By State Representative, Leon D. Young
Leon D. Young
A funny thing happened to me last week. I began receiving a series of very expensive-looking campaign mailings from the Republican Party of Wisconsin of all people, extolling the political accomplishments of Scott Walker – after one year in office.
As you might expect, this campaign literature was rife with bogus claims and outright lies. For instance, Mr. Walker alleges that from 2008 to 2010, Wisconsin lost over 150,000 jobs. That may or may not be the case, but let’s put that “figure” into some historical context. That period was the height of the greatest economic downtown in this country since the Great Depression – most states, if not all, were hemorrhaging jobs in record numbers. What’s even more telling is the fact that Wisconsin lost over 11,000 jobs in November and 3,900 in December on Mr. Walker’s watch, at the same time when there were 212,000 new jobs created in the private sector nationally just last month.
Mr. Walker’s campaign pieces contain some other scurrilous assertions like how he wiped out a $3.6 billion budget deficit without raising taxes. But,in typical Walker fashion, he conveniently neglects to mention that he took over $300 million from the UW System, and savagely cut more than one billion dollars from public education (K-12) — while extracting additional cuts on the backs of the poor, the elderly, the infirmed, the young and hard-working middle-class families in our state.
In these propaganda ads, Scott Walker also takes issue with the “do-nothing” Congress in Washington and its inability to act on the $15 trillion national debt. He attempts to draw a stark contrast between the gridlock in Washington, and his own success in “doing something about out-of-control spending” in Wisconsin . But, once again, Mr. Walker refuses to tell the true story that he usurped the collective bargaining rights of most state workers and that his persistent political overreach has triggered over 1 million disgruntled residents to sign petitions to have him recalled.
Mr. Walker has been making the rounds trying to raise money to fight the mounting recall effort against him. He recently garnered $4.5 million in the last five weeks and you can rest assured that more out-of-state money will be pouring in to try to save this beleaguered governor.
Mr. Walker has said that he welcomes the opportunity to speak with the people of Wisconsin. If that were true, he wouldn’t be facing a recall election and those political footsteps wouldn’t be getting louder.