Number Games

From the ever-talented Stuart Carlson:

Scott Walker: The Kathy Nickolaus Of Job Creators

Walker ciphering those new job numbers

Scott Walker is pulling all the stops on the extent he will lie to the voters in order to keep his job, at least until he is indicted.

The latest gimmick is that Walker is now claiming to have calculated the jobs numbers in a "more accurate" manner.  What Walker wants us to believe is that during the first year of his abbreviated term as governor, he didn't really lose 34,000 jobs, but had actually created 23,000.  And how convenient it is that he just so happened to do this three weeks before the recall election.

Whoo, boy! Where to start?

Did he pull a Kathy Nickolaus and find those jobs in an unsealed bag in the back of his closet?  Or did he really help create those jobs and forgot to hit the save button?

But seriously now, Walker's got some problematic issues regarding this claim.

First of all, even if one were to give Walker the benefit of the doubt on this, and ignore the fact that it doesn't allow a comparison to other states which have been shown to be doing much better than Wisconsin, it doesn't help him much:

Even using the more positive numbers from the quarterly census of businesses, the governor finished his first year just a fraction of the way toward meeting his target of 250,000 private-sector jobs in four years.

"It would certainly be nice if the particular year saw a 1% increase rather than a 1% decrease, but this remains a slow jobs recovery using anyone's numbers," said John Heywood, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

But one would have to overlook a lot of things to go as far as giving him the benefit of the doubt.

For example, Walker has a notoriously bad time whenever it comes to numbers and math. Not only that, he's tried to do a similar stunt before and got busted out on it.

In 2009, when Walker was Milwaukee County Executive and prepping for his run for governor, he wanted to show that he had some real fiscal acuity, he started the year claiming a huge deficit and ended it with a huge surplus. But this miraculous $24 million turnaround was easily proven to be a lie:

In 2009, Scott Walker declared a fiscal emergency, stating that Milwaukee County faced a $15 million deficit. In order to address this, he ordered all county workers to start on a reduced work week schedule. This meant that all workers would only be putting in 35 hours per week instead of the standard 40 hours.

The arbitrator also found that Walker failed to prove that there was even a fiscal emergency, when an analysis by the county's auditor, Jerome Heer, found that there was only a minimal deficit, if even that. This was later reinforced when Walker claimed a $24 million turnaround resulting in a supposed $9 million surplus.

It should be noted that the supposed surplus from that year is coincidentally just about the same amount that the county "saved" by Walker's illegal furloughs, so that surplus has been basically wiped out.

Another problem with Walker's claim, if you really, really want to believe him is how those jobs came about.  This is something we have discussed before and is clearly illustrated in this chart:

As you can clearly see, the job growth phase of 2011 came when Governor Jim Doyle's budget and policies were still in effect.  It was only when Walker's policies like Act 10 took effect that the job losses started happening.  And as you can see in the chart, once the effects of Walker's budget started kicking in, the job loss accelerated.

So when Walker is saying that there was a job growth in 2011, what he is really saying is that he didn't lose as many jobs as what the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers show.

Wouldn't make that a great slogan for Walker's campaign in these final weeks?

"Yeah, I suck at creating jobs! But just not as much as you think I suck!"