Walker's Grasp On Reality Even More Tenuous Than Previously Thought

In an article for the Journal Sentinel, The Wisconsin Comeback, Scott Walker repeated familiar talking points and platitudes. According to Walker, Wisconsin is flourishing.

The Journal Sentinel has their own editorial, Another Lousy Wisconsin Jobs Report and Little Action on Job Creation.

A new government report shows that our state ranked 32nd in private-sector job growth among the 50 states in the five-year period that ended in June. That's the entire recovery period since the last recession. 

Private-sector hiring in Wisconsin grew just 7.6% during those five years, far behind the national growth of 11.2% and behind nearby Midwestern states. Michigan, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa and Illinois all did better.

Joel Rogers (the Sewell-Bascom Professor of Law, Political Science, Public Affairs and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and director of the Center On Wisconsin Strategy) added:

According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, Wisconsin now leads the nation in destroying its middle class. Defining "middle-class households" as those with income 67% to 200% of their state's median, Pew showed Wisconsin leading all other states in the 2000-2013 period in its rate of loss...

Median worker wages here, for example, are now $17.38 an hour. In inflation-corrected terms, that's up only 71 cents from 35 years ago — equivalent to an increase of only 2 cents a year — despite a near doubling of worker productivity over the period. Job growth has been pathetic, among the worst in the nation. If Wisconsin had merely kept pace with the rest of the country's recovery from the Great Recession, we'd have 90,000 more jobs today than we do.

And job quality is through the floor. More than a quarter (27%) of Wisconsin workers now make $11.55 or less an hour. A full-time year-round job at that wage is not enough to keep a four-person family out of poverty, even on America's distinctively stingy definition of the poverty line.

In the sense that 'comeback' usually has a positive connotation, I don't think 'comeback' means what Scott Walker thinks it means. Hopefully Wisconsin can comeback from the Walker 'comeback'.