puts the new jobs data into perspective.
Good News, Bad News
The much anticipated Wisconsin jobs data came out this afternoon, showing a dramatic estimated increase of 15,700 private sector jobs in January. However, all the 2011 data was “re-benchmarked” and it seems that the state lost 9,700 private sector jobs last year, instead of a slight annual increase of 13,500 as previously reported.
It will be interesting to see how all sides respond to this news. Seems like Gov. Walker’s 250,000 new jobs promise just got re-benchmarked into never-never land.
(For close followers of this stuff: doesn’t that June 2011 figure still seem odd? Before the revision, it was somewhat of an outlier. And now, isn’t it a little strange that the revised benchmark EXACTLY zeroed the prior fiugure out?)
Continuing from my prior post on putting Gov. Walker’s job creation performance in context, I wanted to specifically look at variability of Wisconsin monthly job numbers. Some observations:
- Gov. Walker promised 250K new private sector jobs in four years, but no four-year period since 1990 has yielded 250K or more jobs.
- only two years have yielded 62,500 or more jobs – the yearly average needed to hit the 250K target.
- 23.5% of the months since 1990 have produced more than 5,200 new jobs – the average monthly amount needed to hit the 250K target.
It’s clear that Gov. Walker’s promise was not supported by the historical record. No doubt he was betting on benefiting from both a national economic recovery and positive results from his “open for business” state policies. But Wisconsin only posted 13,500 new private sector jobs in Gov. Walker’s first year, putting his ambitious promise firmly out of reach.
(click on graph to enlarge)
The Long View
Tofias challenged me to put my prior graph tracking Walker’s job promise in context. Is Wisconsin substantially “off-track” in progressing towards his 250K new jobs target? Specifically, do the six straight months of job losses in Wisconsin represent a significant negative trend, or might this just be a hiccup that falls within the normal range of variance in the monthly economic data?
I grabbed the monthly data for Wisconsin back to 1990 and threw it into the original graph and, viola!
A few things jump out to me right away:
- 500,000 new private sector jobs were created in the 90’s,
- the gut-wrenching drop of the Great Recession, and finally,
- Walker’s job promise seems to have fallen out of reach - we’d have to bang away at a job creation rate much steeper than the booming 90’s in order to hit the 250K new jobs target.
What do you think?
(click on the graph to enlarge)
According to data released Thursday by the state Department of Workforce Development, the state lost an estimated 3,900 jobs in the private sector in December from November. In the same month, the United States gained an estimated 212,000 jobs, outstripping expectations of most economists and raising hopes that employers are gaining confidence at the national level.
The December figure is preliminary and the revised figure for November is a loss of 10,600 jobs instead of the preliminary estimate of a loss of 11,700. Nevertheless, this is not good news for Wisconsin, as we fall further away from reaching Gov. Walker’s 250,000 new jobs promise.
Here’s a link to the graph based on last month’s figures. Now, to work on a related homework assignment …
Walker took credit for gains in state jobs for six months of 2011, as the monthly reports showed steady progress toward his promise of creating 250,000 jobs. In the second half of the year, the numbers began to decline and the governor’s approach shifted, with Walker in December criticizing the quality of the data.
The left-hand chart from PolitiFact falls short. While it clearly shows Wisconsin’s changing month-by-month jobs numbers, it does a poor job of explaining overall progress made towards Walker’s 250,000 new jobs pledge. After almost a year, and despite the recent job losses, was Walker still on-track to achieving his goal?
A simple line graph more clearly reveals the story in the data.
