Following clarification from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that Scott Walker and his corporate sponsors at Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce are misrepresenting monthly economic data in their advertisements, Wisconsin Democrats are calling for television stations to remove the misleading ads from the airwaves.
The most recent and accurate federal jobs data available shows that Wisconsin ranks 37th in the nation in job growth in the past two years and continues to add jobs at about half the pace of the national average.
In the face of the disappointing federal numbers, which Walker previously called “the gold standard,” Walker and WMC have begun citing other metrics they believe are more favorable, with apparent disregard for their validity, including in a nearly $1 million television ad buy that states Wisconsin ranks second in the nation in economic growth.
The ad relies on a forecast from the Philly Fed; however, that data is based on projected changes in a state’s GDP, and is not a measure of actual job growth or intended for use as a comparison between states, according to a Paul Flora, a senior economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
In an email to The Capital Times, Flora stated that, “We do not consider state rankings based on the coincident and leading indexes to be valid.”
Citing “significant volatility” from month to month in the index, Flora also noted that, “An individual state’s ranking based on the percent change can jump wildly from one end of a relatively narrow range to the other. Rank order is not persistent, thus state rankings are misleading.”
View the WisDems letter to Wisconsin television stations here.
Read The Capital Times article here.
