Wisconsin is dead-last in job loss under Scott Walker. It's not working, and Walker will have an easier political time pardoning veterans' money-embezzling Tim Russell than explaining Wisconsin's losing the most jobs of any state in the last year. This table below is shocking. The only statistically significant decrease over the past year in the number of workers employed is in Wisconsin—losing 23,900 jobs.
How can Wisconsin’s unemployment rate continue to go down while the number of employed also goes down? Simple. The workforce is shrinking. People are bailing out. They are leaving the state, or finding jobs in neighboring states and commuting, or retiring earlier than planned to protect pensions. Many have run out their unemployment benefits and have given up looking for work, so they aren’t counted.
The state's Department of Workforce Development actually released the Wisconsin job numbers yesterday* so we already knew Wisconsin had lost 4,500 jobs, most of them in the private sector. Now we know how Wisconsin compares to the rest of the states. In short, Wisconsin's economy is going down the toilet. It's one thing to lose jobs when the whole country is experiencing a major recession. It's quite another to continue shedding jobs after most of the country has shown small but sustained growth for two years.
*The Secretary of the DWD waited until after Scott Walker's photo op at a Brookfield, Wisconsin factory yesterday morning before issuing a comically absurd press release (which hid the job losses on page 2.)
This table is the most shocking of all. The only statistically significant decrease over the past year in the number of workers employed is in Wisconsin—losing 23,900 jobs.
So, this morning I have the radio on and I hear an economist from the University of Wisconsin barely acknowledge that taking hundreds of dollars a month out of the paychecks of tens of thousands of public employees might have an impact on the economy, but that the real problem is the "uncertainty."
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