The myth of Scott Walker as a budget guru and great TOON

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Love the toon--but sad.








http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/purple-wisconsin/287292131.html

The myth of Scott Walker as a budget guru


By Jimmy Anderson
Jan. 1, 2015

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this one: Scott Walker in 2011 balanced a $3.6 billion budget deficit. After the onslaught of political ads in Wisconsin over the last four years, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who couldn’t regurgitate that talking point back to you. And trust me, nobody will throw it up faster than Walker himself. He ran on the budget deficit in 2010 and has bragged about squaring our budget circle in every election since. If you turned Walker into Woody from Toy Story, instead of “There’s a snake in my boot!” you’d get “There’s a $3.6 billion budget deficit I balanced!” It’s been ingrained into the Walker mythos through rote repetition.

But what does it mean? Sure, it’s fun to say. You can picture Walker standing at the precipice of a $3.6 billion sized hole, shovel in hand, and after a montage of aggressive dirt scooping accompanied by an ascendant soundtrack from the 80s, (let’s go with “Hearts on Fire”), the camera pans out to a dirt smudged Walker standing on top of where the hole used to be. Cut to a guy looking through a theodolite, and then backing away shocked, stammering about how it’s the most balanced budget ever balanced in the history of budgets. It makes for a compelling story. Unfortunately, like Rocky Balboa winning the heavyweight championship, the idea of Walker as some kind of budget guru is a myth.

It’s hard to deny the numbers. Since Walker took over, revenues have consistently come in less than expected due to a combination of below average job and wage growth, a sluggish state economy, and his arguably reckless $2 billion in tax cuts. Estimates now put our state budget at a $2.2 billion deficit. Walker has tried to dismiss the number as unrealistic because it’s calculated using agency requests and the agencies always end up with less than what they requested. But that’s an oddly hypocritical stance given that the apocryphal $3.6 billion budget deficit he always crows about balancing was calculated the very same way.

But what’s really concerning is that Walker generated this $2.2 billion deficit during a period of economic growth. When the state was facing that $3.6 billion budget deficit in 2011, it was primarily because we had just suffered through the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. The stock market had cratered, jobs were lost by the thousands, home values plummeted, spending dried up; in nearly every way a state collects taxes (capital gains, income/employment, property, sales), revenues were down significantly.

Walker, though, has created a budget deficit roughly half as bad as the one in 2011 but during a time when the stock market has hit record levels, wage and job growth has been moderate but consistent, home prices have rebounded, and consumer spending has never been higher. Nationally, it’s been the strongest economic growth we’ve seen in over a decade. And yet, despite all of the good economic news, we’re still staring at a $2.2 billion hole in the state budget...............

[Scuba]

1. K&R

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2. Kickety, Kick Kick

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