Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is filled with excuses. Also failure.
It's a month in which job creation rankings are being released, which means it's a month in which there's news about how badly Wisconsin is doing at job creation under Gov. Scott Walker's leadership. This time, the state has
fallen to 44th in private-sector job creation.
Let's be excruciatingly fair about this: A governor's policies aren't the only factor affecting job creation, and Wisconsin had had a mixed record in the years before Walker took over. That said:
Wisconsin ranked 11th among the 50 states in 2010 in private-sector job growth, outperforming the nation as a whole. But it dropped to 38th in 2011, Gov. Scott Walker's first year in office.
And it has been going down since. Mind you, this is private-sector jobs, and with Walker's highest-profile attacks on workers having been on public workers, Wisconsin can't look to the public sector for an economic bright spot. In fact, the state has been
losing public sector jobs even
more quickly. Walker bills public-sector job losses as saving money for the state, but making that many people unemployed is inevitably going to be a drag on the economy, reducing spending that supports local businesses.
Walker came in promising 250,000 new private-sector jobs. It's not just that that doesn't look likely to happen—he's also pairing failure on that front with public-sector job losses. When will his excuses run out?