Walker's Total Flip On Job Data

When the official job surveys went his way, he loved the reports:

Gov. Scott Walker touted the best job numbers since he took office in January by traveling to Milwaukee to deliver them in person, a departure from the state's custom of issuing the monthly jobs report in a news release.

Now that the year-long trend using those reports left Wisconsin as the worst-performing state in the country, Walker spins out a different take as as recall defense, and - - Presto! - -  the figures and discussion change by 57,000 jobs.

I'm expecting soon a news release from Walker's Department of Health Services that claims obesity is actually down in Wisconsin because the new state standard for "obese" has been raised by 100 pounds.

Says the Journal Sentinel about Walker's jobs 'discovery:'

In an unusual effort to rebut bad news on the jobs front, the Walker administration is speeding up release of new numbers showing job gains rather than job losses in Wisconsin last year.

The numbers come from a source familiar to many economists but one that hasn't figured until now in the state's highly politicized jobs debate heading into the June 5 recall election: the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

The new figures, provided to the Journal Sentinel on Tuesday, cover the final three months of 2011.
State officials said they show a gain of 23,321 jobs (public and private) between December 2010 and December 2011, which represents Gov. Scott Walker's first full year in office.

That stands in sharp contrast to a commonly used and widely reported monthly jobs measure, the Current Employment Survey, which earlier this year showed an estimated loss of 33,900 jobs in Wisconsin for the same 12-month period.

This thread is cross-posted at Purple Wisconsin, fyi.