Walker's Health Care Malpractice

When Scott Walker said he was going to do his own thing with the health care exchanges and eschewed federal funding to help expand Medicaid coverage in the state, you just knew he was going to bollox things up, and wow, did he ever:

The White House Council of Economic Advisers' report found that expansion in Wisconsin would mean coverage for an additional 120,000 people by 2016. The number of people facing catastrophic out-of-pocket costs would drop by 5,400 annually and the number of people borrowing to pay medical bills or skipping payments on medical bills would drop by 17,100.

Expansion would lead to 11,200 additional jobs in Wisconsin by 2017 and $2.6 billion in additional federal spending in the state between 2014 and 2016, the report said.

Of course, Walker denies all of this and said that the report was about those other states that didn't expand Medicaid, not Wisconsin.

Yeah, right.

This news comes at the same time that it is being reported that the state is facing a $93 million shortfall. The reason that Walker's administration gave for the shortfall, which more than quadrupled since March, was because there are more poor people applying. Needless to say, the reason for the increase in poor people is because Walkernomics is predictably not working.

Walker's administration is trying to deal with this shortfall in his usual method - delaying, if not outright denying, needed services.  The time that the state is taking in authorizing requests have grown almost as exponentially as the shortfall.  The process time for requests through the state Medicaid system has gone from two months to more than six months.  And many times, those requests end up being denied anyway for the most trivial of reasons.

Failure to create jobs, denying and/or delaying services to people that need them and running up a deficit when federal funding is there for the takings....

Walker's train wreck of a health care system reminds me more than a bit of the wreck Walker caused by shunning high speed rail which would have helped create jobs and bring a lot of much needed funding to the state.

About That "Surplus"...

In what I am sure was a inadvertent moment of truth, the Teapublicans and the Bradley Foundation-sponsored front group MacIver have accidentally spilled the beans about what we had known all along:

Walker never did fix the deficit like he claimed to have done.

The surplus that somehow miraculously appeared when his internal polling came back not looking so good, isn't really a surplus.  It's nothing more than the money he didn't spend to pay the bills, which, by the way, the taxpayers are still on the hook for. Plus interest.

The Walker Budget Is Already Working! Part LXXII

Gee, who didn't see this one coming?

First, Scott Walker takes gives every public sector worker in the state a massive pay cut, thereby reducing their income and hence the amount they pay in income tax.  

On top of that, the public sector workers have their personal budgets cut to the breaking point, meaning they have a lot less buying power and thus are not spending as much.  This leads to a predictable cut in sales tax revenue for the state.

This then leads to ripple effects, where local businesses that depend on people's discretionary spending start feeling the pinch and end up laying off people or closing up shop, leaving everyone out of work.

And if that wasn't enough, Walker's "pro-business climate" is turning out to be anything but that, and the state loses nearly 50,000 jobs in the first six months that Walker's budget has been in effect.  What is obvious to everyone but Walker and his apologists is that all of these laid off people also aren't going to be paying as much in income tax or sales tax, thereby keeping the downward spiral continuing.

Eventually all of that money that's no longer being spent, since he gave it all to big corporations that only use it to enhance their profit margin, will come back to have a very bad effect on the state budget.

That day of reckoning came today.

The State Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported that this loss of revenue is causing the state to lose $216 million dollars when compared to previous projections.  That means that Walker's "balanced budget" is facing a deficit of $143 million.

And amazingly, Walker continues on with the same worn out cliche that "Wisconsin is headed in the right direction."  

When I heard that line, the first thought that I had, and still have, is that of when John McCain, running for the President of the United States, said that the "economy is fundamentally sound" as the Lehman Brothers went belly up, the stock market started to crash and the full impact of the Great Recession was being felt.

I hope Walker has the same success with his gaffe as McCain did with his.

Then once Walker is ousted, maybe the real healing could begin.

State Wars

With many states being under new management, or in Wisconsin's case, new manglement, there is a shuffling of stances and various states playing different hands while trying to take on their own state's fiscal mess.

In Illinois, their solution was to raise taxes. Goobernator Scott Walker jumped on the news and started touting how Illinois businesses should immediately relocate to Wisconsin. He was hammering away on how taxes in Illinois went up by 66%. All the conservative blogs were crowing about this as was the radio squawkers.

One thing that kept going through my mind whenever I heard someone else chirp in about how businesses were going to just come flocking over the border is wondering why they only mentioned the 66% statistic. Knowing how Walker likes to worm his way around the facts, I smelled a rat. Well, a weasel, actually.

Ironically, it was Walker himself who gave me the answer I was looking for. In a rare act of journalism, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel actually reported this:

Speaking to reporters in Madison, Walker acknowledged tax rates will remain lower in Illinois than in Wisconsin even after the increase is approved. But he promised he would lower Wisconsin's income and corporate tax rates before his term ends in 2015, though he stopped short of saying he would seek to set them below the rates in Illinois.

"If you're a company, you make an assessment not just on where things are today but where they're headed," Walker said.

Comparing taxes between different states can be tricky, but Wisconsin's corporate tax rate is 7.9% and its income tax rates vary from 4.6% to 7.75%, depending on the taxpayer's income. The legislation waiting to be signed by Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, would raise the state's corporate tax rate to 7% from 4.8% and raise the state's income tax to 5% from 3%.

He never did get around to explaining exactly why a business would come flocking to a state with higher taxes. Ah, but don't worry. Walker said he would lower Wisconsin's taxes...someday.

But since he mentioned about how companies look to where things are headed, he gave Wisconsin another dolorous blow. USA Today looked at the same question, but it does not come up in our favor:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, invited Illinois businesses to relocate to his state, but J. Fred Giertz, a University of Illinois economics professor, says an immediate exodus isn't likely.

Companies, he says, weigh workforce availability, transportation and other factors when deciding where to build or expand. "Our state is close to insolvency, and they don't like that either," he says.

"An immediate job killer? Not likely," says Ed Morrison, economic policy adviser at Indiana's Purdue Center for Regional Development. "Much more important is regaining financial stability."

Well, in the couple months since the election, most of which was before he even was sworn into office, Walker has killed off HSR and before that has shown he is no friend of mass transit. With less transit options, it will be harder for workers to get to the jobs. If you don't believe me, just talk to Bucyrus CEO Tim Sullivan and other business leaders.

A business leader could also see that the maneuvers of Walker and the Republican legislature is doing little to cut taxes, even less than that to create jobs, but is escalating the whole budget deficit problem.

Altogether, it's not a pretty picture.

But it only getting worse.

Joining in the State Wars is Minnesota. They are trying to improve their fiscal situation by collecting on debts owed to them, like the nearly $60 million that Wisconsin owes them. And if Walker tries to stall payment until midyear, which he probably will, it goes up another million dollars in interest.

So, taxes staying the same (namely higher than most of our neighbors), deficit ballooning, failing transit system, and a government run amok with their antisocial agenda.

Yeah, I can just see the businesses coming in any second now. But you'll have to excuse me if I don't hold my breath waiting for them.