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Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously said that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. When it comes to job growth in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker apparently thinks otherwise.

For months now, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics have unambiguously shown that under Walker's leadership, employment "growth" in Wisconsin has ranked among the worst of any state in the country. The most recent monthly "year-over-year" data, for example, from the BLS' Current Employment Statistics, show that employment shrank by 21,400 in Wisconsin between April 2011 and April 2012 - a period that nicely coincides with the first full year after passage of Walker legislation (i.e. the budget-repair bill and June 2011 budget).

This "job creation" performance, a decline of 0.8%, places Wisconsin dead last among the 50 states in job growth during this period. By way of contrast, employment grew nationally during the same period, by 1.4% - the same national jobs growth for which Republicans such as Walker and Mitt Romney routinely castigate President Barack Obama.

Now, in an effort to muddle the facts about its disastrous stewardship of the economy as the recall election approaches, the Walker administration has prematurely released another set of BLS data, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, purporting to show that between December 2010 and December 2011 - the first year of Walker's tenure as governor - Wisconsin actually gained 23,000 jobs. Let's ignore that these are preliminary, unvetted data - the official BLS release is June 28 - but that Walker, shamelessly and dangerously playing politics with statistics, has released them anyway, in hopes of neutralizing a bad issue for him. Voters will judge for themselves what such shenanigans reveal.

But let's assume that the QCEW data are correct - what do they really tell us? First, the QCEW numbers run through only December 2011 - but all of the available data suggest that job losses under Walker have accelerated in 2012. So the QCEW numbers only give us, at best, a partial snapshot of jobs performance under Walker, including relatively good numbers from his first months in office when his policies weren't even in effect, and tell us nothing about the most recent, apparently worsening economic period.

Second, the QCEW numbers released by Walker are presented in a vacuum - there is no comparative benchmarking to other states (because, unlike Walker, other governors have respected the apolitical integrity of the federal statistical system and not prematurely leaked the QCEW numbers). But, we can compare these Wisconsin numbers to national trends, and in that context Walker's record looks awful: between December 2010-'11, the QCEW preliminary data show a 0.8% increase in Wisconsin employment; by contrast, employment nationally grew by 1.4% during that same period.

In other words, even using the muddled, misleading and politicized figures released by Walker, his "best-case" data show job growth in Wisconsin at only 57% of the national rate during his first year in office. And this does not even include the first quarter of 2012, when, at least according to CES estimates, Wisconsin's job performance fell off the cliff.

Walker has also attempted to defend his economic record by contrasting it to Mayor Tom Barrett's in Milwaukee. Mayors, of course, have much less power to affect macroeconomic trends than do governors. Nevertheless, put in proper perspective, Barrett's record is far more impressive than Walker's. During Barrett's years as mayor (2004-'11), which included the national Great Recession of 2007-'09, employment in Milwaukee declined by 2.2% (compared to a national decline of .06%). By contrast, in the seven years before Barrett assuming office, employment declined in Milwaukee by 10.8%, while it grew nationally by 7.1%.

Put another way, during Barrett's years as mayor, even as the city endured the Great Recession, the employment curve bent in a positive direction.

By contrast, under Walker, Wisconsin's employment record has diverged, in a negative way, from national trends and, more than ever, lags the national economy.

I have certainly disagreed in the past with Barrett on matters of economic policy; ironically, without my permission, the Walker campaign has actually used a news clip of me in some of its campaign advertising. However, despite the Walker administration's efforts to blur the issue, the employment data are clear: the governor's record is a disaster, and significantly inferior to Tom Barrett's in Milwaukee. In the last analysis, right wing market fundamentalism and austerity policies work no better in Wisconsin than they have in Ireland, Spain or Great Britain.

Marc V. Levine is a professor and founding director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee