“A Tough Sell”: As His Austerity Agenda Melts Down, Scott Walker Blames Protests For Record Job Losses
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker rarely does interviews with Wisconsin reporters who might ask him difficult questions. He prefers making the rounds of Fox New and CNBC programs, where he gets softball questions and an opportunity to promote his campaign website to the wealthy out-of-state donors who have sustained his recall run.
But this week he appeared on a popular Sunday news show, UpFront with Mike Gousha, and faced some of the most serious questioning he’s gotten since the last time he appeared on Gousha’s show.
Specifically, Walker was asked about the news that over the year since his policies began to take hold, Wisconsin has been the only state in the nation to experience what the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as “statistically significant” job losses. Noting the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline that declared, “State Job Losses Worst in US,” Gousha asked, “Wasn’t that headline in the state’s biggest newspaper last week, the one that screams ‘job losses,’ isn’t that as about as damaging as anything that can happen to you five weeks before an election?”
Walker responded by blaming last year’s protests against his assault on public employees, public-school teachers, public education and public services. “Those [job loss] numbers reflect early on last year when we saw all the things that were happening around our state Capitol. I think there’s no doubt anyone logically would look at that and say ‘of course that had an impact.’ ”
Then Walker said the June 5 recall election—in which he could be replaced by the voters of Wisconsin—has become the problem.
“The biggest single worry they [businesses that might create jobs] have is what’s going to happen in these recalls. They don’t want to see the positive foundation reversed for us to go back in time—not only back to [the policies of former Democratic Governor Jim Doyle]—but even back to what we see in Illinois right now,” said Walker. “That’s where [Democratic gubernatorial candidate] Tom Barrett, that’s where [Democratic gubernatorial candidate] Kathleen Falk would take us.”
But in the last year of Doyle’s governorship, after several years of dealing with the challenges created by the Bush-Cheney recession, Wisconsin’s unemployment dipped and the state created 30,000 new jobs.
In contrast, in the year after Walker’s policies began to be implemented in March of 2011, Wisconsin lost 24,000.
During that same period, Illinois added 41,000 jobs.
So Walker’s spin is a tough sell.
Even with Walker.
Indeed, when he appeared on Gousha’s show in January of this year, he was also asked about jobs.
The conversation turned to the influence of the protests and the recall election on job growth.
Walker mentioned the recalls but then, according to the recap of the UpFront program by the show’s producers: “Walker immediately walked back the comment, adding the recalls alone weren’t responsible for the state’s sluggish economy. He also insisted he wasn’t saying recalls are a factor in business decisions.”
The recap continued by noting that “[Walker] said no business leaders have told them they have decided against investing in Wisconsin or creating jobs here because of the recalls.” And Walker added that “he didn’t want to ‘over inflate’ any role the recalls have played in business decisions, saying it was largely attributed to the state’s manufacturing-heavy economy and a lack of demand in foreign markets because of the economic troubles seen in Europe, particularly Greece.”
So what changed from January to April?
Walker presumed, as everyone did in January, that Wisconsin would follow national job growth patterns in the months leading toward the recall election on June 5. Instead, while other states began to boom, Wisconsin kept shedding jobs.
Now, the governor faces the fight of his political life. And he is willing to say anything that will save him—even if it contradicts what he said just three months earlier.
The one thing Scott Walker is unwilling to do is acknowledge what everyone else is coming to recognize: that his policies are not working.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, April 30, 2012
“A Very Bad Boy”: Will Gov. Scott Walker Ever Come Clean On Wisconsin’s Budget Deficit?
Scott Walker is running a television commercial extolling the crowning achievement of his short time in office —the balancing of the Wisconsin state budget and the wiping out of the $3.2 billion deficit he inherited. Check this out: http://youtu.be/vYFrt_jwdCk
Even the harshest critic of the Wisconsin governor would have to acknowledge that this is some pretty impressive work. For a governor to balance his state’s budget in these tough times—even if it is done by making Draconian cuts to health and education—is a noteworthy accomplishment.
Of course, such admiration would only be required if the Governor had, in truth, actually succeeded in the manner he suggests.Unfortunately, it turns out that Scott Walker is being a very bad boy…again.
In fact, we now know that the Governor is either being untruthful with the good people of Wisconsin on the whole ‘I balanced the budget and wiped out the deficit’ thing or he’s been, shall we say, stretching the truth when speaking to Uncle Sam on the same topic.
As we all know, it’s not nice to lie to your Uncle Sam.
In a letter sent by Mike Huebsch, Walker’s Administration Secretary, to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services just two months ago, Huebsch disclosed that the state of Wisconsin would have an ‘undisclosed deficit’ from January, 2012 through June, 2013.
But didn’t we all just watch the video where Walker extolls his great victory in cleaning up the state’s multibillion dollar deficit?
If you’re confused, get use to it as it only gets worse.
This latest episode in the “Adventures of Scott In Dairyland” it is the perfect expression of everything we have come to expect from Governor Walker—half-truths designed to mislead, broken campaign promises, and a predilection to sneak through the back door when going in via the front would result in way too much unwanted exposure.
Let’s begin with why Walker would want to go on record with his letter to HHS claiming a deficit while, at the same time, campaigning on a message that tells a very different story.
Federal law allows a state to remove people from the state’s Medicaid rolls only in the circumstance where the state can show that it is suffering deficits. As Walker is planning to make even more cuts to Wisconsin’s health budgets—cuts he tells us he is attempting to accomplish without forcing people out of this critical health program—the Governor wants to keep his options open. To do that, it was necessary for the Walker Administration to tell HHS that his state is running a deficit while attempting, at the same time, to convince voters of the precise opposite—all so he can hold onto the opportunity to place more than 50,000 Wisconsinites in danger of losing their only access to health care.
Perfectly understandable, yes? After all, what’s a governor to do when he wants to take health care away from thousands while trying to convince those same people to vote for him in a recall election?
It’s not easy being Scott.
Still, we are left to wonder whether Walker is lying to the people of Wisconsin or fibbing to the federal government? It pretty much has to be one or the other.
The answer is dependent on, of all things, accounting.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel does a good job of laying it out-
In June, Walker and Republican lawmakers passed a balanced budget according to the measure that is always used for state budgets – cash accounting. That means essentially that the state will have cash left in its main account – an estimated balance of $68 million – when the budget ends on June 30, 2013.
That’s the measure that state officials use for budgets and the one Walker has repeatedly touted in statements when he says he eliminated a $3 billion budget deficit on a cash accounting basis.”
There are, essentially, two accepted methods of accounting. There is the “cash method”— the one utilized by the Wisconsin legislature and Gov. Walker in creating their balanced budget—which accounts for how much money is in the bank at the end of the fiscal year after bills have been paid. If there remains cash in the bank account, then there is no deficit.
Of course, this approach does not take into account the reality that upcoming obligations are not only going to wipe out that cash, but create a deficit when those obligations exceed what is in the bank. As a result, cash accounting rarely presents a true picture of an organization’s finances—which is precisely why every public company in America, along with most city and country units of government, are required to use the GAAP method.
GAAP (the acronym for Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) accounting takes into consideration the money expected to come in and the money committed to going out in order to work out where an organization actually stands.
If you employ the cash method being utilized by Governor Walker, were you to have $100 in the bank at the end of the year, after all the invoices that came in during December have been paid, you can credibly claim that you have no deficit. Never mind that you know full well that a credit card bill is coming in January for the $5,000 you spent Christmas shopping during the month of December and that there won’t be anywhere near enough cash in your bank account to pay that bill when it arrives. That is what we call a deficit. If you are using GAAP, you are required to account for that $5,000 obligation in the month you rack up the obligation. Thus, what is a $100 surplus if you are using cash accounting becomes a $4900 deficit if you are using the more precise GAAP accounting.
What Walker is doing here is using the cash method of accounting to form the basis of his claims as stated in his advertisement while using GAAP accounting when making his claim to the Feds.
That’s a no-no in anybody’s version of the real world—or should I say anybody but Scott Walker. While the rest of us are required to live and die by the accounting method we choose, Governor Walker, apparently, doesn’t believe that this applies to him because …well, because Governor Walker is ‘special’. He is, after all, on a first name basis with the Koch Brothers.
To be fair, politicians have long used the more favorable cash method of accounting to lay claim to better financial results, including Walker’s predecessor, Democrat Governor Jim Doyle. However, because this is so dishonest a way of putting forth the realities of a state’s financial condition, people have long been disturbed by the practice—people like ….Scott Walker?
It seems that while Governor Walker now chooses to use cash basis accounting rather than a more honest representation of the state’s finances—at least when reporting his results to the people of Wisconsin—Candidate Walker saw it very differently. In fact, in 2010, Walker vigorously campaigned on the importance of ridding the state of this distorted method of accounting, going so far as to state on his campaign website that he would “Require the use of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) to balance every state budget, just as we require every local government and school district to do.”
How quickly he forgets—except when it serves his purposes to suddenly convert to GAAP when he wants something from the federal government.
There is really no logical way around the conclusion that Governor Walker has, at the very least, (a) broken an important campaign promise within months of making that promise, and (b) lied to either the people of Wisconsin or the government of the United States.
The good news is that Governor’s Walker’s spokesman, Cullen Werwie, doesn’t see a big deal here. He tells us that this is all “…nothing more than what we’ve been saying all along.”
That’s good enough for me. I mean, it’s not like this is the Cullen Werwie who required a grant of immunity from prosecution before he would cooperate with prosecutors in the John Doe investigation into illegal electioneering that threatens to bring down the Walker Administration before we even get to the recall vote.
Oh wait….it seems that the governor’s chief spokesman is the very same Cullen Werwie who required a grant of immunity to avoid prosecution.
Say what you will about the folks running things up in Madison, Wisconsin, but you certainly can’t say they aren’t colorful.
The Tea Party Plan To Save Scott Walker
Tea partiers are gung-ho to help the Wisconsin governor fend off a recall vote—and their fate may well be tied to his.
As soon as April, millions of Wisconsinites will vote on whether to oust Gov. Scott Walker—a rising Republican star and arguably the most polarizing governor in politics today—just two years into his first term in office. Walker’s recall election is a referendum on his hardline conservative agenda, including curbing collective bargaining rights for state workers and slashing education funding. For Walker himself it’s a pivotal moment in his young political career.
The recall fight is also a crucial test for the tea party, the populist movement that helped elect Walker in 2010, vigorously defended him during last winter’s protests over his anti-union “budget repair” bill, and has been organizing to prevent his ouster. The movement’s support is flagging, its clout dwindling, its buzz mostly gone. But now, tea partiers at the state and national levels are rallying around Walker’s recall defense, hoping a victory could bolster the movement in a critical election year. A defeat, on the other hand, would give ammo to liberals and conservatives alike who say the tea party is all but dead.
In recent months, the Tea Party Express, a national organization, and the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, a tea party-linked political action committee, have waded into the recall fight, blasting out more than a dozen emails to supporters and launching a $100,000 “money bomb” fundraiser to help defend Walker. They argue that the outcome has national implications for the 2012 presidential election; a Tea Party Express email to supporters in January announced that Wisconsin is “Ground Zero for the Battle Against Obama’s Liberal Agenda.”
The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama says it has raked in small donations from supporters throughout the country, from Napa, California, to Nashua, New Hampshire. The group’s director of grassroots outreach, Donald La Combe, wrote in an email to supporters that funds would go toward TV and radio ad campaigns as well as “war rooms” throughout Wisconsin to bolster Walker’s support among voters. “We’re going to win this fight, we’re going to DEFEAT the RECALL, and we’re going to stop Barack Obama from getting Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral Votes,” La Combe wrote. (Neither of the above groups responded to requests for comment.)
Two Wisconsin tea party groups, We the People of the Republic and the Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty, claim to have signed up 11,000 volunteers and trained 4,000 of them to scrutinize the estimated 1 million signatures gathered by Walker foes. That signature total was nearly two times the 540,208 needed to launch the recall process; nonetheless, the two groups’ vetting operation, VerifyTheRecall.com, was created to root out duplicate signatures and “downright fraud” found in recall petitions for Walker and Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, their website says. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin branch of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded group that helped train and grow the tea party, held a town hall earlier this month touting the budget reforms enacted by Walker and state Republicans.
It’s not hard to see why the tea partiers would go all-in to defend Walker. There is no clear tea party favorite left to rally behind in the 2012 GOP presidential nomination fight with Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain all out of the race. Walker, on the other hand, is right in the tea party’s sweet spot: He battles unions, axes state spending, rejects federal funding, and is rigidly pro-life and pro-gun rights.
The tea party also has a lot of political capital invested in Walker. When intense anger over Walker’s anti-union “budget repair” bill spilled into the streets of the state capital of Madison last February, Americans for Prosperity swooped in to hold a counter-protest defending Walker. Other tea party groups also rushed to the aid of Walker and ripped his critics.
“Walker is a central figure to them, their Sir Galahad battling the evil unions,” says Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociology professor and coauthor of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Walker ultimately signed the bill into law in March, and it later survived multiple legal challenges.
Last summer, Tea Party Express and Tea Party Nation, two national groups, launched a four-day bus tour across Wisconsin defending six Republicans facing recall elections for their roles in the battle over Walker’s anti-union bill. (Republicans lost two recall races, but clung to a narrow, one-seat majority in the state Senate—a “victory” the tea party claimed credit for.) Tea Party Express also ran TV ads defending Walker’s agenda on the economy.
How much influence does the tea party have at this point? An analysis last July by the liberal blog Think Progress found that the number of events held each month by the Tea Party Patriots, a national group, had dropped by half in the first seven months of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Harvard’s Skocpol affirms that tea party events “are falling off some, but there is not a collapse.”
A Pew Research Center analysis published in November found that 23 percent of people in the 60 districts represented nationwide by House Tea Party Caucus members disagreed with the tea party, up from 18 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, 25 percent of respondents in those districts agreed with the tea party, an 8 percent drop. And a Rasmussen poll this month reported that dislike of the tea party was at an all-time high—and that 46 percent of respondents said the tea party would hurt the GOP in the 2012 elections.
A recent Marquette University poll (PDF) found similarly lackluster support for the tea party in Wisconsin. Forty one percent of respondents thought poorly of the tea party while 33 percent viewed it favorably.
Still, even if the tea party suffers a major defeat with Walker’s recall, their influence will be felt for years to come given the hardline agendas promoted by state and federal lawmakers swept into office in 2010. And Skocpol says the recall election could be a galvanizing event for the movement. “Because all of the tea party forces have not been able to unite on a GOP candidate for president, they’re going to redouble on things like the Wisconsin crusade,” she says. “Grassroots tea partiers everywhere will be be following and contributing to the Walker campaign.”
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