The banner headline [3] in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this morning "State posts largest percentage job loss in U.S. over past year" underscores a serious problem that folks living in Wisconsin are already familiar with. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wisconsin was the only state in the country to have statistically significant job losses in the past year. Wisconsin lost 23,900 jobs between March 2011 and March 2012. The majority were government jobs, but that number included 6,100 private sector jobs, the most private sector jobs lost in any state.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker [4], who was elected on a promise to create 250,000 jobs, has a new theory about when the job situation will improve. He told NewsMax in an exclusive interview [5] that job creators are waiting for him to win the recall. "I think the big thing that people are waiting for is to have the certainty of knowing that this sort of positive outlook for job creators is going to continue," Walker told NewsMax. "That's why I think that after June 5th, after these primaries are done, and when I and the lieutenant governor and these senators prevail, I think it means there will be a clear message to the job creators and the small businesses in the state that now is the time to add jobs."

But economists at the Federal Reserve [6] have a more dire view of the situation. They say, "there is little prospect that such trends will reverse. Given the contractionary policies implemented in the budget, this is no surprise."