Even Walker's Preferred Jobs Measure Shows Failure
There has been an issue lost in the discussion about whether it is appropriate for the Walker administration to use the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) or the "Establishment" survey done each month by BLS. Even the numbers the Walker administration would prefer to use do not present the state's employment situation in a favorable light.
There are three points to make here:
1. Wisconsin is trailing its peer states. According to the data through September, Wisconsin had the slowest job growth on a year-over-year basis of its neighboring states plus Indiana (which is often used for comparisons due to its similarities to Wisconsin). As of September 2011, Wisconsin had year-over-year gains of 1.4% in the QCEW survey compared to 1.6% in Illinois, 2.1% in Indiana, 1.6% in Iowa, 2.4% in Michigan and 2.5% in Minnesota. These are hardly the sorts of numbers that would suggest that Wisconsin's business climate has become much more favorable than that of other states. In particular, the typical comparison made by the Walker administration is to Illinois, which has increased its individual and corporate income taxes. However, there is no evidence that Wisconsin is outperforming Illinois in the past year.
2. Even the QCEW shows a decline in the growth rate of jobs on a year-over-year basis in the last five months of the year. It stands to reason that, once you adjust for seasonality, jobs either stagnated or started falling in the August-December period. This was at a time when national job creation numbers were running fairly strong. Since Governor Walker's budget for the 2011-13 biennium did not take effect until July 1, 2011, these would be the very earliest numbers that could be tied to the Walker administration's economic policies. As such, once all of the regional data are released in late June, it is very likely that Wisconsin's performance relative to other states will worsen.
3. The 2011 growth rate was down from 2010, the last year of Jim Doyle's administration. In 2010, according to the QCEW, Wisconsin created nearly 40,000 jobs. In 2011, this growth rate slackened, particularly in the months following the adoption of Governor Walker's budget.
All of this can be verified using the data released via Governor Walker plus a simple search on the BLS website through the QCEW database. The analysis can be independently verified by anyone in the space of half an hour.
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