The Last Days Of A Scoundrel?

Scott Walker on Fox News dodges question on secret emails

Gov. Scott Walker declined again Sunday to answer whether he knew of the existence of a secret email system in his Milwaukee County executive office.

Instead, during the appearance on "Fox News Sunday," Walker called the controversy over the release of thousands of emails "old news" and said Democrats were trying to switch the subject from his budget successes.

I guess if you consider borrowing and digging the state deeper into debt than when your administration began, kudos, well done, Mr. Walker.

"If you look at the facts out there, this is old news," Walker said. "This is about a case that was closed last March. A Democratic district attorney in Milwaukee County spent multiple years looking at all this information. 

"The 27,000-plus pages of documents that were just released this week have been looked at by a team led by a Democrat from Milwaukee County, and last March he announced the end of that case, plain and simple. It's old news." 

Which, when the district attorney ended his investigation, brought charges against numerous individuals working for Mr. Walker.

His comments echoed those he made Friday while speaking to reporters for the first time since the release of the documents. 

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm's office launched an investigation in May 2010, lasting nearly three years and leading to the convictions of six individuals, including three Walker aides, an appointee and a major campaign contributor. 

Documents released Wednesday linked Walker to a secret email system that was used in his county office. The documents also showed close ties between his campaign operation and taxpayer-paid staff members during the months leading to the November 2010 election for governor. 

Now we have documents, discovered by further investigation, tying the governor to the secret e-mail system used for illegal campaign (and who knows what else, at this point) activities.

"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace pressed Walker on whether he knew there was a private email account. 

Walker responded, "Again, it's one of those where I point out the district attorney looked into every single one of those issues." 

Wallace interjected: "But sir, you're not answering my question." 

Walker said, "No, because I'm not going to get into 27,000 different pieces of information." 

The governor continued, "The bottom line is a Democrat who led the district attorneys office, looked at all this, decided not to charge anything other than the individuals you mentioned, who were people who had worked for the county in the past but don't work for me today. 

Wow. Talk about being detached from reality. "Decided not to charge anything other than the individuals you mentioned." So Walker does realize his former employees were charged with committing illegal acts for his benefit. (Which is probably why they're not working for him anymore.) Now, more information points to the governor being involved with and knowing about such activities. Yep, old news. Move along.

"I think that's pretty straightforward. It's one of those things where they want to keep pushing this issue into the forefront because in the end the folks running against us can't counter our positive message when it comes to the economy and creating budget surpluses." 

Or, maybe those interested in the truth and honest politics just want to point out what a corrupt, lying bunch of Machiavellians the Walker administration has been all along. I'm so glad Walker has had such a positive message about the economy, but most Wisconsin workers actually want to see positives that translate to earnings, not just platitudes. And, as mentioned earlier, those "surpluses" are illusory. So, Walker's message doesn't hold water, and now we're finding out their whole operation is fraught with dishonest activities.

Mike Tate, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said there are additional questions that Walker needs to answer.  

"What we continue to see is the further erosion of public trust in the governor's judgment," Tate said. "Did he know his staff was breaking the law, and if he didn't, how is that possible with what has come to light? How will his public and campaign staffs interact moving forward? And how do citizens know that their tax dollars won't be misused by mixing private-public staff going into an election year?"

Luckily some are still looking into the e-mails and documents concerning Walker's improprieties. It's highly unlikely things are going to get better for Mr. Walker.

Give Reality Back To Taxpayers

Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch took to the Journal Sentinel to boast about all Scott Walker has done for Wisconsin and to propose giving the budgetary "surplus" back to the taxpayers.

If you consider borrowing, increasing long-term debt, as a "surplus," then Scott Walker has really been on point. Yet, as most can see, this is merely kicking the can down the road. A bit of smoke and mirrors for Mr. Walker, so he can present the illusion of positive policy outcomes. But in reality, he's just burying Wisconsin is debt so he can advance his own political career.

To come up with her rosy picture, Kleefisch compares the Walker administration's tenure with the peak of the recession. One would expect improvement after hitting rock bottom. They could have taken office and done nothing and things would have shown some improvement. For a truer test, we need to see where we were at before the recession. To show real gains one would expect improvement above and beyond the norm, and improvements that rank near the best among states, especially if one is going to claim his or her policies are doing so much good.

Kleefisch crows about the improvement in the unemployment rate. "Four years ago, the state's unemployment rate was 9.2%. In fact, Wisconsin lost more than 133,000 jobs and lost 27,000 businesses during Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's final term in office. After Gov. Walker and I were sworn in, we took aggressive action to get Wisconsin working again. Now, the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in more than five years at 6.2%."

As you can see from the graph below, its awfully convenient to choose 2010 for comparison, rather than any other time before that. When we look back just a bit further, we see Wisconsin still has a way to go to reach full employment. Our current unemployment rate ranks us 22nd among the states. In 2011 and 2012, although we had higher unemployment rates (6.9 and 7.5), we ranked 19th among the states for both years. As far as the state is doing compared to others, we've actually gotten worse.

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Kleefisch talks of turning a deficit into a surplus. "We also took necessary steps to get our fiscal house in order over the past few years. We inherited a $3.6 billion budget deficit when we took office and turned it into a $759 million surplus by the end of the 2011-'13 budget."

As Media Matters commented, "Fox News hyped Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's economic record, claiming that the governor's economic plan generated a nearly $1 billion budget surplus while ignoring that the current surplus is built upon a projected structural deficit and that the state ranks 28th in the nation for job creation under Walker's tenure." From the same article, "The Legislative Fiscal Bureau: Under Walker's Budget, Wisconsin's Structural Deficit Would Grow To $725 Million. A non-partisan analysis of Walker's most recent budget concluded that the Governor's proposed tax cuts would increase the state's budget shortfall over the coming years. Walker's tax plan hyped by Fox would in fact cost the state $180 million and would ultimately turn the touted surplus into a deficit by 2017."

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin also notes, "When Scott Walker was running for governor, he promised to balance budgets Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP); however, the budget he claims as balanced is anything but when using GAAP. By gutting public education to the tune of $2.6 billion and slashing more than $500 million from public healthcare, along with skillfully kicking the can down the road with accounting tricks that pass debt onto future budgets, Walker has given the appearance of a balanced budget. But when using the GAAP that Walker promised to use, Wisconsin’s deficit will actually be more than $3 billion at the end of the biennium – a larger deficit than Walker inherited."

Kleefisch continues, "And some 100,000 jobs and nearly 13,000 new businesses have been created since we took office." Again, as we can see from the graph below, all this "job creation" has only gotten us back to 2004 levels. Oddly, I remember some politician promising 250,000 new jobs in his first term. 

[source]

Republicans always talk about "putting money back into taxpayers pockets." Although Kleefisch didn't mention it in her op-ed, lets take a look at the real median household income in Wisconsin. Are those wonderful Walker policies fattening your wallet? As the graph below shows, the median household actually has less now than they did during the peak of the recession. 

 [source]

Kleefisch and Walker are giving Wisconsin taxpayers a bigger debt burden, meaningless promises and a false reality. 

U.S. Deficit Fell 37 Percent In 2013

From Neil Irwin, at the Washington Post:

The federal government's 2013 fiscal year ended Sept. 30, though most of us were so busy focusing on the government shutdown that accompanied the new fiscal year that there wasn't much time to reflect on the year that had passed. 

Now the Treasury and Office of Management and Budget is out with the final budget results. Surprise! The deficit fell quite a bit in 2013. The federal government took in $680 billion less revenue than it spent, or about 4.1 percent of gross domestic product. In 2012, those numbers were $1.087 trillion and 6.8 percent of GDP. That means the deficit fell a whopping 37 percent in one year. 

This is the first sub-$1 trillion and sub-5 percent of GDP deficit since the 2008 fiscal year, which ended the very month that Lehman Brothers fell and a deep crisis set in. 

What's behind it? 

Most of all, there was more revenue. Government receipts totaled $2.774 trillion, up $325 billion from 2012, and rising to 16.7 percent of GDP from 15.2 percent. That reflects in part a stronger economy that increased income and payroll taxes. It also includes the expiration of a payroll tax holiday that increased tax receipts, and higher rates for upper-income Americans agreed to for this calendar year. 

There was less spending, amid the drawdown of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, lower unemployment insurance benefits due to an improving economy, and the enactment government enacted budget cuts called for in the 2011 debt ceiling deal, including the sequestration automatic spending cuts that began in March. Overall outlays were $3.454 trillion, the treasury said, falling $84 billion compared with the 2012 fiscal year. That fall moves government outlays from 22 percent of GDP to 20.8 percent. 

It remains true that there are longer-term challenges facing the U.S. government finances, particularly around rising health-care costs. But the reality is that much of the conversation around debt and deficits is missing this basic fact: Deficits are, for now, falling fast. If anything, too fast. Just Wednesday, the Federal Reserve concluded a policy meeting with a statement that asserted, as it has in the past, that "fiscal policy is restraining growth" and that its forecasts are "taking into account the extent of federal fiscal retrenchment over the past year." Independent economists outside the government have reached similar conclusions, and now worry that deficits will fall so fast as to undermine the recovery.