Economy

“In Wisconsin, we don’t make excuses, we get results,” said Governor Walker as quoted by the Associated Press. The governor was unveiling his $75 million budget initiative earlier this year to economic development professionals across the state.

While the new dollars are still being the debated, the spending of existing economic development dollars recently took center stage among Legislators.

The Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB) released a stinging indictment of mismanagement and poor oversight at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). The audit reviewed 30 economic development programs during the 2011-12 fiscal year. WEDC awarded $41.3 million in grants, $20.5 million in loans, provided $110.8 million in tax credits to businesses and individuals, and authorized local government to issue $346.4 million in bonds.

Auditors found not a single job created by this investment was verified by WEDC. More than half of the required reports had not even filed by businesses receiving assistance. Without evidence it was impossible for auditors to determine if contractually specified performance, including required job creation, ever happened.

 In page after page of the 120-page report auditors outlined management failures and violations of current law.

“Why don’t these numbers add up?” the school board member asked me. He was looking at the summary tables on dollars for schools in the new state budget. “Because numbers are missing,” I told him, realizing there are a lot of missing numbers.

The Legislature is given a 519 page “summary” of the budget to consider but nowhere can you find numbers to compare this year’s budget requests for particular programs to dollars actually spent under the previous budget.

There are no numbers clearly showing the increases or decreases in each individual program. There are no numbers showing what was accomplished by the spending.

As we begin our celebration of Christmas it may be approiate to look at the world in general to see how far we have moved from the teachings of Jesus Christ regarding the poor among us and the difficulty of a rich person to enter the gates of heaven.

As an exercise, I compared the net worth of othe four richest members of the Walton family with the Gross Domestic Product of the there Baltic Statess; Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.  It ia an unteresting comparison.

Net Worth of Four Richest Waltons (Forbes 2011)

Christy Walton:        $24.5Billion

Jim Walton:             $21.1Billion

Alice Walton:            $20.9Billion

S. B. Walton             $20.5Billion

Total:                      $87.0Billion

Now, lets look at the GDP of the three Baltic States (World Bank 2010)

Like a lot of people these days, we have come to the conclusion that it’s time to change our lousy bank.

And it wasn’t even like we chose badly, either – we were customers of Washington Mutual for almost two decades, and we loved ‘em: they were nice people to deal with, they didn’t constantly hammer you every time you came in to the branch with desperate sales pitches, and they didn’t even charge you for using another bank’s cash machines.

It turns out, however, that all that beneficence came at a cost: WaMu made a lot of money making sketchy mortgage loans, and when it all came crashing down, we found ourselves customers of JPMorgan Chase, who we now hate with the fire of a thousand suns.

But it turns out choosing a new bank ain’t all that easy – and that’s where you come into today’s conversation.

We gotta grow some jobs, and that’s a fact, and we probably aren’t going to be able to do it with big ol’ jobs programs funded by the Federal Government, what with today’s politics and all, and that means if this Administration wants to stay in the jobs game they’re going to have to find some smaller and more creative ways to do it.

They are also going to have to come up with ideas that are pretty much “bulletproof”, meaning that they are so hard to object to that even Allen West and Louie Gohmert will not want to be on record saying “no no no!”; alternatively, solutions that work around the legislative process entirely could represent the other form of “bulletproof-ery”.

Well, I have one of those “maybe bulletproof” ideas for you today, and it has to do with how “Made in USA” the things are that our Government buys.

The archer sees the mark along the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows might go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he loves also the bow that is stable.

--From “The Prophet”, by Kahlil Gibran

Even Rep. John Boehner (R-Orange) thinks it would be a bad idea for the US to default on its debt payments, but Ryan says it's no big deal.

Could it be that Ryan and the GOP really want the economy to tank before the 2012 elections so they can blame Obama and the Dems? It certainly worked last year.

In other news, Ryan has vowed to continue the work of the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Andy Borowitz has details.

If you cannot make it to Stevens Point today for the Joint Finance Committee hearing regarding the proposed budget you can watch it live here. 

There’s a lot of ways to be petty and cheap and stupid, and a lot of ways to stick it to a program you don’t like, and by extension, the clients of that program…and this week the House Republicans have embarked on an effort to combine the two into one petty, cheap, and stupid way to stick it to the clients of Social Security and the workers who administer the program.

They’re going to sell it to you, if they can, as a way to “lower the deficit”, or words similar…but what this is really about is making the actual Social Security program work less well—because, after all, if a program is popular today, the best way to make it less so is to apply a bit of “treat ‘em like their cars were impounded” to every interaction customers have with the system.

And what better way to make sure that happens…then to aggressively demoralize everyone who works down at the ol’ Social Security office?