On Wednesday, Scott Walker delivered his 2013-15 Budget Address. Others have covered the school voucher expansion, the below-inflation education "increase" that leads to net zero extra funding because of caps, kicking people off of Badgercare and calling it helping them achieve independence, the insulting #TacoBelltaxcut (named after what you can afford with it if your income is high enough) and decrying the Federal government as being an unreliable funder of expanded Medicaid as justification for refusing it while simultaneously requiring the Federal government to be a reliable subsidizer of private insurance on the Obamacare exchanges in order to make his plan work enhance his Tea Party creds.
I'm going to instead look way down his Budget in Brief where on page 81 is this table including past and projected state job totals:
The data listed under 'actual' is the average of the 12 monthly seasonally adjusted CES reports for each year and regularly appears in Wisconsin budgets - or at least it did until the 2012 value. That is not from the CES historical data, but rather is a projection from the Fall 2012 Wisconsin Economic Outlook report:
The actual average seasonally-adjusted CES value for 2012 is 2,728,500. To be sure, CES data displayed an anomalous drop in 2011 that makes this suspect (more details about that below), but sorry Governor Walker, you're not allowed to pretend that job projections are actual values.
But beyond that, the change from 2011 to 2015 that Walker's Budget in Brief projects is a four-year gain of 147,500 jobs - nowhere near his oft-repeated 250,000 promise and one which includes some of a more bountiful 2015 than 2011 ever was.
Now, that's total jobs, not the private jobs promised and just between annual averages at that. So delving deeper into the projections in the Wisconsin Economic Outlook produced by the Walker Administration's Department of Revenue, at the end of 2012 we're looking at about 2,368,050 private nonfarm jobs (by averaging the 2012Q4 and 2013Q1 values given). By averaging the 2014 and 2015 values given, we should be at 2,450,450 at the end of 2014.
The absolute values here may be wrong, but since it's only the increase we're interested in we can do some subtraction to see that roughly 82,400 more jobs are projected over the course of 2013 and 2014.
Since we have final QCEW numbers for 2011 (+29,800) and preliminary CES values for 2012 (+9,700 - you'll have to subtract government from total to get private - I'll go into why they're credible after the jump).
Add them all up and that's about 121,900 private sector jobs forecast for Walker's first term: the Walker Administration's own data and projections show that we'll be lucky if he gets halfway to fulfilling his promise.
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