Walker's Missing Recovery - You Can't Say Wisconsin is the Titanic of the 50 States, Since We are Still Afloat (But Barely)

 RMS Titanic




I previously posted about the mistake Governor Walker made last month in crowing about the February results in the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank's Coincident Index.  I won't repeat what I said back then, except to say that the governor missed the boat. 

As I mentioned in a post on Saturday, the governor wants to run government in Wisconsin like a business.  He also wants to put Wisconsin in direct competition with other states, most notably Illinois, in terms of developing jobs and inducing the transfer of businesses and jobs across state lines. Businesses look at metrics to ensure that they are competitive.  They don't just keep doing what they always have done in an effort to beat the competition.

Saturday's post was about the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Index and how poorly Wisconsin has done in developing new businesses. 

The March 2012 Coincident Index came out at 9:00 AM this morning from the Philly Fed, and the results for Wisconsin over the last twelve months under the Wisconsin Administration have been a unmitigated disaster.   Over the past twelve months every state has seen about a one percent or better increase in its coincident index (a measure that is intended to roughly track a state's increase or decrease in its GDP) except for Wisconsin, which has had a gain of just under two-tenths of one percent.  Essentially, every state in the union is growing its economy but Wisconsin.  (I computed the twelve month growth rate for each state by subtracting the state's coincident index for March 2011 from its coincident index for March 2012, and then divided the remainder by the March 2011 coincident index.  You can find the Fed's data which I used here.  Click on the actual report, a PDF document, where you will find the link to an excel spreadsheet with the data for all 50 states.)

Here is a chart showing all fifty states in terms of Coincident Index growth over the past twelve months, lead by North Dakota with 10.69% in annual growth in its Coincident Index, and Wisconsin's, with just two-tenths of a percent in growth of its economy.   This is a sad result that all the money streaming into the state from outside Wisconsin can't cover up.