Scott Walker the job slayer

Gov. Scott Walker, who talks big about boosting private-sector jobs in Wisconsin, is so far doing just the opposite: costing the state private-sector jobs. A Milwaukee think tank puts at 10,000 the number of jobs that sector would lose were Walker’s plan to cut compensation for public-sector workers to go into effect.

Yes, you heard right. Cuts in public employment hurt private employment – which is the exact opposite of the mindless mantra beaten into our heads over the last two decades: to wit, cuts in public employment help private employment.

What that mantra ignores is that public-sector pay checks stir the same economic ripples as private-sector pay checks. In other words, $50 spent at the local supermarket from a government payroll has the same impact as $50 spent there from a company payroll. Both equally enable the supermarket to meet its own payroll. The fewer dollars that come in, whether from public or private salaries, the less money the supermarket can spend on its payroll and the more likely the supermarket will have to lay off workers.

Walker is trying to crush the public employees unions in Wisconsin. He is seeking to eviscerate their bargaining rights. His diabolical plan also includes unilaterally reducing the take-home pay of union members by having them step up contributions to their benefits. That element is what an analysis by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future  addresses. The analysis also factors in reduction in pay from planned furloughs

Jack Norman

The institute concludes that Walker’s plan would lead to the the loss of $660 million a year in economic production in the private sector, eliminate $46 million in property taxes or shift them to other taxpayers, noticably boost the state’s unemployment rate and wipe out 9,900 private sector jobs.

Yes, there are a couple of counterarguments, which I put to the institute’s Jack Norman, the author of the report:

Sure, public employees won’t spend as much, but the cuts mean taxpayers will gain spending money. So won’t the state’s taxpayers make up for the loss in expenditures by the state’s public employees?

Well, the idea of the cuts is to reduce the budget deficit. So the savings wouldn’t go back to taxpayers.

In light of the dire budget situation, doesn't Walker have no choice but to enact the cuts, whether they hurt the economy or not?

If he has no choice, why then did he give money away in a special session last month through the enactment of new or expanded tax breaks.

Even before he took office Walker killed a federally financed high speed rail project that would have led to thousands of temporary and permanent jobs for state residents. Despite his highfalutin rhetoric about creating jobs, Walker is starting his governorship as a job killer, not a job booster.

Related reading:

“An Update on State Budget Cuts,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Rail backers demand jobs at Madison protest

Madison, Wis. – As power shifted here from one major state party to the other Monday, five bus loads of Milwaukee residents rode into town demanding jobs. They invited new-Gov. Scott Walker to appear at a community meeting in Milwaukee to explain why he killed a project that would have led to employment for thousands.

The 250 Milwaukeeans were joined in front of the Capitol by roughly 100 others, many of them students. The crowd heard labor leader Sheila Cochran bellow: “He says that the state of Wisconsin is open for business. I want him to know that we mean business.”

She and others noted that, in killing the $810 million high-speed rail project connecting Milwaukee and Madison, Walker was going in the opposite direction of his promise to create 250,000 jobs.

A coalition of organizations, including MICAH (Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope), sponsored the protest. Their first stop was Monona Terrace for a prayer rally outside as Walker attended a prayer breakfast inside. The Rev. Willie Brisco, who heads MICAH, says he gave a Walker representative an invitation to attend a community meeting in Milwaukee and that she promised to make sure Walker got the invitation. The governor would choose the date.

The group is calling on Walker to bring good jobs to Milwaukee and to explain face to face how he’s going to do that and to invest in the Milwaukee north side complex that contains train maker Talgo, which has said it would move its manufacturing operation to another state because of Walker’s antagonism toward rail.

The group prayed and sang freedom songs, such as “This Little Light of Mine” and “We Shall Overcome.”

The sky was grey and the air was cold.  But it was not the biting cold participants had feared.

Later in the morning, the protestors rallied at the Capitol, where the Rev. Gregory Lewis said, “We are living in times of desperation” due to the absence of jobs. That desperation is leading to crime, he said, volunteering that his church office was recently broken into and its contents  rifled and items taken. He led a chant: “We need jobs.”

The Rev. Leondis Fuller said, “We have a governor who's being inaugurated today, and I want you to know he does not care about workers.”

Saying the people have the power to fight back, he added: “The fight is going to be long, the fight is going to be hard. but we're going to have to stay the course because the Republicans in this building behind us, they do not care about you and I.”

He said that “Walker had already sent jobs out of state.” Because of Walker’s action, train maker Talgo plans to move its manufacturing operation from Milwaukee to a state friendlier to rail. What’s more, the federal government has redistributed Wisconsin’s $810 million to other states, where the money will create many jobs.

The federal government would have fully financed construction of the Milwaukee-to-Madison line. Walker objected to the state’s picking up as much as $7.5 million a year in operating costs, even though the project promised to generate enough taxes – by boosting sales and personal income in the state – to cover those costs.

Said another speaker at the rally: “We are tired of going to job fairs where there are no jobs.”

After the rally the crowd broke up into groups stationed in front of the entrances to the Capitol and chanted slogans and held picket signs.

Inside, Walker was being sworn in as governor, and a new regime was beginning – a regime seemingly callous to the desperate plight of workers in Milwaukee.

Photos by Gregory Stanford and Cynthia Henry

Wisconin Gov.-Elect Walker has a deep-seated hatred for rail

Photo credit: dreamstime_11512691

Hatred of rail most logically explains Wisconsin Gov.-Elect Scott Walker’s torpedoing the planned high-speed train between Milwaukee and Madison. His stated motive – to save Wisconsin taxpayers $7.5 million a year in operating costs – doesn’t compute. After all, the project should easily generate that money and more for the state coffers.

Before I had a chance to post this piece, an alternate explanation emerged: the gobs of money the road builders lavished on the Walker campaign. But the Milwaukee County executive’s phobia about rail goes way back, stunting public transit in Milwaukee for years. Now he has public transportation in a whole state to retard.

Consider these facts:

• The Republican politician has pledged to attract 10,000 companies to Wisconsin in four years. Yet, almost the first thing he does as governor-elect is to practically shoo a company away, Milwaukee-based high-speed train maker Talgo, which Mayor Tom Barrett and outgoing Gov. Jim Doyle had convinced to open shop in the industrial city. The company has said that, because of Walker’s anti-rail policies, it may move to Illinois, into the open arms of Gov. Pat Quinn.
• Walker has pledged to bring 250,000 jobs to the state in those four years. Yet, already he has done the opposite, idling dozens of workers who have started to construct the high speed rail line. In killing the project, he would put the kibosh on thousands of construction jobs altogether and lead to the layoffs of scores of engineers and others already hired for the project. Dozens of new jobs – to run the railroad and its stations – won’t be created. He would likely chase away the 125 jobs planned for Talgo. Hundreds of spinoff jobs – at the ice cream parlor that opens near a train station or at the electronics store that must hire due to increased business generated by train-related paychecks – won’t come to be.
• Walker complains about the state’s fiscal crisis. Yet, he’s thumbing his nose at $810 million in free money – that is, money the state doesn’t have to raise. Sure, he’s asking the feds to redirect this stimulus money to Wisconsin roads, or, in the latest ploy, to existing rail. But that outcome is, as Doyle put it, “pure fiction.” Meanwhile, governors elsewhere, particularly in Illinois and New York, are salivating over these funds. What’s more, if Wisconsin drops the project, the law holds it would have to return millions already spent on it.
• The thousands of jobs to be generated by the project – the Madison-based Wisconsin Public Interest Research Group puts the number of permanent jobs at 13,000 – should result in state tax payments that would easily cover the $7.5 million in yearly operating costs. But Wisconsin may only have to pay $750,000 – should federal aid cover 90% of the costs, as it already does with the Milwaukee-to-Chicago Hiawatha line.

In short, in killing the Madison-to-Milwaukee rail line, Walker is pursuing a course that would likely cost Wisconsin many times more money than the $7.5 million a year it might save. So the question becomes: Why is he pursuing this insane course? True, the money he’s getting from the road builders is likely a factor, even though the $810 million can’t be used for roads. But the most logical explanation, to borrow from Glenn Beck, is that Walker has a deep-seated hatred for rail.

Milwaukeeans are familiar with this hatred. One of his chief “accomplishments” as Milwaukee County executive was to keep light rail away – for reasons that likewise failed to withstand scrutiny. He called himself protecting the county bus system, from which light rail would drain resources. He depicted himself as champion of the poor (don’t laugh!), who ride the bus, whereas light rail draws the upwardly mobile, quiche-eating crowd.

Some protector he turned out to be. He has the bus system in a death spiral of rising fares, reduced service and falling ridership.

While Walker was saying “no” to light rail, Minneapolis was saying “yes.” And that enlightened city found that light rail 1) drew more riders than expected, 2) in contrast to busses, pulled people out of their cars and onto public transit, 3) increased bus ridership since passengers could use their light rail transfers for the bus and vice versa, 4) boosted business around light rail stops and 5) increased job opportunities for poor people.

Minneapolis could look amused at County Executive Walker’s irrational hatred of rail. But the Minnesota city must be alarmed at Gov. Walker’s hatred. The next leg of high speed rail to be constructed was supposed to connect Minneapolis to Madison and thus to Milwaukee and Chicago. But Walker’s quashing those plans.

The better workers, customers and business people can move around, the more vibrant the economy will be. Walker retarded that movement in Milwaukee County. Now, gads, he’s trying to do for the state what he did for the county.

Feingold's challenger backs theories that blew up in Bush’s face

Ron Johnson, the Republican who may oust Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, expresses the belief that sunspots, not car tailpipes or factory smokestacks, are melting the polar ice caps. Not a bad hunch, actually.

The rising sun plays with the Di Suvero sculpture
The Calling in Milwaukee

The sun, after all, is Earth’s furnace. When the planet warms, a natural question is: Did somebody turn the furnace up? Sunspots indicate that somebody or some process did. Thus, many scientists have looked into the issue of whether a hotter sun means a hotter planet.
The overwhelming conclusion: Not really. Here’s the way Scientific American put it last year: “Many climate scientists agree that sunspots and solar wind could be playing a role in climate change, but the vast majority view it as very minimal and attribute Earth’s warming primarily to emissions from industrial activity — and they have thousands of peer-reviewed studies available to back up that claim.”

Yet, in his debates with Feingold, Johnson persists in his convenient belief that sunspots are the global warming culprit, rather than accept the inconvenient truth that, by emitting gasses that trap the sun’s heat, human activity is the actual villain. His persistence suggests a mind hostile to the scientific process – a suggestion reinforced by some of his other political notions.

Ron Johnson

The scientific mind does formulate theories to explain what’s happening, as Johnson did. But the next step is to submit the theories to rigorous scrutiny and then – and here’s the stumbling block for Johnson – to go where the facts lead.

Take this tax-and-spend thing. Johnson expresses the belief that extending President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy would spur the economy. Again, not a bad hunch. The more of their dough billionaires keep, the more they can spend to create jobs. Common sense, right? Trouble is, this theory has actually been tested in practice, and with miserable results.
Despite the tax cuts, private-sector job growth was painfully slow during the Bush years and the economy ultimately crashed. And there was this other little thing: The budget surpluses Bush inherited from President Clinton turned into deficits. These pesky facts don’t deter Johnson, though. Note that the Oshkosh businessman is toeing the Republican Party line on taxes – an indication that the preference for theory over contrary facts is party-wide.

Johnson voices the bedrock Republican notion that government regulation is bad. Again, the theory that governmental red tape jams economic gears makes some sense on its face. A business has to take time out from producing goods or services to fill out governmental paperwork and to clear bureaucratic hurdles. But over the last several decades, government has in fact loosened regulations. Two recent calamities – America’s financial meltdown and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – demonstrate spectacularly what happens when government rules or their enforcement are too lax. Johnson ignores these developments, which fail to back up his theory about the intrinsic evil of regulation.

Johnson set the tone at the start of his senatorial campaign by telling a whopper that has made it into the realm of The Big Lie, a falsehood repeated so many times that it eventually sounds true. The millionaire ran an ad in which he said government doesn’t create jobs – a statement that makes no sense whatever on its face, but that sounds legit nonetheless due to constant repetition on the political right. Were government merely to create a post of paper shuffler, it’s creating a job – real in the sense that the person who holds it gets real money, which would support a family, who would spend the money on goods and services and thereby help keep the economy humming.

Typical government workers do more than shuffle papers, of course. The services they perform boost the economy, providing the law and order that commerce needs to thrive, moving the mail and the parcels on which business depends, schooling the next generation of business leaders and workers, keeping contagious diseases at bay, maintaining licensing systems to help keep automobile traffic orderly, helping shops get back on their feet after natural disasters.

Also, government creates jobs though contracting out services and through economic development initiatives, which, as it turns out, have benefitted Johnson’s plastics firm.

The Big Lie supports the theory that government is of little use – a theory to which the Bush administration subscribed to its detriment. Remember Katrina, the beginning of the end for the Bush White House? That administration’s disdain for government – anybody can run an emergency management agency, you don’t need an expert – helps explain its inept response to the disaster.

Wisconsin seems on the verge of electing a senator who gives pet theories more weight than facts – specifically, the facts that made lies of the theories during the Bush years.