How interesting. I always thought Walker to be pro-economy pro-jobs.
How do these numbers line up with a) private sector -only b) overall WI economic growth ?
I always thought that trickle-down is flawed idea, so no surprise on falling personal income. Still, I was expecting tax cuts, union busting, and pro-business agenda to result in more private sector moving to WI.
No, they just interpret the terms differently. Maybe full-on nihilists or something might oppose jobs and economic health, but even commies want us all working and eating.
You could be pro-world peace, but if you go around murdering people you not exactly advancing that cause.
So who isn’t? In US anyone who is increasing scope of regulation, increasing corporate taxation, or most importantly introducing uncertainty into risk analysis.
Walker’s union-busting should have had a positive effect on employment (but not personal income). I am surprised it didn’t work out that way.
Yes, if shown some evidence. My base premise is that unions increase employment costs, increase personal income and decrease total number of jobs available in any sector they are prevalent. Additionally, At-Will states tend to have higher employment rates, but more poverty during recessions.
It could be that positive effects were lost in larger trends, it could be deferred effects of previous WI administrations, it could be that job growth isn’t following liner growth model under Walker policies…
So far you only have a correlation between Walked and lack of job growth over relatively short period of time. I am not willing to accept it as causation without additional evidence.
Just to add fuel to the fire: noted liberal bastion & Democratic apologist FoxBusiness.com claims that GDP growth is stronger under Democratic administrations than Republican ones. That Internet meme has been echoing for a while now.
Sinij, you don’t want to touch this one. Scott Walker is just an unintelligent patsy. There are administrations which could expect to see growth from discouraging union membership and attract business, just like Toyota can give you a great car and good employee compensation partly as a result of its non union shops, there are businesses like Walmart that just peddle crap and pay peanuts. Walker is in the latter camp.
He melted down a major state agency to create the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and they pissed large chunks of money away and lost unknown millions more. On paper, and with a better leader, some of the ideas his handlers sold him would work, but he and his people are incapable of putting them into action correctly.
As for his predecessor, Governor James Doyle, he was not much of a success or failure. He was basically a placeholder governor who took over from Scott McCallum, who was Tommy Thompson’s Lieutenant Governor until Thompson joined the Bush Administration in early 2001. One of Doyle’s major failures was turning over a six hundred million dollar high speed rail program approval essentially to Walker after Walker had been elected but before he was governor. That six hundred million dollars of commuter railroad connecting Madison to Chicago and Milwaukee stood to generate billions in economic activity on both sides. But Walker was taken in by those Southerners who famously refuse Federal funding for one project while backhand pocketing billions and billions more. So he backed us out of the agreement with the Obama administration because he thought he was competent enough to pull a Tommy Thompson. Tommy Thompson’s first clutch three-pointer was taking a previous large Federal money bucket and turning it into the Marquette Interchange which greatly benefits the people of Milwaukee and the economy.
Scott Walker also has a problem with Obamacare, and he is one of the governors who put his head in the sand after the lawsuit failed. He is playing around with some type of ideological or philosophical consistency in positions, and it is costing his supporters their businesses. The Insurance industry in my state needs someone to help them adapt and remain profitable under Obamacare, and they helped Scott Walker get his job and his response, because he does not want to be seen as cowtowing to Obama is to allow the Federal Government to construct our insurance exchange. To me, having the chance to build a healthcare exchange that can keep Wisconsin mutual insurance corporations on top of out of state for profit insurance concerns who are only looking to invade the Wisconsin market so that companies like American Family can’t compete with them on other turf means that you do it. If you are the governor of the state of Wisconsin and the goddamn devil himself appears and offers you a way to save ten thousand jobs, but all you have to do is kiss him on his fiery red ass, you and I both would be breaking out the chapstick faster than old Scratch can drop trou.
Thanks Flowers, as non-WI resident with fiscal-conservative leanings I was understandably curious about Walker. Unfortunately, conservative media due to dogmatic imperative was/is useless at informing about situation.
Also why do you see out-of-state healthcare insurers as a problem? More competition should theoretically decrease price?
Edit: Noticed I forgot to mention that this post about unions was tied to this thread to address Walker’s anti-union work that caused all those protests. It’s not a total non sequitur, really. :)
Unions are like a lot of other things in life. Too little is bad…too much is bad…the right amount is good.
Too little is when the workers have no representation, and are screwed out of anything resembling a living wage by employers. This is what’s happening in today’s part-time temporary warehouse worker market, for instance.
Too much is when workers get so much leverage that the companies are required to sacrifice their agility and good business practice for the good of labor. This is what happened to the US auto industry, and they’re still feeling the effects.
Getting is just right is hard, obviously. It may even be impossible under free market conditions, since this certainly seems to be a special case of the tragedy of the commons problem. Labor is a common resource used by companies…all the companies would be better off if everyone treated their workers better, since said workers would become a healthy market for their products/services…but any one company is better off by treating workers poorly, since that cuts their costs and improves the bottom line. Typically the best way out of a tragedy of the commons situation is an outside force that imposes a low-end price on the resource (in this case, wages/benefits/job security) which is higher than an individual company would pay, but low enough to allow them to still be profitable.
Unions have a track record of doing a good job at being that outside force at first, but over time they tend to force the price up too high. That’s where examples like Toyota vs GM seem to show that non-union (or at least minimal union) is better. It’s not necessarily true, but too much union is just as bad as no union at all.
Yeah, he is an extremely polarizing figure, a hero on the right and a demon on the left, the problem is that he is only smart enough to break things. Ideological agreement or disagreement is seldom an indicator of intelligence and never an indicator of competence. It’s a function of experience and worldview, and someone having views similar to yours doesn’t make them a good governor any more than it makes them a good cook. He also coasts more than a little bit on the anti-intellectual undercurrent in the state, and that is not healthy for our nation.
I actually agree with this. Once you decrease employment costs past certain threshold overall economic inefficiency of low consumption offsets efficiency gains of low employment costs.
In plain speak - Ford had it right. You had to pay your workers enough so they could buy your own cars. This way everyone is better off and there are no problems socially downstream that are costly to clean up.
Wallmart is prime example of “not doing it right”.
