Recall Defense: Understanding the Jobs Numbers

It’s not about the jobs—or is it?

Does Tom Barrett fall short as a political strategist? He has, after all, been trying to run on the issue of jobs in next month’s recall election. Is this a colossal bluff; a desperate hope that if he talks about it enough, no one will notice how bad his performance has been?
 
Good luck, Mr. Mayor. Even with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s deflector shields fully deployed to obscure his record, Barrett can’t keep the rest of Wisconsin from finding out that under his aimless leadership Milwaukee is a graveyard for jobs.
 
Surely March was a disappointment. Wisconsin lost 4,500 jobs. But there’s more to it than that: 4,400 were in Barrett’s Milwaukee.
 
It needn’t be this way, except for Liberal ideological purity. For instance, not one Democrat, Barrett included, spoke up when a single vote in the State Senate would have opened the door to thousands of jobs building an iron mine and the machinery to operate it.
 
Instead, Barrett fixates on “investing” your tax money in  a two-mile, hundred-million dollar trolley line and wind energy systems—just as people wake up to the expensive failure of “green energy” to deliver either environmental benefits or reliable power. 
 
If Wisconsin struggles with job creation, it’s not because Scott Walker curbed government union collective bargaining. It’s because private-sector job-creators fear Walker could be gone in a month and a Leftist governor could be trying to rig up a tax-financed economy with science-fair energy projects and passenger-rail money pits.
 
The March unemployment rate was 6.8 percent for Wisconsin and 8.2 percent nationwide. In the City of Milwaukee, it was 10.4 percent. If you’re wondering how to make jobs disappear, don’t call Scott Walker. Don’t even call Barack Obama. Call Tom Barrett. He seems to have the secret.