Scott Walker’s Job Creation Statistics In Wisconsin

    Oh, and it is not a very pretty picture in the state as Wisconsin is actually losing jobs. It is the only state in the nation to do so.

This chart from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says it all. It also tells you that Walker’s tax-cuts for his wealthy friends and for big business created no new jobs.

   Walker did promise Wisconsin voters that he would create something like 250,000 private sector jobs by 2015 if they would elect him as their Governor. He still has time, but it will not happen because of anything Walker has done.

  About the chart:

It counts jobs in the state, not the number of people working. It is an estimate based mostly on surveys that measure non-farm payroll.  Every instance of someone on somebody’s payroll in that month is counted as a job. If someone in Milwaukee works at a Milwaukee McDonalds during the day and a Milwaukee Burger King at night, two jobs are counted for Wisconsin. If a person lives in Racine, Wisconsin but commutes to Chicago to work, that is not counted as a Wisconsin job. Again, the report measures jobs, not people.

There is another report put out monthly by the BLS at the same time that estimates the unemployment rate by state. It is based on different surveys from the ones described above. It is a ratio of the number of residents in a state who are working compared to the size of the state’s workforce. Those numbers are not related one to one. If the number of people working stays the same in a month but the size of the labor force goes down because people moved, died, or retired, the unemployment rate can go down even though the same number of people are working. If our imaginary worker from the previous paragraph is laid off from his night job at Burger King, he is not considered unemployed because he still works at McDonalds during the day. If the Racine worker loses her job in Chicago, she counts as one of Wisconsin’s unemployed because she lives in Wisconsin. The report measures people, not jobs.

In summary, the two reports are significantly different. Among other differences, one report is based on where the jobs are, the other is based on where the person resides. Neither is inherently better than the other, but they are not two ways of measuring the same thing, which is the way many lazy journalists describe them.    Source

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