Incomes Are Lower In Wisconsin, Elsewhere Since Recession, Economist Says

A Michigan economist says all the recent focus on job numbers in Wisconsin misses a larger point: that incomes here and elsewhere are lower than they were just a few years ago.

Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic gubernatorial challenger Mary Burke have traded shots all year over job numbers, but University of Michigan labor economist Don Grimes said he thinks there’s another reason some people are dissatisfied with the economy.

“Most people who managed to keep their job in 2009, they’re looking at where they are now in 2014, and they may be happy that some of their neighbors who were unemployed got reemployed,” he said. “But from their personal perspective, things aren’t any better than they were in 2009. And in many cases, they’re actually worse.”

Grimes is talking about median income, adjusted for the cost of living, taken from the American Community Survey produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. Grimes said that measure shows that since the bottom of the Great Recession in 2009, there has been no wage growth for the typical worker in Wisconsin or the nation. In Wisconsin, median incomes have dropped faster than the rest of the U.S. for workers with college degrees or some college.

Grimes said the one group that saw a slight increase in Wisconsin was workers who didn’t graduate high school.

“Although you have to keep in mind that this data includes all of your hours worked, so what’s probably happened for a lot of these people who did not complete high school is they’re actually working more hours. They’re working more hours per week, and they’re actually probably working more weeks in the course of a year,” he said.

Compared to 2006, the last full year before the recession, the drop in median income was even more pronounced no matter what a worker’s education, and it dropped slightly faster in Wisconsin than in the rest of the nation.