The Jobs are NOT There!

With the recall looming and Scott walker starting to worry about losing his cushy job, he knows one of his biggest obstacles is the fact that he promised 250,000 new jobs and he currently leads the nation in job losses.  The Walker administration has come up with a way to fix this.  No it is not sound economic policies tha tcreat new jobs that would be too easy and go against everything the republican party believes in.   The idea that the Walker administration had was to"cook the books"

 .According to Laura Dresser, a labor economist at The Center On Wisconsin Strategy at The University Of Wisconsin, Walker’s new numbers are little more than an incredibly transparent effort to create a false reality just in time to mislead Wisconsin voters who will cast their ballot in a few short weeks. Pointing out just one of the flaws in the ‘new and improved’ Walker method of measuring job growth, Dresser says, “It seems that they’re attributing employment growth in other states to Wisconsin.”

 The Walker administration will now be taking credit for every new job created in the Midwest.    He has already sent his paid monkey, court jester and fiction writer Christian Schneider out with a blow to explain why we need new numbers.   Luckily most people who are paying attention know that Schneider lacks any journalism ethics or reality so they will not pay attention to the paid hack.

 I am sure the next line of defense will be the right wing hate triad of talk radio.  Everyone should know that McKenna, Sykes and that other guy( his name escapes me at the moment), are being paid very well to advance the right wing propaganda.   This attack will be then followed by republican politicians. I am sure Robin Vos will lead the way, as he has higher ambitions.  Be aware however, Robin Vos's knowledge of economics comes strictly from paying divorce lawyers.

The intelligent thing to do would be to find someone without "skin in the game", like business insider magazine.  Business Insider magazine is a very good read, as they take us through Menzi Chinn's @econobrowser's breakdown of Walker's actual record and compares Scott Walker's ACTUAL job performance, not only to his promise and the national average, but also to IL.   (Spoiler alert:  Walker loses every time).

It's just too bad that from an economic standpoint, he's not a good governor.
Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser takes a look at his record on private sector job creation, and it turns out that not only is he well behind his own goals, he's just generally bad at it.

 This is followed up by the following three charts.

1.   is Walker's actual record compared to his promise:

Got that? Not only is Walker's record on private payroll employment far below his stated goal (it's not even close) but he's barely up since the beginning of 2011, when he took office.
That might be forgivable if private payrolls were doing badly overall over the last 16 months, but in fact the national scene is much different: Private payrolls are doing well, while state and local layoffs (like the ones pushed by Walker and his fellow Republican governors) are bringing down the headline numbers.

Who knew laying off people would have an adverse affect on the economy....let's move on to our second graph.  This one compares Wisconsin to the rest of the nation.  

It's pretty clear that Wisconsin is lagging badly under his tenure.

Now just for comparison purposes, lets compare WI under Walker to Illinois in the same time period:

 Yes even Illinois(blue line) is doing better than WI.

Let's get to the bottom line that every sane and credible economist has been saying since the 1930's.  

 

The bottom line: The idea of expansionary austerity (the idea that things will just get better if you cut spending and remove government) fails almost anywhere you look.