FACT: Scott Walker’s central campaign promise was to create 250,000 jobs by January 2015, a figure his own administration concedes they will not reach. Under Scott Walker’s failed leadership, Wisconsin has fallen from 11th in the nation in job creation on the day Scott Walker took office all the way down to 37th, according to the latest, most accurate federal jobs data available.
Over the past year, Wisconsin has created just 23,963 new jobs — a figure that puts our rate of growth at about half the national average and is less than half as many jobs as our neighbors in Minnesota created during the same period.
The 23,963 jobs added in Wisconsin are the worst numbers for that one year period in the past three years. In the previous year, immediately following the recall election after which Scott Walker predicted “unbelievable amounts” of new jobs, Wisconsin added 37,959 jobs. And two years ago, under the last Democratic budget, Wisconsin added 39,909 jobs.
Meanwhile, Scott Walker’s flagship jobs agency, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, has been plagued with scandal amid allegations of bid-rigging and a series of scathing audits that revealed the agency had violated state and federal law, spent taxpayer money on alcohol, Badgers tickets, and iTunes gift cards, lost track of millions of dollars in taxpayer-financed loans, and lacked mechanisms to track whether a single verifiable job was created.
