The Always Indispensable Rich Miller is reporting at the Capitol Fax Blog that Scott Walker is coming to Springfield next month.
He's been invited by -- natch -- the Illinois Chamber of Commerce to be the keynote speaker at the Chamber's annual "Employer Action Day" which this year is Tuesday, April 17, at the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel, 701 E. Adams St.
According to the sample notice to Chamber members (to which The Always Indispensable Rich Miller has linked):
His address will recount Wisconsin’s dramatic fiscal turn around and serve as an important reminder to our state policy makers that big problems require big solutions.
We hope you will join business leaders from across the state for this important day. It will focus on solutions to Illinois’ fiscal crisis and lobby directly for reforms that will turn things around. Illinois leaders should recognize what Governor Walker realized: big problems require big solutions. Some of those reforms in Wisconsin include:
- Elimination of a $3.6 billion budget deficit without raising taxes;
- Reduced overall school property taxes by one percent, the first reduction in six years;
- Paid back over $800 million in unpaid bills left by the previous administration. ($60 million payment to Minnesota for tax reciprocity and $233 million repayment for the illegal raid of the Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund);
- No massive layoffs of public employees;
- Avoided slashing funding for Medicaid and instead invested $1.2 billion of additional state taxpayer funds to help those in need.
- Enacting job creating legal justice reforms.
That the Chamber invited him at all is comical.
That the Chamber looks to him as a model to emulate here in Illinois is not surprising, but nonetheless sobering. They want to do to us what Scott Walker has done to Wisconsin.
I say no.