The Republicans have cooked up another phony controversy about Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke, but don’t believe the hype about it. Supporters of Scott Walker want you to get upset about their false attack so that they can distract you from his utter failure to create jobs.
Walker famously said that he’d create 250,000 private-sector jobs in his first term. He declared that Wisconsin was “open for business,” then slashed collective bargaining rights, refused federal funding for major projects and services and let businesses and the wealthy get whatever they want. If it sounds like Walker swiped his strategy from the playbook of the corporate-sponsored bill-writing lobby American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), it’s because he did. Even worse, ALEC’s playbook is written by none other than Arthur Laffer, creator of the discredited “Laffer curve,” which asserts that lower taxes generate higher total revenues.
So how’s that working out?
Terribly. Walker’s Wisconsin has added a little more than 100,000 jobs and he won’t fulfill the central promise of his first campaign.
Rubbing salt in that wound is that the rest of the nation is doing so much better.
According to a new report from Marc Levine of UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development, since Walker took office Wisconsin’s private sector-employment growth is just one-third of the national rate. Total employment—which encompasses private sector and public sector jobs—has grown at less than one quarter the rate of the other states, at just 23.5% of the national rate. Wisconsin is dead last in the Midwest, trailing every state that surrounds us, Levine confirmed. And rate of job growth under Walker is stalling; the state had a higher private-sector growth rate during the first two years of Walker’s reign than in the past two years.
Ready for more bad news?
Wisconsin’s economy stalled on Walker’s watch. “Wisconsin’s job growth performance has not consistently lagged the national rate in recent years,” Levine wrote. He found that Wisconsin had a lower rate of employment decline between 2001-2010, when the Great Recession fully hit, and that Wisconsin outperformed the nation’s job growth nine times in the 20 years before Walker took office.
Wisconsin’s stagnant economy proves once again that the Herbert Hoover brand of right-wing economic theories promoted by ALEC and Walker simply don’t work in the real world. They didn’t work in the 1930s and they don’t work today. Don’t fall for Walker’s latest attempt to divert your attention from the mess that he created.
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