While Gov. Scott Walker has been busy elsewhere in the country or around the world, we have seen major proposal after major proposal disappear from his budget or be called into question by his own party.
For a while, legislative Republicans at least pretended to believe Walker’s idea of doubling down on his extreme budget cuts might somehow magically improve Wisconsin’s economy, still wallowing near the bottom nationally.
Republicans even talked openly about using the improved revenue to restore some of Walker’s drastically unpopular cuts to K-12 education and the University of Wisconsin.
Then the Legislative Fiscal Bureau broke the truth to everybody, announcing the state’s desperately lagging economy was continuing and no additional state revenue could be expected.
“For those of us who have been crossing our fingers and going to church on Sunday, it didn’t work,” Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos explained.
That’s what Wisconsin Republicans get for relying on crossed fingers and a higher power to save them from the actions of their own governor here on earth.
The only thing more dangerous than a governor who doesn’t know anything about economics is a governor who’s absolutely certain about everything he’s doing economically when it’s absolutely wrong.
Faith-based economics don’t work in the real world. Basic economic principles do. And Walker really doesn’t appear to understand anything about basic economics.
Neither do many other tea party Republicans, of course. They’re still baffled about why passing out hundreds of millions of dollars in humongous tax cuts and untracked corporate giveaways to the wealthy by reducing the wages of ordinary working people hasn’t turned Wisconsin into some kind of booming economic paradise.
When they were kids, they were told if they just believed and clapped their hands loud enough, Tinker Bell would rise from the dead.
But in the real world, despite the claims of billionaires generously funding Walker’s presidential aspirations, the super-rich aren’t really the job creators in our economy. Consumer spending by ordinary working people creates jobs. It accounts for 70% of economic growth.
That’s why when Walker closed a $3 billion budget gap by taking it out of the hides of public employees all over the state and destroying their bargaining rights, he dug an enormous hole for his state’s economy.
Since then, he has just kept digging by signing a right-to-work law to lower wages for private company workers by weakening their unions and by supporting the repeal of prevailing wage laws to cut the pay of private employees working on major state projects.
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Expensive Reforms and Credit Card Budgeting
There’s something else really basic that Walker either really doesn’t understand or simply refuses to understand for his own partisan political reasons.
It’s that hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the state of Wisconsin create an enormous number of jobs and would really get a listless economy booming again. That’s true even if the money comes from President Barack Obama, the dreaded African American president detested by extreme right-wing Republican presidential primary voters.
There are all kinds of additional benefits to businesses and residents in Wisconsin from those hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars in federal spending.
You know, important things like expanding health care for the state’s poorest citizens or building a modern, high-speed rail transportation system.
Every intelligent Republican businessperson in the state must be baffled as to why Walker would spend millions more in Wisconsin tax money to pay for health care for the poor instead of accepting 100% Obamacare federal funding to expand Medicaid.
If there’s one thing smart corporate executives are always ready to do it’s accept free money from the government whenever they can get their hands on huge piles of it.
But since Walker wants to attract support from stupid Republican primary voters, a powerful bloc within the party these days, he can’t be seen cooperating with Obama’s Affordable Care Act to improve the lives of millions of people in his state who have pre-existing conditions or lower incomes.
Republican legislators are starting to have sneaking suspicions that a lot of Walker’s budget items put off solving problems until he can beat it out of town to either higher office or more lucrative private employment.
Republican leaders already object to Walker patching highways with wads of hundreds of millions in borrowed money they’re going to have to pay back eventually.
Enormous cuts in education and diverting public school funding to private voucher schools was used to primarily damage Milwaukee Public Schools, but now those cuts are hurting all-white Republican districts.
Walker keeps selling a fantasy that enormous wealth created for the wealthy will “trickle down” to people who need it.
Nope. The wealthy are going to keep it.
It’s time for Peter Pan to grow up and for Walker’s Tinker Bell economics to expire.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license
