By Urban Media News
It isn’t unusual for a candidate to make promises while running for office, in fact, voters expect a concrete vision of what the candidate will do on day one if elected to office.
In 2010, Scott Walker wasn’t shy about repeating his central campaign promise early and often. Playing off the effects of the great recession, which left tens of millions of Americans unemployed across the nation, Walker promised to create 250,000 new private sector jobs if elected Governor. His promise didn’t fall on deaf ears.
Thousands of unemployed or underemployed Wisconsinites who were losing their homes and watching the dream of a middle-class life fade away took Walker’s promise to heart as a plan to get households back to work. Voters craved the prospect of good paying jobs, family-sustaining wages, the return of industries to communities like Beloit, Milwaukee, Kenosha, and Racine. Those prospects seemed tangible in Scott Walker’s promise, but four years later, Wisconsin families face more of the same issues they did when Walker first declared Wisconsin open for business.
Walker’s Wisconsin turned out to be just the opposite.
The state is dead last in Midwestern private sector job creation and trails the rest of the nation in terms of economic growth. Wisconsin isn’t coming back. Instead, it’s falling behind.
With just a handful of months left in his first term, Walker is only 40 percent of the way to what he promised.
In order to reach the stated goal, Walker would have to add an average of 36,951 jobs per month in the next four months. A highly unlikely possibility since the state has only added 8,880 jobs so far this year.
The independent fact checking organization Politifact, which has been tracking Walker’s progress since the first day he stepped into the State Capitol as its chief executive, says time has run out for the governor to make good on his promise. They now call Walker’s jobs promise a – “Promise Broken.”
Now, in the heat of the toughest election of his political career, Scott Walker is changing his tone in order to save his electoral prospects.
Walker and his administration continue to offer excuses on why the governor has come embarrassingly short on his central campaign promise.
Walker blamed foreign conflicts, offered the vague excuse of “uncertainty” in markets, criticized the best available jobs data, and even pointed to Wisconsin’s seasonal winter weather as reasons why citizens weren’t going back to work.
Walker can’t hide the truth; it rears its head every time a family has more bills than they can handle or capable graduates struggle to find wages high enough to pay off their student debts.
Walker arrived at his promise of 250,000 jobs through projecting a combination of normal economic growth, which was expected to create 119,000 jobs over four years, and recovery of the 137,000 jobs lost in the Great Recession. UW-Oshkosh professor called Walker’s promise an expectation to “let the economy get back on track, and take the credit for it.”
Walker should have been able to reach such a low bar, but his extreme policies undermined the very job growth he promised.
Walker’s strategy for job growth hasn’t worked. When you put those at the top and big special interests ahead of working and middle class families – it’s no surprise Wisconsin lags behind on job creation.
Marquette University economist Abdur Chowdhury points out the governor’s inattention to a historically vibrant and critical part of the Wisconsin economy, “One way to respond to these recent challenges is to diversify our manufacturing base,” Chowdhury said. “The state government has not paid much attention to this area.”
Manufacturing, historically the most active sector of the Wisconsin economy, only accounts for about 16 percent of employment – compared to 20 percent ten years ago. Of the top 15 manufacturing states, Wisconsin has the 12th slowest rate of growth.
Although manufacturing took a big hit during the Great Recession, many of our neighbors, Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana have posted job growth numbers above the national average despite the fact that all of their economies depend heavily on manufacturing.
To ignore such an important sector of the Wisconsin economy should be a signal to Wisconsin that Scott Walker never had a proven strategy for job growth. His 2010 promise was one that he never truly intended to keep.
Now it’s those same voters who have to survive in Walker’s Wisconsin where another 4,300 jobs were lost just this past August.
During his 2010 campaign, Walker claimed that he “absolutely” wanted to be held to his 250,000 new jobs promise.
Now, with his promise to Wisconsin broken, the failure to create jobs should be placed squarely on Walker’s shoulders.
