Jake has the 2019 gold standard numbers, and they are just terrible.
Wisconsin’s rate of job growth started to decline in mid-2016, and has pretty much gone down since then, with the except of a Bubbly 6 months after the GOP Tax Scam was signed into law. But last year was a new depth, with barely more than 5,000 jobs added from December 2018 to December 2019, and we even slipped below 0 in November before a small rebound in the last month of 2019.
Jake compares the jobs picture in Wisconsin with Minnesota, and the comparison does not go well for Wisconsin.
Total jobs added, QCEW 2010-2019
Minnesota 330,103
Wisconsin 227,993
Difference 102,110
Jake further points out that the 2019 data for Wisconsin reveals that Dane County by itself is providing the job growth for the entire state.
Jobs added, Wisconsin 2019
Dane County +7,446
REST OF WIS -2,367
As Jake concludes:
This data sure seems to indicate that we could learn something by being more like Minnesota and Dane County, because that’s what was working before the COVID-19 recession hammered everyone starting in March. And today’s report is yet another blaring piece of evidence of just how much we have been held back during the Age of Fitzwalkerstan. It needs to be ended ASAP, and it goes well beyond changing who is in the Governor’s office.
Because job growth has been so anemic in Wisconsin, unemployment is that much more important as a wage replacement. But, as indicated previously, Wisconsin’s policies over the last decade have made unemployment much, much more difficult to get. Now with the pandemic and absolutely no jobs available at all, folks who have been suffering under meager job growth the past decade have absolutely nothing to fall back on other than unemployment. And, that system is designed to be difficult and cumbersome.
The Evers administration could start fixing this system by actually following the law rather than subverting it, as it is currently doing by denying PUA benefits to the disabled (see the discussion of SSDI in this post). And, the Evers administration could take a look at what our neighbor in Michigan is doing to make an equally difficult unemployment system at least less burdensome on claimants and the workers who have to administer that system. The results of these efforts in Michigan speak for themselves:
Chart courtesy of NELP
In comparison to Michigan, Wisconsin will only begin to start paying out PUA benefits next week.
Wisconsin remains . . .
