...and other economic nonsense
Speaking of Clement Atlee, Winston Churchill once quipped, “There's less to him than meets the eye.”
The same can be said for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. His recent Twitter comment merits the same assessment. It read,“Wisconsin is #1 in the Midwest for personal income growth over the year.”
A PolitiFact column in the Friday, August 15th edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wasted nearly a third of a page on Walker's factoid. This de-facto defense of Walker's claim, a tour-de-force of equivocation and spurious qualification, is a literary muddle-piece. It dances around the fact that Walker's Tweet, absent context, means nothing, while allowing the tweet to insinuate he's done something creditable.
Wisconsinites who have suffered thanks to Walker's ignorance, incompetence and ideologically-blindfolded, Koch-directed economic policies bluntly rate his latest claim an “Empty-headed-goat-grunt.” His staff have once again earned this week's “Let's-Cherry-Pick-Data” award from the WSJ.
Walker loyalists have been scouring economic data from their enemy, the Federal government, for any scintilla of “evidence” that his combination trickle-down/handouts-for-the-rich economic policies can be connected to positive growth in Wisconsin. This signals how desperate Walker's campaign has grown: they'll even depend (loaded word) on Uncle Sam, their evil nemesis. This hastily-released Tweet is their latest claim. Does it stand up to scrutiny?
No.
Walker's conceit here: “I stumbled across this factoid, now I want credit for it.” His Tweet is a bit of preaching to the choir, nothing more.
The problems with trumpeting this factoid as something broadly meaningful and relevant are manifold, but the PolitiFact article fails to acknowledge this, and fails to delineate the insignificance of Walker's discovery. It also fails to excoriate Walker for insinuating that he has something to brag about. The author dances like a dandy to avoid puncturing Walker's Twitter balloon. Why? Orders from above?
And the problems (deceits) begin with the headline: “State leads region in personal income.” Walker's twitter comment, by contrast, references “personal income growth.”
Those are two different metrics. The headline is, at least, ambiguous.
But the muddlement continues: Paragraph two of the article references total personal income, a third metric.
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income numbers Walker cites are, to begin with, aggregates, a mix of income sources; first, wages, salaries, bonuses; second, property income (rental properties, dividends and interest), and, thirdly, not to be ignored, transfer payments such as Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment.
At the BEA website, it is possible to look up both total personal income levels per state and percent change from the previous quarter, also for each state, and thus obtain two distinct metrics, but Walker hides behind the technical limitations of a Twitter comment to avoid having to explain and qualify his insinuation. Fluctuations in that second category are especially deserving of explanation and clarification.
A genuine, integrity-based information release would include a third metric, Average Personal Income, for Wisconsin residents and for those in surrounding states.
But if Walker wants to cherry-pick statistics from Big (Bad) Brother to save his own skin, let's follow him into the BEA website and nose around ourselves. Oooops! What's this?
In the category Average Wages and Salaries for 2013, Wisconsin ranks 4th place in a field of 6; not so hot, in other words, compared to neighbors Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. It was in that same spot in 2009, and in third place in the intervening years.
Oh, and look here! If we try to give personal income a little more dimension by providing a statistical anchor, we get a new category: Real Personal Income.
The BEA website definition of Real Personal Income: “...Personal income divided by the RPPs (Regional Price Parities) and the national PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditures) price index. The result is a chained dollar (using 2008 as the base year) estimate of real personal income.”
To steal a line from Family Feud, “Survey says!”...the Badger State limps in again at 4th place in a field of 6.
A much more honest approach to finding meaning in the personal income numbers, if that's what Walker actually wanted, would begin with a few questions, and an exhaustive, rigorous, honest search for answers. (This would stop Walker's desperate attempt to employ a deceitful Twitter comment for short-term political gain...which is what he did. It's clear he treats information as expendable. It is the stick he found laying about. He picks it up, swings it until it breaks, discards it and finds another. It has no other value in his worldview, and certainly shouldn't be used to hold him accountable.)
But let's ask the obvious questions that Walker avoids:
How are Wisconsinites doing now compared to past years? (And find a measure of greater relevance than the mushy aggregate “personal income”.)
How are Wisconsinites doing compared to other citizens in other states in this region?
How are Wisconsinites doing compared to the nation?
And since I don't believe Walker, or his supporters at PolitiFact, have the integrity to ask the following question, here it is:
Is Wisconsin now rigged, thanks to discredited trickle-down policies, to lag surrounding states in speed of economic rebound and recovery, degree of economic rebound and recovery, and in resistance to future economic downturn? Has Walker succeeded in making Wisconsin as backward and regressive as the infamous southern “right-to-work-(for less) states?
Now that a few genuine, substantive questions are on the table, I invite Walker, the reader and Wisconsin citizens, to begin that honest search for answers.
As for Walker's tweet, what, you ask, is wrong with using the Federal definition of Personal Income?
Remember that second category of earnings? It was property income (rental properties, dividends and interest). Recognize this for what it is, the latent benefit of earlier investment, and as a form of wealth transference. This wealth transfer happens, in the case of rental property, largely in a direction that bears scrutiny; from the have-nots to the already-haves. And the have-nots are unlikely to be recipients of the other two forms; dividends and interest are primarily the gravy served to those who have already invested discretionary income.
Transfer payments, that third category of personal income, also deserve scrutiny.
These can still be said to be “earned,” due to a citizen's prior participation in the economy (set aside by business and government as “rainy-day” funds, or deferments to pay for future services). Or they belong to that category of responsible actions undertaken by just, watchful and activist government, one charged with looking out for the well being not of any particular party in power, and its supporters, but of the citizenry as a whole.
That last definition sure as hell doesn't describe Wisconsin government under Walker. So, Scotty, don't trumpet the fact that you accidentally stumbled across evidence that state government is (via unemployment), for once, doing what it's supposed to do. And let the Federal government take credit for Social Security and Medicare, will ya?
These last three can also be identified as targets of Republican avarice: Paul Ryan is certainly eager to “redistribute” them, but not necessarily to those who actually need them. The nagging trouble with his notion of “reforming” anti-poverty efforts is that, in his Frankenstein-like fervor to re-animate block grants and give control of same to state governments, he doesn't much care to regulate and monitor how states apply (or misuse) those grants to the same extent and with the same rigor that he would like to micromanage the recipients.
Bush, please recall, was all too eager to expose Social Security to market forces (At the time Wisconsinites labeled his idea, “The Madness of King George.”)
If Wisconsin's job growth is the lowest among the states in this region, noting that “Wisconsin is #1 in the Midwest for personal income growth over the year” is a sly way to avoid talking about the unemployed, unemployment levels, discouraged workers who have stopped looking for work, and about Walker's failed jobs promise.
Wisconsin “haves” are doing great, those other Wisconsinites who have “some” are beginning to recover from the mess the Republicans have made of the economy, but those who rely on transfer payments...well Republicans are scheming right now to make them even more marginalized, more invisible. In Walker's vision for Wisconsin, the long-term unemployed and the discouraged job seekers don't warrant a mention. Ryan reminded Walker that the plight of such types is their own fault; character flaws, insufficient motivation, no real work ethic...
Is personal income growth actually happening here not because of Walker's economic policies, but despite them?! Is the states' long-respected workforce, along with smaller businesses and start-ups, busy devising and implementing work-arounds to insulate their efforts from Republican predation?
And where is quality of life referenced in this tweet about personal income growth? It isn't, because there isn't any way to spin good news out of the status quo playing field for workers in Wisconsin. Retirement, when and where it is still possible, holds too many uncertainties for too many Wisconsinites, and the promise of a decided decline in quality of life is all but guaranteed for those Wisconsinites who worked the hardest and the longest. Thanks Scotty. What did these Wisconsinites ever do to you or your puppet masters that made you hate them so much?