Here & Now

"If demography is destiny-- and it is-- then Wisconsin's economic future is cloudy." That's a quote from a new report by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance that tracks demographic trends. The bottom line? We're not getting any younger and any baby boom is closer to a bust going forward. Todd Berry, president of the Alliance joins us now and thanks for doing so. >> Thank you. >> So what are the most important features of Wisconsin's demography that make this economic future so cloudy? >> Well, and the reason we're talking about it is it affects the economy, it affects tax collections, government, everything. But in a nutshell, you have school enrollments that have been declining for a number of years in Wisconsin. Those kids are now coming into the labor force. The labor force is not going to grow for decades. Meanwhile, you have the babyboomers leaving the work force, and they were a very huge bubble in the work force. So you're going to have a work force that is not going to grow in Wisconsin for the next 30-plus years. For all the debate about jobs in the partisan political realm, it's sort of funny that nobody has stopped to think about this because you can create all the jobs you want, but if you can't put people in the jobs, you've got a problem. >> So what parts of the state might suffer most in regard to this kind of slow population growth, larger number of retirees, and then there's another point that we haven't mentioned yet, which is kind of out-migration. >> Right. Well, first of all, there are only 21 counties that by 2040 are going to have grown their work force compared to now. So we're not talking about this being isolated. In fact, I think there are 13 counties in northern Wisconsin that are going to lose 10% of their work force between now and 2040. And that obviously means you're going to have a lot of counties sort of in that stagnant to slow decline. >> So one of the things one might want to do to ameliorate this would be to bring people in from other states. How successful might we be at that? >> Well, we've got to have jobs for them, or we've got to have some kind of training and opportunity for them. It would seem to me the first thing we should be doing is making sure that we don't have any high school districts that are failing to graduate 10%, 15%, 25%, 30%, 40% of their kids. We just can't afford to be sloppy anymore, for starters. We've also got to have sort of a different kind of conversation about immigration, because we need people so that companies can fill the positions they want to fill and create jobs. >> How do we compare to other states that may not be kind of as encumbered by their demographics? >> Yeah. Well, you know, for starters let's say that we're not alone. You're going to see parts of upper New England, the upper Midwest that are like that. The Plains states have been having trouble for a long time. It's partly a reflection of the whole country, it's just we're more so. You know, we know that we're going to have real financial problems with Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security in the decades to come, for the same reason. It's just that we are an older state, on average, and are having the problem probably sooner and more. >> Now, there's one group for whom this will be good and that is, anybody who wants a job. >> Yeah. You know, unlike times when college grads came out and couldn't find jobs or had to take part-time jobs, this is probably going to be a pretty good time. The labor force is probably going to see wages bid up because there's not enough people. And it probably will be easier to find a job. >> Now, you say-- And I've looked back on your reporting-- You have been warning about this for a decade. So what have policymakers done toward addressing this or, in your mind, what should or could they do? >> Well, in fact it's probably worse than that, because I can think of one forecaster in the Department of Workforce Development in state government that was talking about this 20 years ago. But yeah. We did a study very similar to this one in 2004. We called it "Wisconsin 2015," as if that was far out and, you know, we have time to do something, folks. But, you know, we've-- It's not hard to project this stuff. This is not like the economy. You see how many babies are born, you see how many people are going to retire. You know what's coming. >> So you've projected it, but is there anything they can do? I mean, I know you talked about, you better make sure your graduation rates are as close to 100% as possible and then deal with the idea of immigration. >> Right. >> Anything else? >> Well, certainly we're going to want to try to keep retirees in the work force longer. And we probably should look toward recruiting people with certain kinds of skills from other countries and other parts of the country that we know we're going to have. We have a particular manufacturing kind of economic base, so we know to some degree the kind of people we need. >> All right. Todd Berry, thanks very much.