Despite millions of dollars in anonymously funded Republican attack ads and an election eve decision by a Republican appeals court that could disenfranchise many Democrats, the governor’s race is finally focused on what really matters.
That’s the damage inflicted on Wisconsin’s economy by the actions of Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
Walker, who brags about closing a large budget deficit, can no longer cover up the fact that his own budget manipulations will create an enormous budget deficit of nearly $1.8 billion for whoever is governor in January.
The Walker budget deficit would be the third largest in state history.
What may surprise voters confused by Walker’s dishonest distortions of the record of his predecessor, Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, is that the $2.5 billion deficit Walker inherited from Doyle after a massive national recession was not the largest budget deficit any governor ever faced.
The largest deficit in state history was the $2.9 billion budget deficit Doyle inherited in 2003 from Republican Gov. Scott McCallum.
And here’s the most important thing to know about that. Doyle closed the largest budget gap in state history without destroying bargaining rights for public employees, without making the largest cuts to education in state history and without slashing state revenue sharing to every city, county, town, village and school district in Wisconsin.
And it is precisely because Walker chose to do all those things that he is limping into November’s election having severely damaged Wisconsin’s economy, dead last in job creation in the Midwest, creating barely more than 100,000 of the 250,000 jobs he promised voters to get elected.
Walker had complete freedom to do whatever he wanted to fulfill that promise. Republicans controlled both houses of the Legislature. They even controlled a corrupt Wisconsin Supreme Court that was eager to approve brazenly illegal Republican laws and did so several times.
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But in the end Walker failed miserably because his claim that right-wing economic changes would spur enormous state job growth was completely wrong. Maybe Walker should have finished college after all.
The Real Job Creators Aren’t the Rich
Like his ideological twin, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, Walker claims to believe the way to create jobs is to shovel as many millions of public dollars as possible to the millionaires and billionaires they call the “job creators.”
No one knows whether Walker and Ryan really believe that or not. It could just be a convenient political excuse to cut government programs benefiting the working class and struggling poor Americans to fill the pockets of the wealthy donors who finance Republican campaigns.
Walker could have learned from a basic college economics course that trickle-down economics is absolutely wrong. The super rich are not the “job creators” driving the economy of either the state or nation. Consumer spending accounts for 70% of economic demand and satisfying this demand is what eventually creates jobs.
And guess who drives consumer spending? It’s not the super wealthy. Those folks already have more money than they can possibly spend in their lifetimes. Instead of spending their windfalls, they invest it throughout the world wherever they can get the greatest rate of return to make more money and shelter it from taxation.
No matter how ridiculously wealthy you become, you can only buy so many shirts, drive one car even though yours is awfully nice and sleep in one bed in one house at one time.
The real job creators are the working middle class who spend most of what they make every week on goods and services. The more middle class workers spend on goods and services, the more people are hired to produce more goods and services.
That means that even more people are earning more money and spending it on more goods and services and creating more jobs for more people and up and up. Economists call it the virtuous cycle that creates a successful economy that works for everyone.
When you understand that, you can see Walker did exactly the wrong thing to create jobs in Wisconsin. Walker closed the budget deficit he inherited primarily by destroying public employee bargaining rights and reducing the pay and spending of hundreds of thousands of middle class state workers, teachers and local government employees all over the state.
That blew a nearly $3 billion hole in Wisconsin’s economy as workers spent less money on consumer goods and services leading to fewer new jobs at precisely the time Walker wanted hiring to be going the other way.
But what about those tax cuts Walker talks so much about? Didn’t they put a lot more money into the state’s economy? Not really. Once again, an overwhelming two-thirds of Walker’s tax cuts went to the very wealthy who didn’t have to spend any of it and invested it throughout the world.
The working class barely noticed the meager $100 tax cuts they received. The overdue bills they paid with it didn’t create many jobs.
It’s too bad that when Walker was elected promising to create 250,000 jobs, we didn’t have a governor who had any idea how to accomplish that.
