Senator Ron Johnson has recently observed:
“It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin.”
Current Wisconsin employment (according to private nonfarm payroll numbers) are shown below.
Figure 1: Wisconsin private nonfarm payroll employment, 000’s, sa (blue). +250K by January 2015 (red), both on log scale. Light orange denotes Walker administrations. Source: BLS, DWD, author’s calculations.
As Wisconsinites will recall, as late as August 2013, Governor Walker was reiterating his campaign promise to create 250,000 new private sector jobs by the end of his first term (January 2015). In July 2018Wisconsin’s private sector net job creation surpassed Walker’s promised target — a full 3.5 years late. The current number of jobs in Wisconsin is now 2.2% (57,000) below what Scott Walker promised to achieve by January 2015.
