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I’ve watched several unemployment reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) roll by without diving too much into the details. What I have seen is both the Democrats and the Republicans cherry picking data at times to highlight either job losses or gains in the state. What’s a trend? …well, it usually depends on how you define your baseline. Democrats start counting in June while the Walker administration likes to start from January of last year — presumably the time period he’s influenced those numbers.
The recent data from the BLS is different. It covers the period from March 2011 to March 2012. Given when Act 10, the Budget Repair Bill, was unveiled and publicly debated, this March to March period reflects when Walker’s policies have been in place. Arguably, this is the best measure of the effectiveness of his key policies in creating jobs and turning the Wisconsin economy around. Wisconsin was the only state in the union to have statistically significant job losses over this period.
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From the BLS:
Caution on aggregating state data. State estimation procedures are designed
to produce accurate data for each individual state. BLS independently develops a
national employment series; state estimates are not forced to sum to national
totals. Because each state series is subject to larger sampling and nonsampling
errors than the national series, summing them cumulates individual state level
errors and can cause significant distortions at an aggregate level. Due to these
statistical limitations, BLS does not compile a “sum-of-states” employment series,
and cautions users that such a series is subject to a relatively large and volatile
error structure.
We’re not aggregating state data. In other words, we’re not adding up Midwestern state. So, this caution does not apply to this data or the map. I’ll repeat BLS’s key phrase: “State estimation procedures are designed to produce accurate data for each individual state.”
Actually Ric Harris, if you look at the data reports, more than 500 PRIVATE sector jobs per month were lost under Walker’s reign as well as the public sector jobs… “only” 6100 off the more than 20k jobs lost being private sector may not seem as terrible an outlook to you, but I am a private sector RN who works TWO part-time jobs to equal fulltime work and am not eligible for health insurance from either one… I agree Barrett is not the best choice for Wisconsin, which is why I’m voting for Vinehout, but Walker simply HAS to go!!!!
During the Doyle administration there was and employment first in Wisconsin. More people were employed by government than were in manufacturing jobs. Walker cut spending in the state which equates to taking people off the state payroll. Granted unemployed people are unemployed people. Never the less if you take the government jobs that were eliminated out of those statistics the outlook is not as terrible as it would seem.
I’m not Pro Walker but if the choice came down to Walker or Barrett. I am not choosing Barrett because he will lead the state back into the same mess Doyle left us with.
So you’re saying Wisconsin lost 23,000 jobs, some of which were state jobs. But if we look at the figure without state jobs, the number is “not AS terrible” ??? So, don’t recall Walker because he’s terrible, but not that terrible. He’s still bleeding jobs.