Another day, another outrageous claim from the right-leaning Politifact.
The latest eyerolling claim from Politifact is that Sen. Lena Taylor's claim that Walker "has not created at single job" was not accurate:
So, let’s look at what has happened since Walker took office in January 2011.
According to Department of Workforce Development #000066">statistics, the state had a net gain of more than 13,000 jobs in January and February. To be sure, Walker’s policies hardly had time to take effect in that time frame, but that’s not what Taylor is citing as evidence.
Let's look at the actual information. According to the DWD, there were 2,318,900 people in private sector jobs in December of 2010. In February there were 2,262,700 people in private sector jobs. Therefore, the state had a NET LOSS of 56,200 in January and February.
Politifact was looking at January and February since that was the latest information available when Taylor made the remarks on March 29, however, if March's private sector job count (2,275,300) is included Walker's total is a net lost of 43, 600 in the months that he has been governor.
In fairness, there is a jobs-bumb because of retailers hiring for Christmas, so let's just look at at January numbers, which were 2,265,900. In February, there were 2,262,700 jobs, meaning that from January to February therewas a net loss of So, when Taylor made her comments Wisconsin had a lost a total of 3,200 jobs.
So, where did Politifact get the "more than 13,000" number? They link to a DWD press release that came out a month and half after Taylor made her comments. There is no reference to anything over 13,000, but presumabely they're using the "seasonally adjusted numbers," which as previously discussed, are when you take the real numbers and adjust them to take into account seasonal employment drivers (such as Christmas-time hiring). So, they're using a starting point of
2,328,500 private sector jobs for January, 2,331,500 for February, and 2,341,300 for March. Even though the March numbers are irrelevent because they weren't released until several weeks after Taylor made here comments, they're taking March numbers and subtracting the January to get 12,800, which apparenty constitutes "more than 13,000." If they wanted to use the seasonally adjusted numbers for job growth from January to February, the correct number would be 3,000.
3,000 versus 13,000 is important, because Taylor qualified her comments with the loss in jobs that Walker cost Wisconsin by destroying the high-speed rail deal, which would have created approximatly 10,000 jobs in Wisconsin.
Therefore, even using the seasonally adjusted numbers, there is no validity in Politifact's claim that Taylor's claim was false.
Therefore, we here at WisFactCheck rate Politifact's claim as "Pants on Fire."