“Walker job-creation officials promise to do better”

That’s the title of a La Cross Tribune article:

Officials with Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s floundering job-creation agency promised again to do a better job in the wake of another scathing audit and the departure of their second chief officer in just four years.

I hope they are right. As it stands, as of July, Wisconsin employment is 99,500 below the target of 250,000 new private sector jobs that Governor Walker last promised in August 2013 would be created by January 2015. This is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Wisconsin private nonfarm payroll employment (blue), and path promised by Walker in August 2013 (red). Source: BLS, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, author’s calculations.

Astute observers will see no net progress toward the goal over the last few months. Using updated data, and an random walk model, I still predict the Governor will achieve his goal before the end of his second term (2018M06), although possibly as early as 2017M05 (using a 90% interval). Of course, it’s possible that occurs later than 2019M01.

Update, 2:30pm Pacific: GeoffT asks for a plot in logs, and I am happy to oblige. I include in this graph a forecast plus 90% interval from a random walk model of employment.

Figure 2: Wisconsin private nonfarm payroll employment (blue), and path promised by Walker in August 2013 (red), forecast from random walk (green), and 90% band (gray). Left scale is logarithmic. Source: BLS, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, author’s calculations.