Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker ran on a promise of creating 250,000 new, private-sector jobs by 2014. After months of union-backed protests and court delays, his union-busting budget “repair” bill finally went into effect in July, as did his first budget. Walker described his virtual elimination of collective bargaining rights for public employees coupled with huge cuts in public services, school aid, and municipal revenue sharing as “tools” that would allow local governments to balance budgets.
So how’s it going so far? Walkernomics is in full swing…and the results are a disaster.
State employees started seeing large cuts in take home pay in August, and many public school teachers will start seeing the cuts this month. Within the next year, billions of dollars that would have gone to middle class families will be taken out of the Wisconsin economy to fund tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-rich, with a vague promise that the tax breaks will inspire them to create jobs.
It's not working, and neither are more and more Wisconsinites.
Despite the statistical contortions performed by Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) Secretary Scott Baumbach in a press release issued today, Wisconsin’s job growth picture is bleak and getting bleaker. Wisconsin saw a net loss of 800 private sector jobs in August.
Wisconsin’s unemployment rate in August was 7.9%, up from 7.8% in July, which was up from 7.6 in June. Except for the month of April which saw a drop of one tenth of one percent, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate has stayed steady or gone up each month since Scott Walker took office in January, 2011.
In contrast, the rate went down for 12 straight months in the last year of previous (Democratic) Governor Jim Doyle’s term. Nationally, the unemployment rate has risen one tenth of one percent since the beginning of the year, while Wisconsin's has risen half a percent. That's FIVE TIMES the national rate!
There is only one reason companies hire more workers – they have too much work to do and not enough people to do it. That ain’t happening right now. This is not just a result of low consumer confidence. Even if they were "confident", more and more Wisconsinites simply have no more money after struggling to pay for rent, heat, and food each month. They can't buy extra products and services. Period.
Walkernomics is the Bush tax cuts on steroids. It's a bust, and it’s only going to get worse.