Walker's Second Crack At 250,000 Jobs Worse Than His First

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According to an older article (March, 2017) from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state of Wisconsin, under six years of Gov. Scott Walker and his reforms, "created" 185,208 jobs.

One problem with that is the newspaper writes up his 250,000 jobs promise as "remains elusive" after six full years have passed, as if to suggest that someday he will fulfill the promise.

The second problem is, and it's a whopper, is Walker's original promise was made as candidate Walker running for a four year term for governor. Put it this way, nobody runs in a first-time election for a four year term, makes promises and then states, "Oh, I'll need three, maybe four terms in office to fulfill any promises you heard my lips speak. Just so you know." Nobody. Never. Said.

Just to be clear. The Journal Sentinel's attempt to keep Walker's jobs promise alive ...after it died two years earlier, borders on "fake news" political propaganda. It's a hypothetical story line that carries whimsical, almost meaningless soundbites in a ploy to keep Walker's promise and his reforms active in conversations regarding jobs creation in Wisconsin.

But enough with the media analysis. Let's look at the numbers.

Scott Walker promised that his reforms would create 250,000 jobs in his first term in office. Unfortunately, he created only 132,443. Slightly more than half, but woefully short. To put it bluntly, his reforms failed and he failed to keep his promise. End of story. It's over.

However, Walker is back in the news and according to The Political Environment, he is creating a new number or qualifier for annual jobs success - and that number is 30,000 jobs starting in 2017. As noted at TPE, that new 30K jobs number is slightly less than half of the 62,500 jobs Walker claimed his reforms would create annually beginning in 2011.

After miserably failing to keep his jobs promise in his first term, Wisconsin voters, for whatever their reason, gave him a second chance and re-elected him in November of 2014.

To be fair, Walker never made a jobs promise for his second term ...but, it's also fair to see where Walker, now into the last year of his second term, and his reforms are taking Wisconsin. What's the trajectory?

It's not looking good.

Walker's second term jobs numbers begins in 2015 with 35,565 officially reported and 17,200 for 2016. That's 52,765 at mid-term. Now he's touting 30,000 jobs for 2017 and because I'm a good guy, I'll generously give him 30,000 for 2018 as well for a grand total of 112,765 jobs in his second term.

A loss of almost 20,000 jobs from the total reported for his first term.

Or as Walker would say, "My reforms are working!!"