Evers' Economy is a Soviet Dream

"Record Employment!"

Governor Tony Evers has taken to X to boast about the tremendous job he's been doing as Wisconsin's Chief Central Planner. According to him, he's done such a bang-up job that the Wisconsin economy is now smashing employment records:

Seven months of record-level employment is pretty good! It's only all too regrettable, however, that context makes Evers' celebration totally unwarranted.

The context Evers omits is that the increase in employment is simply the total number of jobs on employers' payrolls. That means that "employment" (the number of jobs) can go up while the number of people employed can stay the same or decrease. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't report the level of part-time and full-time employment for states, but they do report average weekly working hours.

The graph below shows that since November 2021, private sector employees have been working fewer and fewer hours every month for 30 of the last 37 months. Only from September to November of this year did private sector employees start to work more hours than they did the year prior, and the other four months saw no change in average weekly hours. That's not nearly enough to recover from almost three years of continual cuts in working hours.

So the so-called "high" employment numbers are simply the result of the BLS asking employers how many payroll jobs they have on their books, while the hourly figures above are the result of asking employers how many hours are recorded for each position. This means that Wisconsinites are taking on multiple jobs––specifically, multiple part-time jobs.

This becomes abundantly obvious when you also take into account the fact that labor force participation in Wisconsin has declined massively since 1998.

You simply cannot "smash" employment records while labor force participation is going down––not with these numbers. And the numbers he's applauding tell a very different story anyway. Believe it or not, the data show that a huge share of the "new jobs" Evers is so excited about have been government jobs––50%, in fact!

The graph above shows what percentage of new jobs created since the beginning of the year and up to that date (Year To Date, YTD) have been private and government jobs. Using the number of jobs on employers' books in January as the baseline, the graph shows that by February 57% of new jobs were in the private sector. 

By March, 79%(!) of all new jobs created up to that point were government jobs. If we look at the last column in the graph showing job creation up through the month of November (almost a full year's worth of job creation), we can see that since January of this year, 49% (half!) of all jobs created in the state of Wisconsin have been government jobs.

Considering healthy economies have government job growth at rates no higher than 20%, it's hard to imagine what's so spectacular about this kind of "record-level" employment; that is, unless you model your form of government after the Soviets: Every man, a Comrade; every worker, an employee of the State; every professional, a part-time, unionized gig worker.

Since the beginning of this year, Wisconsin has created only 15,800 jobs, and 7,800 of these were government jobs. This is hardly good news for Wisconsinites.