The Facts around Walker Jobs Claim and Promise not to Raise Taxes..

As I've been saying all along, and the media rarely brings it up, Scott Walker is misleading voters when he included the Great Recession's job losses as a Tom Barrett problem. This isn't a new tactic either, he did the same thing to Gov. Jim Doyle. Didn't you know, Doyle caused the global crisis. For whatever reason, Republicans have been using this twofer against the Democrats, and getting elected. 

Just for the record, here are a few stats I thought you might want to have handy, from FactCheck on April 26, 2012:

Shoveling the bullshit

In his ad, Walker says in the three years before he took office, “Wisconsin lost 150,000 jobs” … It’s true that Wisconsin lost nearly 150,000 jobs in the three years before he took office. More precisely, Wisconsin lost 145,000 between January 2008 and December 2010, the month before Walker took office. The entire country was reeling from the recession, and the percentage of jobs lost in Wisconsin mirrored the percentage of jobs lost nationally (both losing a little more than 5 percent).

Now, for the second part of Walker’s claim, that “since the start of the year, Wisconsin has added thousands of new jobs.” Do you see what he’s done there? Walker has skipped entirely over 2011, his first year in office … Between January and February, Wisconsin added 10,100 jobs. But then the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Wisconsin lost 4,500 jobs in March. So now, there’s been a net gain of 5,600 jobs in 2012. But if you look at the jobs picture since Walker took office, Wisconsin has lost a net 14,200 jobs. In fact, Wisconsin has lagged behind the rest of the country in the recovery. From January 2011 to January 2012, Wisconsin lost a net 12,700 jobs. According to a review by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, that was the worst performance among all 50 states.

Walker: “We wiped out a $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes.”

Walker’s claim is also dubious … did Walker balance the budget without raising taxes? Walker did not propose any general tax increases, and he implemented several corporate tax reductions. But his claim that he didn’t raise taxes is not entirely true. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau labelled two tax credit reductions as tax increases. One measure reduced the earned income tax credit for people with two or more children, a change projected to net the state an added $56.2 million over two years. Another reduced the homestead tax credit, bringing the state $13.6 million over two years. Walker argued those were spending cuts, not tax increases. But suffice to say, those who got those credits before, and don’t now, probably consider them to be tax increases. Walker also raised tens of millions of dollars by increasing a number of fees.