A gale, laced with Republican stink-pickles, is already blowing ahead of this November's general election.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's crew is busy shoveling manure onto the airwaves. Years wasted shoveling that same fuel into the boilers of the S.S. Wisconsin fouled her economic engines and left the ship wallowing and belching black smoke. Sister ships of the Midwest Line, the S.S. Minnesota among them, make real headway in the meantime.
Will the crew of the S.S. Wisconsin oust their Koch-puppet captain and avoid the shoals of financial ruin?
“Full-Speed ahead,” Walker mumbles, summoning the charisma of a man whose moral compass is AWOL, whose intellect is putrefying in his bilge, whose civic duty and oath of office were heaved overboard, and whose economic radar refuses to flash warnings of a looming field of budget-hole icebergs.
PolitiFact, an arm of the Walker Apology Machine (WAM, or “Take that, Wisconsin!), once again flatulates a faulty verdict on a misleading claim made by Governor Ahab. The latest offense stains the Wednesday, August 20th edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Perhaps the PolitiFact Wisconsin column ought to be re-labeled “PolitiFactoids for Walker.” The column, a “fact-checking operation” of the Journal Sentinel, is really a Walker cheerleader, a henchman to the paper's editorial board, itself a de-facto public affairs flack for the Walker machine.
The headline, “Walker savings claim right, with caveat,” signals that another exhibition of obfuscation and shell-gaming will pollute the page of what should be a newspaper. It once was.
The gist of this faux grist is Walker's claim that Act 10 saved Wisconsin taxpayers approximately three billion dollars. Well Captain Queeg, let's get a look at those strawberries...
In a rare display of deep thinking, the article mentions, almost in passing, that Wisconsin public sector employees, who now bear these “taxpayer savings” as out-of-pocket expenses, also happen to be...Wisconsin taxpayers!
This is the moment in the show where Homer blurts out, “DOHHH!!!”
But the greater moral and intellectual failure (and deceit) of this factoid-rating waste of column space is that it refuses to spell out the greater, long term (and hidden) costs of Walker's short term shell-game. The author, the editorial board, and the newspaper's owners are indulging in short-term-think, a neurotic compulsion rampant among the willfully blind. These GOP Pollyannas need rehab, a twelve-step program, cult-deprogramming, something...
Let's bravely go where these fools fear to tread.
Scott Walker: “I support our Act 10 “reforms” (quotations mine) because they saved the taxpayers some $3 billion.”
“Saved?” You want to claim this as “savings?” You have a very slippery understanding of the definition of savings. You and your fellow Republiclowns shifted some health and pension costs from the entire taxpaying citizenry to public sector employees. Shifting is not the same thing as saving.
Wisconsinites now witness the Koch Brothers twisted notion of “justice” or “fairness” in this, a ploy straight from their ideological playbook. That tome is filled with twisted parables from warped minds, made so by exposure to John Birch Society memes. In it Davy and Chucky chortle, “You want a career in public service where your salary will be lower than comparable work in the private sector, but your benefits and job security will be better? That warrants punishment! Take this!”
His mind grown paranoid by snorting lines of Koch, in public no less, Walker continues to insinuate, in moments of feigned lucidity, that public sector employees are evil, power-hording and money-grabbing “undeservings.” (Sound like more than just a little bit of projection on the part of Walker and his puppermasters?)
Public sector employees should, if you can follow Walker's “reasoning,” take one on the chin so that he can shovel taxpayer revenue at his rich friends, who have earned a government handout, by reason of their...uh...affluence...yeah, that's it! Because of what they can do for him. Not, please notice, what he can do for Wisconsin.
Targeting public sector employees with new out-of-pocket costs, rather than diffusing them among the entire taxpaying citizenry, sharply lowered the standard of living of said employees. So what affect did this have on the state?
Walker's “savings” rippled through the state economy, choking the speed of economic recovery. Public sector employees tightened their belts and spent less in local economies. Local businesses felt this loss and put off hiring and expansion projects.
Public sector employees canceled or put off major purchases such as cars, homes, home improvements, took on more personal debt to pay college tuition fees, wedding expenses, or unexpected repairs and purchases. They made smaller donations to charity. Their emergency expense funds and discretionary income shriveled. They canceled or shortened vacations up north.
That last bit of forced austerity hurt the tourist/travel dependent economy of that decidedly Republican half of the state. Every place where these employees spend money lost revenue, every way in which these employees injected money into the state economy was throttled. The public sector employee's loss was the state's loss. Savings? Really? Drill some holes in that waxy, ideological build-up in your ear canals, then explain it again, and listen to yourself...
Walker and other Tea Party governors have made the claim, proven to be bogus again and again and again, no matter how many times they repeat it, no matter how badly the true-believers want to believe it, that tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, along with drastically scaled back government, and its watchdog oversight of business practices, will stimulate the economy.
This obsession-driven hunt for the white whale, austerity-driven prosperity, has failed, Captain Ahab, failed, failed, failed...
Austerity-driven prosperity is not about to breach, or do a back flip. You're chasing a myth. Stop believing the hallucinations of diseased, angry, old, rich, white men who are soon to leave this world and now grow desperate to make one more power-grab. They are empty-headed, empty-hearted fools.
Take a look at a real-world, measurable and dire consequence of such a mad quest. Governor Sam Brownstain of Kansas sent his stateful of GOP sheeple chasing this same El Dorado full of fool's-gold, austerity-driven prosperity. Their reward? The state's creditworthiness was downgraded! The reasons? Slow economic growth, propelled into mediocrity by revenue reductions that resulted from tax cuts.
Why, yes, that should sound eerily familiar...
The new jobs that should have sprouted like mushrooms, overnight and almost like magic in unexpected places, never materialized. Even the clowns at the conservative Kansas Policy Institute, an ALEC tool, are struggling to spin good news out of the GOP led, trickle-down bungling now making a laughingstock of the Sunflower State.
Walker would have Wisconsin line up alongside Kansas as the next stunning failure of trickle-down disaster economics. Now...how to make that a campaign slogan.... “Scott Walker: Moving Wisconsin fuedal-ward...” Hmmm...maybe...
And why didn't Walker strive to raise the living standards of all ordinary Wisconsinites? Why didn't he strive to make the state a shining city on the Midwest hill, an example of how responsible, progressive government is supposed to function?
Call it a vision problem. Man, these GOP clowns are nearsighted. Can't see past the end of the nearest dollar bill.
But give their laziness some credit, too. Actually doing the work, called “legislating” when it occurs in functional governments, requires them to listen to constituents and opponents, to hammer out compromises, to stuff their ignorant self-righteousness where the sun don't shine because the work they do isn't supposed to be about them or their richest backers. See that happening anytime soon with this bunch of Badger Republiclowns...?
Those crew members aboard the S.S. Wisconsin who haven't succumbed to the hallucinogenic trance that follows the snorting of lines of Koch should set Captain Bligh adrift this November, and chart a more sustainable, sane course.
And stop looking to Wisconsin PolitiFact for any insights into the meanings of Governor Koch-Puppet's bleatings...