Yesterday I posted an essay here suggesting why the debate over whether Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has overseen either negative job growth or paltry job growth is a tempest in a coffee cup. It's because other data show state tax collections are way down, especially in terms of personal income tax withholding and sales tax collections. Which in turn suggests a lot of Wisconsin residents have much less money to declare as income, or have discretionary money to buy stuff.
I supplied some data from the Rockefeller Institute and the state's Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Added evidence showed up today in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel news report that examines the issue and raises new issues. Read on to the first two paragraphs of that story:
This sounds good: The 23,000-odd jobs Wisconsin added last year, on balance, were heavily concentrated in high-wage industries.
And not so good: From December 2010 to December 2011, the average weekly wage in Wisconsin declined.
The story said despite reported gains in high-salary industry jobs, Wisconsin experienced declining average pay statewide: "The weekly average dropped from $835 to $817." And: "The biggest employment gain by far - 7,002 jobs - came in the `Unclassified' sector. That catchall category also saw a whopping 36% drop in its average wage."
Which helps further explain a main point in my post yesterday: Wisconsin state revenue collections have been way down. Gov. Walker might like to distract voters with purported good news based on his unusual method of calculating that maybe 23,000 or 30,000 jobs have been created in the state since he took office in January 2011 -- itself not particularly impressive. But trumping that are the declining income revenue data. They tell the more significant story about what's very quickly happened to once prosperous Wisconsin under Walker's controversial watch.
Of course, as always, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Walker cherry-picks the economic data to make his best case, focusing on a slightly declining unemployment rate as if it were a good thing (it isn't, for reasons well documented here and elsewhere) and those alternative job creation numbers of his, which aren't backed by US Bureau of Labor Statistics data that all other states use, and that Wisconsin used until Walker no longer found them useful for his campaign.
But the key here is that Republicanomics depends on trickle-down outcomes, and the most important trickling down in Wisconsin is, at the moment, happening to the size of worker paychecks. Some Wisconsin workers are making more or getting rehired to good jobs, but many others are still unemployed and not making any money at all, and overall average income is down. That means less to spend overall. That means a shrinking economy. Nothing else ought to matter to voters, because a shrinking economy is bad for everyone in the state, sooner or later.
Voters would be wise to ignore the rhetoric from Walker's office and look around their neighborhoods and workplaces, and at their bank balances, too. A few will cheer. Most will not. Paraphrasing what Reagan used to ask: Are Wisconsin residents better off today than when Walker took office? It's pretty doggone hard to answer yes in the aggregate, at least if you are intelligent enough to pay attention to the real world and not the GOP political head trip.
See the full Journal Sentinel article here:
http://www.jsonline.com/...
And see my earlier post here:
http://www.dailykos.com/...