As Scott Walker campaigns for president in South Carolina today, news is breaking that Wisconsin has dropped to 38th in the nation in private sector job growth.
That’s according to the latest and most accurate quarterly federal jobs numbers, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (“QCEW”), which Scott Walker has referred to as the “gold standard” when it comes to tallying job creation. Over the most recent one year period, Wisconsin added just 27,491 private sector jobs.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, “Wisconsin continued to trail the national rate of job creation, as it has since July 2011. The United States created private-sector jobs at a rate of 2.3% in the latest 12-month period, twice Wisconsin’s 1.16% rate, the data show.”
Reports of Wisconsin’s dismal job growth under Scott Walker are just the latest in a string of bad news this week for the governor and presidential candidate; jobs numbers released yesterday show that Walker added just fewer than 55% of the 250,000 jobs he promised in his first term, his flagship jobs agency WEDC is the subject of another bad internal audit that shows the scandal-plagued agency again failed to follow the law and properly track taxpayer funded loans, and his “Our American Revival” presidential campaign committed an unforced error by hiring a digital strategist who criticized early caucus state Iowa and then summarily parting ways with the staffer amid a backlash from Iowa conservatives.
“As Scott Walker courts conservative support for his presidential campaign in South Carolina and Florida the next few days, everyone must remember that he ran for reelection in Wisconsin on the idea that he led a ‘Wisconsin Comeback,’” Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Mike Tate said Thursday. “But between his budget mess and the news that the state has dropped to 38th in the nation in job creation – growing jobs at just half the national average – what we got is more like a ‘Wisconsin Setback.’”
