The myth of Scott Walker as a budget hawk

Over at the Milwaukee JournalSentinel’s “Purple Wisconsin” blogs, Jimmy Anderson has a great piece debunking the myth of Gov. Scott Walker as a budget guru. Here’s a snippet from Anderson’s piece.

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.

To be honest, I’m having problems wrapping my mind around a supposed fiscal conservative racking up a $2.2 billion budget deficit during the strongest period of economic growth our country has seen in over a decade. It’s easy to assume that this self-imposed budget fiasco is the result of conservative fiscal demagoguery. The political right over the last few decades has bought into the notion that tax cuts, particularly those for the wealthy, are some kind of economic cure-all.

As Gov. Walker inches ever closer to formalizing a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, we can expect to see more truth-telling from bloggers and other social media types about Gov. Walker’s miserable record here in Wisconsin, since our mainstream media seems afraid of telling the real story of Scott Walker’s time as governor.

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