"Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has just announced that he will run for President of the United States in 2016. Of course his campaign kickoff commercial is riddled with lies, but since he announced during peak Trumpamania, the real question right now is does anyone care?"
July 14, 2015

The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz and Ana Kasparian take a look at Scott Walker's campaign kickoff ad, which is riddled with lies and a recent article from The Hill where they did a bit of fact checking on his record as governor in Wisconsin.

I've got my issues with the publication, one being that even though so much of their content is non-partisan, they look like they refuse to monitor or clean up their comments section on the site, which regularly reads like some of the what we'd see on sites like Free Republic or some of the worst of the right wing blogs on the net. I don't know if they're too cheap to pay for site monitors or if they just don't care and welcome the hateful dialog you see over there, but the results are the same either way, so that doesn't matter much.

That said, I'll give them credit, as Cenk and his crew did as well, for allowing this editorial to be run, which took an honest look at Walker's record in Wisconsin and what the voters can expect if heaven forbid somehow this man manages to wind up being elected president.

A closer look at Wisconsin’s economy under Gov. Scott Walker:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is looking for a new job but, unfortunately, so are too many of his constituents.

After running on the promise to create 250,000 new private sector jobs by the end of his first term, Walker didn’t just fail to meet this goal, he failed miserably, creating barely half of his promised amount.Walker has implemented a failed economic strategy, based on basic and failed Republican economic principals, that has left Wisconsin lagging behind peer states.

Even just a glance at economic metrics in Wisconsin tells a story of stifled job growth, ballooning deficits, and a shrinking middle class.

When looking for reasons why Walker may have failed so miserably at creating jobs in Wisconsin, the obvious place to look would be his flagship job creation agency: The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). WEDC, which Walker chaired, gave out taxpayer-funded loans to hundreds of companies in the hopes of spurring growth. But the jobs Walker promised never materialized. Instead, in an epic display of mismanagement, WEDC lost track of millions of dollars in loans, gave awards to ineligible businesses, and has generally been a poor steward of taxpayers’ money.

In terms of job growth, Wisconsin has consistently trailed the national average. In fact, Wisconsin only saw 1.5 percent private-sector job growth in 2014. Unfortunately for Wisconsinites, while this is the best job creation number Walker has seen throughout his entire time in office, it lags far behind the national growth rate of 2.6 percent.

But none of this should come as a surprise. Instead of fulfilling his promise to create jobs, Walker has chosen to prioritize attacking public workers and teachers. All this did was create a culture of polarization that has divided his state to the core.

How big a failure have Walkernomics been? Just look next door at Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton’s Minnesota, which leads Wisconsin in almost every economic indicator.

In Minnesota, Dayton turned a $5 billion budget deficit into an over $1 billion budget surplus in just one term. By requiring the wealthiest earners to pay their fair share, Minnesota is now in a position to invest more resources into the state’s schools and infrastructure.

In Wisconsin, Walker was unable to take his state out of the red and faced a $2 billion budget deficit. Walker made the decision to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, while slashing education funding and refusing to make investments that would benefit middle class families and Wisconsin’s financial wellbeing.

In Minnesota, Dayton has moved forward Democratic policies like increasing the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, and investing in the middle class, and now we are seen as one of the most business friendly states in the country. Just this year, Forbes ranked Minnesota as the 9th best state for business and careers, 7th in economic climate and 2nd in quality of life. On top of all that, CNBC just ranked Minnesota the country’s top state for business in 2015.

In Wisconsin, Walker refuses to raise the minimum wage and equal pay legislation, rejected federal funds to expand Medicaid, and attacked Wisconsin workers with right to work legislation and anti-collective bargaining policies. As a result, the cost of doing business in Wisconsin is higher than the national average, and median household income in Wisconsin is thousands of dollars less than it is in Minnesota. Read on...

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