Governor Scott Walker's latest attempt to confuse voters about the severity of Wisconsin's job crisis is to claim that Wisconsin, in fact, has "plenty of jobs" and one need only look to the state's jobs website to see that there are "over 70,000 job openings."
The reality is that in any given month, Wisconsin has tens of thousands of job openings and tens of thousands of job closings-- the key to job growth is that openings outpace the closings. And, as has been discussed numerous times, like nearly every state, Wisconsin does have job growth, its just much, much slower than the rest of the country and behind our midwest neighbors.
However even using Walker's misleading metric of job openings in the state, Wisconsin is still behind our neighbors. Illinois boasts "over 200,000 jobs," Minnesota has nearly 90,000 and Iowa has 50,369. Adjusting for population, Wisconsin is behind way behind and isn't really a statistic to brag about.
Iowa, in fact, has such labor shortage right now that they're advertising on Wisconsin radio stations to come to the Iowa-Cedar Rapids corridor's "job rush." Now, why would Iowa be advertising in Wisconsin for workers if there are "plenty of jobs" as Walker claims?
Hmmm....
