It was almost comical last year the way Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker would continually claim to have created private sector jobs in Wisconsin. The state did see job growth in the first six months of 2011 while Walker was in office (but before his first budget was implemented), but the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported net private sector job losses every month after Walker's budget went into effect on July 1st.
As month after month of losses piled up, Walker would continue to claim he was creating jobs "for the year", but every month he would have to lower the number as Wisconsin continued to bleed jobs. By the end of the year, he had pared down a 41,000 gain into just a 13,500 gain in private sector jobs for 2011. Walker stumbled across the finish line, but with his creative co-opting of credit for jobs created while the previous governor's budget was still in place, he at least ended the year with a gain.
That is, until the BLS issued much more accurate "benchmarked" statistics (as they always do.) We found out today that during Scott Walker's first year in office, Wisconsin lost 9,700 private sector jobs. When you add in the public sector losses, Wisconsin lost 20,600 jobs in 2011.
The good news in the statistics from the BLS (released by the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development today) is that the very preliminary numbers for January of this year show a gain of 15,700 private sector jobs. The number is unusually high and will be probably be adjusted downward eventually, but it does give temporary cover to Walker. He can point to January's tentative numbers while ignoring the revised statistics from last year.
One thing Walker cannot do is continue to claim that Wisconsin created jobs during his administration's first year in office. It was barely true anyway depending on how one phrased the claim, but now it has been proven false.
Walker's mantra is "It's Working", but it's not working. He claims to have balanced the budget, but he didn't. We are 143 million dollars short, and we still have the same 3 billion dollar structural deficit that he said he would eliminate. He claims that his budget did not include state employee layoffs, but due to cuts in school and local aid, many municipal governments have eliminated positions. Thousands more state and local positions have been left vacant after public employees who could retire early did so to protect their pension benefits.
Those who are still on the job had huge chunks of their take-home pay taken away. The lowest paid public employees had cuts of up to 25 percent. At the same time, many of the health insurance plans that employees are contributing more for were changed - higher deductibles, higher co-pays, and fewer covered services.
The result of all this is that businesses in many communities are hurting for customers. The middle class public employee with some discretionary income to spend is now a rare sighting in Wisconsin, and the ripple effect in small towns is killing main streets across the state.
Walker and the Republican legislators came into office shouting "jobs, jobs, jobs", but they have focused almost exclusively on everything but a real jobs agenda. If Wisconsin sees job growth this year, it will be despite Walker's policies, not because of them.