WI GOP Convenes Friday Amidst Walker-Led Stagnation

Wisconsin Republicans will convene in Milwaukee May 2nd-4th, and while their pro-secession resolution has gotten most of the pre-convention media coverage, a larger battle surrounds the event:

Will Gov. Walker and his publicists - - especially those touting him as Presidential timber - - be allowed by fact-checkers, reporters and independent analysts to claim progress on the economy and job-creation when data and events prove the opposite?

*  For one thing, Walker pledged repeatedly during his 2010 and 2012 gubernatorial campaigns that he'd create 250,000 new private-sector jobs during one term.

Yet the budgets and development-related programs and agencies he's had complete freedom to create, fund and promote have led to only 106,000 such jobs, PolitiFact reports - - with just a few months left in that term in office. 

*  That poor performance lags the national recovery and has kept Wisconsin in the lower tier of states' job growth. Right now, we're 35th of 50.

* After Walker and Robin Vos separately predicted job growth would take off like a rocket.

*  One recent analysis shows that Wisconsin has yet to statistically recover all the jobs it lost when The Great Recession began in 2007, though the state's population has grown and national performance and trends look better:

The economic recovery continues in Wisconsin, producing new jobs in the state, though still not enough to go back to pre-recession levels. New data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Wisconsin added 6,900, after a big drop in February. Growth had been relatively consistent up to that point, but not especially rapid. More than six years since the beginning of the recession, Wisconsin is far from the jobs recovery workers need.

Wisconsin’s job deficit now stands at 134,780. Wisconsin still has 32,500 fewer jobs than in 2007 before the Great Recession. Wisconsin’s population has grown since then. Just to keep up with that growth, Wisconsin needs to add another 102,280 jobs. These two numbers added together – 134,780 – account for the current Wisconsin Job Deficit.

Job growth over the course of the recovery has been too slow to close the gap. Nationally, the labor market is about to return to pre-recession levels. Wisconsin still hasn’t made it up to that level. And given population, too many workers are still waiting to find a job or to have greater security and hours in their current job. Adding 6,900 jobs per month (as we did in March) means that recovering all of the jobs lost since 2007 would take almost two more years.

*  Here's a separate chart comparing projected growth in Minnesota, Kansas, Wisconsin, California and the country. It's a stunning graphic. The red line is Wisconsin:

The Philadelphia Fed has just released leading indices for the states. Wisconsin growth is forecasted to decelerate from March growth rates...

Figure 1: Log coincident indices for Wisconsin (red), Minnesota (blue), Kansas (teal),California (green), and US (black), all normalized to 2011M01=0. Observations for 2014M09 are forecasted levels using leading indices. Numbers in [brackets] indicate ALEC-Laffer 2014 rankings for economic outlook. Source: Philadelphia Fed coincident and leading indices for March, ALEC-Laffer 2014, and author’s calculations.

*  Finally: It is likely that while the GOP delegates meet downtown, two brand-new Amtrak trains built in a factory just a couple of miles away in a jobs-desperate low-income neighborhood will roll away to Michigan - - barred by Walker from operating in Wisconsin or connecting Milwaukee and Madison with faster-growing Minneapolis, and other midwestern cities' economies, as part of a regional, high-speed passenger rail system.

The factory is closing due to Walker's rejection of federally-funded Amtrak rail expansion, along with train assembly, maintenance and repair work in the state.

Talk about a metaphor. Jobs were and continue to be run out of state on a rail.

Walker killed these jobs as a stick-in-the-eye to President Obama - - just as Walker did when rejecting Medicaid funding that would have helped the health and productivity of many of the state's low-income workers.

Again, the outcome is a weakened state workforce so that Walker could make an ideological, self-serving political point.

No amount of spin can straighten what is sure to be the convention's conventional wisdom.

If there were rankings of states led by opportunists pushing bad data and false narratives, Wisconsin would finally be #1.