Walker Sitting on Job Numbers That Almost Certainly Prove He's Lying

Gov. Scott Walker has a secret. And he's not sharing it with you. At least, not immediately. He'll have to sometime, but there's this whole big recall thing going on here in Wisconsin and now would be a bad time. After the election he'll break the bad news.

See, Walker was getting a lot of flack for sucking at job creation. His numbers were the worst in the nation. Then, he dug up different numbers -- mostly meaningless and almost certainly inaccurate numbers no one else uses -- and everything was great. Wisconsin had added 23,000 jobs since he took office, Walker declared, despite the fact that the number was an estimate based on a very slim handful of data. Needless to say, a lot of people were unconvinced.

For example, PolitiFact rated Walker's claim mostly false. Here they explain the problem:

The 2011 numbers are based on the jobs census, which covers about 95% of employers. They are deemed more accurate than the monthly numbers, which are based on a survey sample of about 3.5% of employers, then extrapolated to get a state number...

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When Republicans Say They Can't Create Jobs, Maybe We Should Believe Them

If you cut government spending, it helps the economy, right?

That's what Republicans keep telling us, but it's hard to see how this can possibly be true. The economy is spending. Government spending is demand. Reduce demand and boost the economy? It makes no sense.

And now we have a real world example of how cutting government spending, as Republicans argue, builds a gangbusters economy. As always, reality has a liberal bias.

Associated Press:

Conservative Republicans have long clamored for government downsizing. They're starting to get it -- by default.

Crippled by plunging tax revenues, state and local governments have shed over a half million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. And, after adding jobs early in the downturn, the federal government is now cutting them as well.

States cut 49,000 jobs over the past year and localities 210,000, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics. There are 30,000 fewer federal workers now than a year ago -- including 5,300 Postal Service jobs canceled last month.

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Louie Gohmert's Brainless and Typically Republican Jobs Plan

By now, it should be obvious to even the most casual observer that Rep. Louie Gohmert is not burdened with the curse of genius. In fact, while there may be a lot of competition for the title of Dumbest Member of Congress, Gohmert is definitely a frontrunner. This is the guy who came up with the ridiculous "terror babies" conspiracy theory, who argued that President Obama was in league with the Muslim Brotherhood, and that passage of hate crimes legislation would lead to Nazism, legalization of necrophilia, pedophilia, and bestiality. This is one underachieving mind.

So it should come as no surprise that he has idiotic ideas about what will and won't create jobs. In a headline-chasing maneuver, Gohmert filed a bill titled the "American Jobs Act" before Democrats filed the President's bill by the same name. So now dems can't pass Obama's bill -- unless they change the name to something like "American Employment Act" or the "Jobs for America Act." That should really set them back about thirty seconds. What a crippling blow from a procedural grandmaster.

But it's not Gohmert's pointless poaching of the title that's so demonstrative of his idiocy -- although it's not a bad one. It's his bill itself. Two whole pages legislation is all it takes to get America back to work, according to Gohmert. And it's what's in this simplistic legislation that shows the true depth of Representative Gohmert's intellectual capacity.

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Obama Jobs Plan Modest, Already Compromised

If early reports of President Obama's job speech are accurate and the choice for reinvigorating the economy is "go big or go home," it's looking like the President has opted to go home. As Paul Krugman pointed out a few days ago, the problem with the initial stimulus package wasn't that it was ineffective, but that it was too small to repair all of the damage caused by the Bush crash. In short, it may have saved us from a depression, but that's about all it was capable of doing.

So never let it be said that this administration is capable of ignoring past mistakes. If at first you don't succeed, try again -- fail better. When you need a hoist to lift the economy, get a stepladder and hope for the best. Still, it's not all bad.

Associated Press:

According to people familiar with the White House deliberations, two of the biggest measures in the president's proposals for 2012 are expected to be a one-year extension of a payroll tax cut for workers and an extension of expiring jobless benefits. Together those two would total about $170 billion.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan was still being finalized and some proposals could still be subject to change.

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The GOP Agenda: Drive Down Job Growth, Depress Wages

Some time yesterday, I decided that I would write about the GOP's anti-jobs agenda today. So I'm swinging through my feeds last night and I come across this -- MSNBC's Rachel Maddow stole my thunder.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Let Robert Frank's final words from that interview be what you take away here; that the GOP's focus on the deficit to the detriment of employment is a "criminal misdiagnosis of the problem." I'd add that's a deliberate misdiagnosis.

I'm going to disagree with Maddow on one point; yes, the Republicans' efforts to kill jobs will hurt President Obama in the elections -- but no, that's not the only reason they're trying to strangle off job growth everywhere it rears its head. This is, to a much larger degree, about cheap labor.

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I'm Sticking With the Union

This is the extent of my morning post today. I'm hitting the streets with a few thousand of my fellow Wisconsinites.

WISC-TV, Madison:

Public and private sector union leaders in Wisconsin are coming together to oppose Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to take away collective bargaining rights for nearly all public employees in the state and force them to pay more for their pensions and health insurance.

Union leaders at a news conference on Monday said ending collective bargaining will weaken the middle class in Wisconsin. They are urging Walker to instead resume negotiations with the unions. Thousands of union members were expected to converge on the Capitol on Tuesday for a hearing.

Wisconsin State Journal:

"It is very possible that if the vote goes against public employees, we will witness something that hasn't happened since the 70s: massive strikes," [Mike Sacco, president of the WLEA local that represents UW and Capitol cops] writes. "This may be the only way to fight this 'wartime' mentality of the state. Only with mass unity of the teachers and all other public employees will we be able to beat back this aggression by the governor's office."

While I'm not a public employee, this just plain ain't right. These are good people and good workers. They've been loyal employees and when their employer treats them like crap, someone has to stand up for them. Especially in this case, where the people of Wisconsin are the employer.

Scott Walker may think it's fun to be a lousy, tyrannical boss. But I don't. I'm going out to stand with my employees.

-Wisco


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