Walker Earns Blame For State's Growth, Jobs Failings

Data, reporting and commentary are focused on Scott Walker's direct responsibility for the state's dismal job-creation and lagging growth performance despite his pledge to create 250,000 new jobs that was the centerpiece of his 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

As the Journal Sentinel said in its lede on October 24, 2010 when it endorsed Walker:

Scott Walker has said repeatedly during his campaign for governor that he will develop strategies to create 250,000 new jobs during his first term.

It's a big promise - one that has been derided by his critics. But for the sake of Wisconsin, Walker had better be right.

How has that "big promise" worked out?

The Journal Sentinel published Jack Norman's trenchant, statistics-driven analysis:

For example, Walker's Act 10, which took effect in July 2011, sharply reduced the take-home pay for almost all of the state's 350,000 public employees. A typical state employee earning $50,000 lost $4,228 in take-home pay, according to the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau. That's money drained out of the state's economy....

...based on the Fiscal Bureau's methodology and statistics about Wisconsin public employees, I estimate that in the first year of Walker's budget - July 2011 through June 2012 - public employees gave back over $850 million in take-home pay.

This contracted the economy in every corner of the state, anywhere there's a public school teacher, garbage collector, county jail or public park.

MATC Economics Professor Michael Rosen put it this way:

Wisconsin’s economy continues to be among the nation’s worst performing.  A new report by the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that between 2011 and 2012 the state ranked 41st in nation in personal income growth.

The single largest contributor to this dismal performance was the dramatic decline in state and local government income, the direct result of Governor Walker’s austerity economic policies (See table 3).

Wisconsin’s state and local government employees’ incomes shrank by $529 million dollars, a 2.55% decline. Only Louisiana under the leadership of Tea Party favorite, Governor Booby Jindal, experienced as steep a decline according to the analysis.

My recent contributions are here:

For the record, here is the timeline showing how new passenger rail construction and manufacturing jobs were taken out of a stalled, then failing Wisconsin employment picture by Scott Walker and his legislative allies.

And, separately:

Following through on a campaign pledge (see the "no train" website), Scott Walker forced the termination of an $810 million federally-funded Madison-to-Milwaukee Amtrak line predicted to create thousands of jobs - - including employment in the years of his governorship when Wisconsin's job growth has steadily fallen - - over a six-year period, according to data published in 2010 by the Journal Sentinel: