Republican governors like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, though expected to quickly turn around unemployment numbers in a stagnant economy, are commonly met with expensive and time-consuming legislative burdens from Democrats that actually hurt the state’s job growth potential.
The progressive Wisconsin-based Cap Times recently released a graph with Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showing Wisconsin well below neighbors Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, and Illinois in job creation during the past two years. Liberals have been tittering, because in 2010 Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had promised to create 250,000 new jobs in his first term, yet the state has witnessed a net decline of 16,000 jobs since he took office.
In defense of Walker, comparing Wisconsin unfavorably to Michigan and Illinois—two of the states with the highest unemployment rates in the country—is wholly unfair. In December 2012, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate was 6.6 percent, compared to Illinois’s 8.7 percent and Michigan’s 8.9 percent.
Second, Walker promised to create 250,000 jobs during his first term, which lasts until January 2015. It’s premature for liberals to gloat over the presumed economic fallout from the slight limitations he enacted on lavish taxpayer-funded union benefits halfway through his term. As anyone who grimaced while first-term President Reagan rode out the second half of a double-dip recession can attest, reform takes time. There’s so much variability in the numbers of jobs Wisconsin’s neighbors created in the past 24 months—from Iowa’s 18,600 to Minnesota’s 72,200—that it’s way too early to assess whether Walker’s policies have worked. And Reagan didn’t have to waste his first year fighting a pointless recall election staged by powerful public sector unions. (The Wisconsin recall election also set taxpayers back to the tune of 16 to 18 million job-killing dollars.)
Third, the change in total jobs in Wisconsin includes not only private-sector jobs but government jobs. Since Walker explicitly campaigned on a platform of cutting government spending, several thousand of those “lost” jobs likely came from laying off bureaucrats to save the state money.
Finally, Walker promised to create jobs via the expansion of business—and Democrats have been doing everything in their power to stall his job-creation legislation. Most regrettable is their effort to stop his mining bill, a bill that would open territory for a $1.5 billion iron ore mine and create thousands of jobs in the mining, trucking, and housing industries. Despite the bill’s recent passage after a year of Democratic delay tactics, the mine’s opening could be postponed for years due to legal challenges from environmentalists.
If Democrats want to draw comparisons, they might want to consider the broader view: Unemployment rates declined more across the country in red states—defined by 2012 Electoral College votes—than blue states from January 2011 to December 2012: 20 percent on average in red states and only 14 percent in blue states. And red states had lower average unemployment rates in December 2012 than blue states—7.5 percent vs. 6.6 percent.
So here’s some advice for Democrats who whine when Republican governors fail to fully implement economic growth promises quickly enough: Stop saddling them with costly, time-consuming recall elections, and stop opposing every single job-creation measure they propose. They can get a lot more done that way—if that’s really what you want.
