After over a year of stressing the importance of “actual” job counts versus estimates, Gov. Scott Walker is now highlighting a new set of job numbers.
About a month before his recall election, monthly estimates showed Walker had lost jobs his first year in office. To counter that, Walker sped the release of actual job counts showing job gains.
“The numbers we're talking about today aren't a poll,” he said at the time. “They're an actual survey of more than 150,000 employers of this state.”
The numbers Walker highlighted that day and for more than a year since are the backbone of the federal government's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which economists regard as the most thorough and accurate job measure. Now, with Walker's next election a little more than a year away, and the latest census job numbers due out later this week, Walker is highlighting a different metric.
“Rankings that come out are typically based on quarterly numbers that come out from [the Bureau of Labor Statistics], which are a six-month lag,” he says. “What we're trying to look at is not six months ago … but where are we going to be in the next six months.”
Walker is talking about the Philadelphia Federal Reserve's Leading Index, a complex prediction of where state economies are headed based on several factors, including housing permits, interests rates, and hours worked in manufacturing.
Marquette University's Charles Franklin says it's telling that Walker is moving away from a hard job count that's easy to understand to a much more complicated estimate that's hard to explain.
“Politicians are not economists,” he says. “What politicians care about is the perception of how the economy is doing rather than the best or most reliable measure.”
Thursday will be the first chance people get to see how Wisconsin's employer census numbers – the hard job count – compare to other states through the end of March. The numbers Wisconsin sent to the federal government were the state's worst for that period in the past three years.
