Your Tax Dollars At Work - Boss Abele Style

Just happened to see this on Facebook:

I'm curious as to why Boss Abele thinks it's a good use of our tax dollars to promote his Facebook page?  

And why is he kissing up to Wauwatosa? Is it so they approve what he and his House of Lords at the Greater Milwaukee Committee plan on doing with the land that the mental health hospital is on?

"Not Just for me personally"

Governor Walker released "new " jobs numbers for Wisconsin today that made it look like he was actually doing his job. However, we @ cog_dis showed you how he is just playing a shell game with the numbers and no matter how he does it, we are dead last in the nation in job creation. Walker is using numbers that no other state in our union are using.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics survey is more widely used, but Walker points out it is a poll, whereas the Department of Workforce Development figures are hard numbers. However, it is highly unusual to use the DWD numbers, according to Marquette University’s Economics Department chairman Abdur Chowdhury. “No other state in the union uses that data. Usually what states do is go with the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The reason Scott Walker wants to use this data is it’s obviously more favorable to his administration,” Chowdhury said.

The thing is to get these new numbers, is fairly labor intensive by the Department of Workforce Development(DWD). Why would the DWD and Governor Walker spend the taxpayer time and money to come up with new numbers, when Scott Walker himself has held press conferences touting the wonders of the old way to track unemployment? Like so many other issues, to find out why these things happen you have to listen to the words of Scott Walker himself. at Approximately 1:10 into this news report Scott Walker tells us why he has had the DWD using taxpayer funds and public service man hours, to come up with these new numbers. To help his campaign of course.

"Thats good news, not just for me personally..."

Hmm do we have the Department of Workforce Development to find good news for Scott Walker's campaign? is that a legal and productive use of public money and services? or could that time maybe be used for something more productive? Maybe using taxpayer money to fund his campaigns is all that he knows?

The Walker Budget Is Already Working! Part XXXVIII

Scott Walker said many times how he was going to use his laser sharp focus (read: weasel beady-eyed gaze) on creating jobs by taking our money and giving it to his campaign donors businesses.  So how's that working? Not so good, actually:

About 60 percent of Wisconsin businesses that completed tax credit programs tied to job creation during the past five years actually hired as many people as they expected, according to a Wausau Daily Herald analysis of state data.

Of the 191 other businesses still active in the programs, just 8 percent so far have created the required number of jobs to earn the credits, the review shows.

Nine of 15 businesses that completed state tax credit contracts since 2007 met the hiring goal, according to the records. Two of the 15 businesses in the programs did not create a single new job in five years, and four others fell short of the goal.

Economic development experts and business leaders -- including some who received the incentives -- said the state tax credits alone don't spur new jobs. Instead, job creation still boils down to a simple premise: Increased demand for a strong company's product or service drives hiring.

Yeah. And the only way you can create demand is if the people have the money to buy said product or service. Walker made sure that didn't happen when he took our money away.

Have you signed a recall petition yet?

Liberal Agenda Saves Money

Having worked in the mental health/social work field for a couple of decades, I know all too well that one of the favorite targets at tax cutting time is social programs. The vitriol coming from the right wing about these programs is overwhelming at times.

They would rather cut every single social program in the interest of "saving tax payer money" so that they can keep the tax cuts for the rich to become richer. But they never once look at the cost of their spending cuts.

A fine example of this is a story that recently appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The story is about a type of group home, or halfway house, that opened in Seattle. The program was called the 1811 program, and it was subjected to a lot of controversy, open skepticism and years of protests. The reason for the controversy was that it provided housing and services, but did not demand total sobriety from the residents.

The result of this program, when is was finally allowed to launch, was remarkable (emphasis mine):

Porter's progress is echoed in a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study, led by a University of Washington researcher, found that the once-controversial 1811 program -- which provides housing and services without demanding sobriety -- saved taxpayers more than $4 million in one year.

[...]

Researchers followed 95 chronically homeless alcoholics, who, before moving into the home, had run up a taxpayer bill of $8.2 million in hospitalizations, emergency services, jail time and sobering center visits.

After one year of being in the program, the same group cost taxpayers only $4 million, the study found. Each resident also drank less the longer they lived in the home, and their toll on publicly funded programs decreased as time went on.

[...]

Larimer also compared residents against a control group of 39 homeless alcoholics on a wait-list to get into the home. She found that the residents, after six months of being in the home, cost taxpayers 50 percent less than the wait-listed group.

I can understand why some people would be against the idea of using tax payer dollars to house alcoholics and drug addicts, especially if they are not required to be clean. But the simple fact of the matter is that these people would continue to use whether the housing was provided or not, and that would cost the taxpayers a lot more than this program does.

The same principal applies to the mentally ill. If you take away some of these people's most basic concerns and stressors, like exposure to inclement weather or extreme hunger, they are able to focus on other parts of their lives, reducing their need to use alcohol and drugs, and hopefully become productive citizens again.

Unfortunately, it makes for a sexier and easier to understand soundbite for a politician to act tough on these souls, than to do the right thing.

Minneapolis, Wisconsin

JSOnline has a fluffy piece about another bureaucratic flub, in which the state's new website for campaign finance information has the Capitol building superimposed on the skyline of Minneapolis.

But it turns out to be much, much more of an outrage. From Dan Cody:

For all the recent negative publicity that MPS has received because they SPENT $20,000 ON IPODS!! you’d think a million dollars for a web site with slightly more functionality than my weblog would raise a few eyebrows. Maybe the media couldn’t think of a catchy enough headline for that story. Who knows.

Secondly, if we’re going to be spending that kind of money on a information portal to serve the people of Wisconsin, why the heck isn’t the contract going to one of the many many qualified companies here in Wisconsin to do the work? Off the top of my head I can name at least five companies here in Milwaukee alone who could do the work faster, better and you better believe it: cheaper.

Instead, we’re paying some obscure company from Connecticut a million dollars to develop a mediocre web site that they’re apparently so dedicated to they don’t even bother to use the right stock images for something as simple as the header graphic. Hardly the kind of behavior that instills confidence in the final product or justifies the mammoth price tag, isn’t it?

Read the rest here. It is the height of being cognitive and dissedent, and explains why he has a gagillion readers, and I have 6.4.