Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Walker's Found A New Gaffe

Apparently painting himself into a corner by having to decide if he was going to break his promise to create jobs or to break his promise of stopping high speed rail, wasn't good enough for Goobernator-elect Scott Walker and his transition team.

Now Walker et alia have decided to go for a record time for the most flip flops.

Walker, as Milwaukee County Executive, actively opposed even allowing a referendum on whether the county should be allowed to raise the sales tax as a source for dedicated funding for the parks and the transit systems. In return, people would have had their property tax reduced. After he lost the fight and the referendum was approved by the citizens, he called the voters stupid.

This morning, one of Walker's top guys of his transition team, floated out the trial balloon of the state increasing their sales tax by 2 or even 2.5%:

A key member of Gov.-elect Scott Walker's transition team is floating an increase in Wisconsin's sales tax as a way to stimulate the economy and create jobs.

Former state budget director Rick Chandler says hiking the sales tax from 5 percent to 7 or 7.5 percent would allow the state to reduce income and property taxes, which rank among the highest in the nation.

My, doesn't that sound familiar?

Well, as you can imagine, it this trial balloon fell like a hunk of lead as people became alarmed that Walker wasn't really who he portrayed himself to be, the worker of miracles with pixie dust and a glib tongue.

Things got so bad that his transition team, instead of creating jobs, had to once again go into damage control mode, claiming that his aide was speaking independently and going for plausible deniability. He even had to call upon his top apologists to help spin away the brunt of the people's anger.

Even with that, people started questioning their decision to support him.

Now, I don't think that they thought this would really fly. But they did lay the ground work for two possible courses of action. His Republican allies could decide to allow a smaller sales tax to pass and blame it on the Democrats or they Walker could decide to go with the use of fees and other similar non-tax taxes.

Either way, I am sure he will find a way to get his tax cuts to his wealthy friends and sticking it to the working class.

Again, I have to ask: Is it too soon to start saying "I told you so"?

3 comments:

  1. Too bad we can't have someone perform James Brown's "Pappa's Got a Brand New Bag" to the words "Walker's Got a Brand New Gaffe."

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  3. A little early to have been hitting the sauce, isn't it?

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