Photo credit: Governor Scott Walker Facebook Page
Don’t forget to sign up beginning this week for your $100 election-year bribes from Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious to most Americans that Republicans have ushered in a new Golden Era of Political Corruption under their president. Law enforcement agents raided Donald Trump’s personal attorney’s home and office reportedly hauling out financial records tracking millions of dollars changing hands, burner phones and possibly even recorded conversations with the president and his associates. So much Sopranos-style excitement surrounding the presidency shouldn’t overshadow Walker’s own enthusiastic effort to return Wisconsin to those brazenly politically corrupt days when politicians would simply pass out cold, hard cash for votes.
If Walker’s vote-buying scheme works statewide, he may achieve what Republicans have failed spectacularly to do nationally. Voters in elections around the country have seen right through the $1.5 trillion Republican tax cut that went overwhelmingly to multimillion-dollar corporations and multimillionaires and billionaires.
The GOP’s Hard Sell
Since that tax cut for the ultra wealthy benefitting Trump and his family is the only legislative achievement by Republicans, they’d hoped to convince ordinary, working-class Americans that making the richest people on Earth even wealthier would somehow benefit them as well. That’s a really hard sell since it isn’t true. When wealthy corporations and investors get hundreds of millions of dollars in enormous tax windfalls, they don’t use it to pass out huge raises to all their employees or to create lots of high-paying new jobs. Instead, they spend it on themselves and hide much of it in offshore accounts so they won’t have to pay any taxes on it.
Even Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, an excessively ambitious Republican, said recently there was “no evidence whatsoever” the Republican tax cut had resulted in any substantial benefits for American workers. They could have told him that. In the recent Pennsylvania congressional election won by Democrat Conor Lamb in a district Trump previously had won by 20 points, Republicans stopped running ads touting the tax cut because voters weren’t being fooled.
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So, instead of trying to sell the preposterous idea that enormous tax cuts for wealthy Republican donors benefit ordinary people, Walker decided this election year simply to start handing out $100 bribes to voters. Walker doesn’t call them that, of course. He calls this one-time cash giveaway the Wisconsin Child Sales Tax Rebate. Now through July 2, parents with dependent children under 18 can sign up for checks of $100 per child. The more children they have, the bigger the check. That’s an astonishing reversal for Walker, who is better known for threatening to cut off food assistance and health care for struggling families.
Walker’s $122 Million Bribe
“It’s literally a guy saying, ‘I’m Scott Walker running for re-election. Have some money!’” said Mandela Barnes, the former Milwaukee Democratic legislator now running for lieutenant governor. “Everyone I’ve talked to sees it as a blatant payoff.” This election-year giveaway is expected to cost the state about $122 million dollars and benefit 671,000 families.
Every one of those families should be encouraged to apply for every single dollar. But there is another thing everyone should realize about Walker’s one-time, nine-figure, election-year giveaway. It won’t make any difference at all to anyone’s life. It will disappear shortly after a family receives it, and no one will even remember where it went.
That’s what makes this paltry election-year bribe very different from every other political payoff of more than $100 million that Walker has passed out in his political career. The enormous cash giveaways that go to the big boys at the top with every single state or national tax cut by Republicans don’t get shared with every ordinary Tom, Dick and Harry off the street. They’re certainly not divided up into tiny $100 checks and tossed like chicken feed to hundreds of thousands of hard-pressed, ordinary families.
No, the enormous public cash giveaways to the people who really matter to Walker are more likely to be in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. For the next quarter-century, Wisconsin will be in hock for billions to Terry Gou, the Taiwanese billionaire who made glowing promises of high-tech jobs that, in the future, are more likely to be performed by high-tech robots than human beings.
There’s something else you need to know about the insultingly small political payoffs Walker is passing out to families this election year. They won’t create a single job. They won’t hire a single teacher. They won’t reduce soaring college student loans by a cent. They won’t fill a single pothole.
Every family absolutely should apply for their election-year bribe from Walker. They certainly can use the money. But then they should vote for someone in November who will begin restoring all the community services Walker has devastated. We need our tax dollars benefiting our fellow citizens rather than having our governor delivering semitrailers of cash to the people Walker and his Republican friends truly care about.
