That Walker, and some of his political colleagues in elected office have faced recall elections is an indication of the Republican arrogant overreach that consistently characterizes their assumption of majority in government in recent years. The right has not acted responsibly, they have not served the electorate, they have served big outside money and they have waged culture war instead of focusing on more legitimate legislation that was actually important and necessary. What they did was divisive and served only a narrow point of a segment of the people of Wisconsin, not the interests and belief of the entire state as a whole. That is bad government; that is the GOP and Tea Party. They have been radical and extremist, and now they are being thrown out, and their legislation rejected because it is BAD. The recall of Walker and his lieutenant governor and of multiple legislators is a referendum rejecting Republicans, including BY a significant segment OF Wisconsin Republicans.
So here is what Factcheck.org has to say about the recall of Governor Walker and the reality, not the spin, of his exceedingly lackluster job performance:
The Whole Truth in Wisconsin Air Wars
If using partial truths in political advertising is an art, then ads in the Wisconsin recall election for governor should be in a museum. Former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett are among the Democrats seeking to unseat Republican Gov. Scott Walker in a race that has attracted national attention. And Wisconsin’s airwaves have been filled with political ads largely funded by out-of-state money. But viewers who want the whole truth are advised to ask themselves, “What am I not being told?”
- Partial Truth: “Since the start of the year, Wisconsin has added thousands of new jobs.” – Gov. Scott Walker in a TV ad.
What’s Left Out: In addition to being governor of Wisconsin this year, Walker was also governor last year. It’s true that Wisconsin has added several thousand net jobs in the first few months of this year. But when you look at Walker’s entire time in office, including last year, Wisconsin has lost 14,200 jobs, and ranks dead last among the states in job creation.
What’s Left Out: That’s true if you use the cash accounting method. However, using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) accrual accounting methods, there is a $3 billion deficit in Wisconsin’s budget in each of the next two years. While it’s perfectly legitimate for Walker to cite the cash accounting figure, that may confuse some folks who may remember that Walker used the GAAP figures to argue for cuts in state health programs.
- Partial Truth: Walker says he balanced the budget “without raising taxes.” — Walker in a campaign ad.
What’s Left Out: Walker did reduce taxes overall, but his budget included reductions to two tax credits. Walker does not consider those tax increases, but the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau does.
It’s true that Wisconsin lost nearly 150,000 jobs in the three years before he took office. More precisely, Wisconsin lost 145,000 between January 2008 and December 2010, the month before Walker took office. The entire country was reeling from the recession, and the percentage of jobs lost in Wisconsin mirrored the percentage of jobs lost nationally (both losing a little more than 5 percent).
Now, for the second part of Walker’s claim, that “since the start of the year, Wisconsin has added thousands of new jobs.” Do you see what he’s done there? Walker has skipped entirely over 2011, his first year in office, and instead referenced job statistics for the first two months of 2012. Even so, the ad was barely true when it came out, and less so today after some unfavorable data for March. Between January and February, Wisconsin added 10,100 jobs. But then the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Wisconsin lost 4,500 jobs in March. So now, there’s been a net gain of 5,600 jobs in 2012.
Needless to say, Wisconsin is not on track for Walker to keep his campaign promise to bring the state 250,000 new jobs by 2015.
As the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund correctly pointed out in a recent ad, in 2011, “Wisconsin lost more jobs than any other state. Dead last.” That fact was also featured in an ad from the Barrett campaign. From January 2011 to January 2012, Wisconsin lost a net 12,700 jobs. According to a review by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, that was the worst performance among all 50 states.
Walker: “We wiped out a $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes.”
Walker’s claim that “we wiped out a $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes” is also dubious. The state Constitution requires a balanced budget. And it’s true that Walker offered a balanced budget using the cash accounting method. However, using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) accrual accounting methods, there is a $3 billion deficit in each of the next two years. We won’t bore you with the differences in accounting methods. It’s perfectly legitimate for Walker to cite the cash accounting figure in his ad, but that may confuse some folks who may remember that Walker cited figures using an accrual accounting method when he argued for cuts in state health programs, because that made future deficits look worse.
Next, did Walker balance the budget without raising taxes? Walker did not propose any general tax increases, and he implemented several corporate tax reductions. But his claim that he didn’t raise taxes is not entirely true. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau labelled two tax credit reductions as tax increases. One measure reduced the earned income tax credit for people with two or more children, a change projected to net the state an added $56.2 million over two years. Another reduced the homestead tax credit, bringing the state $13.6 million over two years. Walker argued those were spending cuts, not tax increases. But suffice to say, those who got those credits before, and don’t now, probably consider them to be tax increases. Walker also raised tens of millions of dollars by increasing a number of fees.
Differing Governing Styles
This is a good point to note the very distinct governing approaches of Falk and Walker, who also served as a county executive, for Milwaukee County from 2002 to 2010.While Falk mostly stuck to her self-imposed cap based on growth and inflation, Walker proposed no tax levy increases every year and vetoed attempts by the county board to increase it. However, as our fact-checking colleagues at PolitiFact Wisconsin noted, “the County Board almost always overrode him, complaining his budgets were unrealistic.”
While Walker each year proposed to keep the tax levy constant at the current year’s level, he did not propose that it go back to the level he had proposed the year before. Therefore, in his final year, Walker proposed a tax levy well above what it was when he took office.
Indeed, both counties raised property taxes: Dane’s levy went up $59 million in Falk’s 14 years, while Milwaukee’s rose $51 million over Walker’s nine years. Both increases would be due partly to population growth.
Walker Attacks Barrett on Jobs & Schools
An ad from Walker’s campaign accuses Democrat Barrett of leading Milwaukee backward, with a poor record on both jobs and high-school graduation rates.It claims that “under Barrett, Milwaukee has had one of the worst job creation records of any big city in the U.S.” That’s true, but by no means the whole story.
Walker campaign officials told us they based that statement in part on a two-year-old quote from a university-based development expert, but that expert told us his remark was being misused, and is out of date.
The quote is from Marc Levine, executive director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in a Sept. 28, 2010, story by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “Our analysis of employment data shows that Milwaukee has had among the worst job creation records of any big city in the U.S. for over a decade.”
But when we reached out to Levine via email, he said the situation has now changed for the better, and that in any case, Walker himself shares some responsibility for Milwaukee’s economy.
Levine’s figures show that throughout the decade of the 2000s, Milwaukee consistently ranked in the bottom seven or eight among the 50 largest cities based on an indicator measuring employment growth. Sometimes the city was second or third from the bottom. However, he said, “as Milwaukee came out of the recession by 2010, that had changed, and Milwaukee’s ranking had slightly improved.” In the most recent report from January 2011, Milwaukee ranked 36th out of 50.
“In addition,” Levin wrote to us in an email, “it should be pointed out that whatever Milwaukee’s employment performance during this period, Scott Walker was a decision-maker in the region as was Tom Barrett: so, whatever Milwaukee’s ranking, Walker can’t absent himself from the results.” [Walker was the Milwaukee County executive from 2002 through 2010.]
The Walker campaign also pointed us to annual charts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that rank the unemployment rates for the 50 largest cities in the U.S. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, the unemployment rate for Milwaukee was sixth highest. It was 16th highest in 2008; 10th highest in 2009; and 11th highest in 2010.
That’s not great. But Milwaukee’s struggles began long before Barrett took office. Among the biggest cities, Milwaukee’s unemployment rate was 7th highest in 2004, 6th highest in 2003 and 9th highest in 2002.
The last piece of evidence cited by the Walker campaign is that Milwaukee’s unemployment rate went from 8.1 percent when Barrett took office, and was at 10.5 percent in February. That’s a nearly 30 percent increase, Walker’s campaign noted. Using that same time period, the national unemployment rate actually rose at a faster clip, by 45 percent. Or put another way, Milwaukee’s unemployment rate was 2.5 percentage points higher than the national average when Barrett took office, and it’s 2.3 percentage points higher now.
Graduation Rates
The ad also claims that “Barrett’s city has one of the worst graduation rates in the country.” As backup, the Walker campaign pointed us to a report from the EPE Research Center, a division of the nonprofit organization that publishes Education Week. That report ranked Milwaukee’s graduation rate 42nd out of the 50 largest districts in the country.According to the center’s formula, Milwaukee had a graduation rate of 50.9 percent in 2008, the latest year for which the data are available. That’s far below the national average, which was 71.7 percent that year.
But it’s not the whole truth. As historical data from the EPE Research Center also shows, Milwaukee’s graduation rate has been gradually improving. It was 43.1 percent in 2003, the year before Barrett took office.
– by Robert Farley, with Dave Bloom and Wendy Zhao
First off I want to thank you for posting this very good and informative piece. Should Scott Walker be thrown out of office here very soon is STILL not the justice that needs to be mandated to this scummy bastard. He would be getting off too light and deserves so much more restitution to be paid to the citizens of Wisconsin. That being said the voters got what they deserved by falling victim to the conservative rhetoric and the failure to truly think for themselves.
ReplyDeleteIf the voters of Wisconsin keep him in office after all that has come to light, then they deserve to continue down the vortex of the flushing sound to end up swimming in their own sewer feces of their own making.
The sad part is there are more “Corporate Bought and Paid For” State Governors that will be empowered and emulate Scott Walker.