Great Recession = Labor Shortage in Wisconsin: Note: Scott Walker focused all of his attention on passing hard GOP policy theories, and not on any of the real problems facing the state's labor shortage, even while the business community sounded the alarm.
That labor shortage coming out of the Great Recession is only starting to become a problem after years of much slower increases in population...
The U.S. Census Bureau released its population change estimates for the year ending in July 2018 … the national rate of population growth is at its lowest since 1937 … declines in the number of births, gains in the number of deaths, and that the nation’s under age 18 population has declined since the 2010 census … geographic mobility within the U.S. is at a historic low … nearly a fifth of all states displayed absolute population losses over the past two years … The delayed impact of the Great Recession … the aging American population is the broader cause, a factor that the nation will have to cope with for years and decades to come.…A labor shortage not only affects employers, but a workers taxed income used to support current Medicare recipients. A big problem for retiring baby boomers:
From Sept. 2017, a few notable comments from a series of articles:
Workers Wanted: Wisconsin's Looming Crisis: Wisconsin businesses grapple with a growing worker shortage. Wisconsin is expected to need 45,000 workers in seven years but it simply lacks the people to fill them … expected to worsen over the next decade, according to Wisconsin State Journal interviews with dozens of employers, economists, advocacy group experts and state political and economic development officials. "We are right at the brink of the crisis," said Ann Franz, director of the Northeast Wisconsin Manufacturing Alliance in Green Bay. "I would call it Wisconsin's mega-issue," said Kurt Bauer, president of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which recently found 77 percent of members surveyed had difficulty finding workers, up from 53 percent two years ago.
"We have the potential of losing some of our business sector to other places where skilled labor is stronger, where there's greater population base," said Susan May, president of Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton. "The more we lose our economic base, it affects education and transportation and everything else. … It really presents a scary future for our state."
These are all symptoms screaming for attention. Believe it or not, Walker actually tried to turn lemons like this into lemonade:
"It's a good problem to have, but it's a challenge for sure," Gov. Scott Walker said in an interview.
Housing wealth in Milwaukee is being transferred to out-of-state investors: Yesterday, we found out the Great Recession resulted in this:
The Great Recession hit Milwaukee hard ... a tidal wave of foreclosures ... Simply put: Thousands of residential properties in Milwaukee are no longer owned by city residents (but) instead by individuals and companies. Housing wealth in Milwaukee is being transferred to out-of-state investors: Half of all rented properties are now owned by someone outside Milwaukee. From 2005 to 2019, suburban landlords grew 70%, from nearly 7,700 properties to more than 13,000. Landlords outside of Wisconsin quadrupled from 1,300 to more than 5,800 ... properties owned by someone outside Wisconsin grew from 77 to 573 in 2019. Landlords with Illinois addresses own more than 1,600 residential units ... Landlords in California own 1,400 units ... Texas landlords own nearly 700. Keep in mind that none of these figures includes large apartment buildings.
Build the Wall/Stop Immigration-The final Straw: Just by coincidence Trump Republicans want to shut down the border. Seriously, you couldn't devise a worse economic plan. And voters want Republicans in charge of the economy?
This leaves immigration as an ever-more-important contributor to national population growth. Because of the recent decline in natural increase, immigration now contributes nearly as much to population growth, and is projected to be the primary contributor to national population growth after 2030 as natural increase continues to decline. Thus immigration—its size and its attributes—will be an important contributor to the nation’s future population that is growing slowly and aging quickly.
Free Market Failure and the "returning over-taxation back to the people, it's their money" cliche: George W. Bush set the template with this:
In the late 1990s the federal government ran a budget surplus. The Brookings Institution called the surplus “one of the supreme budgetary accomplishments in American history.” Bush, took a clear stance on the issue:Let's hear from Bruce Bartlett, Treasury official under George H. W. Bush, about the current Trump Republican Party failure. His bottom line: Had we kept Clinton's tax policy after he left office, we would have paid off the national debt by the time George W. Bush left office. We might have had the working capital to pay for universal health care, free K through college education, tax reform, infrastructure investment...etc. But as Bartlett says, using deficits to cut spending on people, but not the military, is the ultimate goal that keeps Republicans in power:
Bush: “Today, our high taxes fund a surplus. Some say that growing federal surplus means Washington has more money to spend. But they've got it backwards. The surplus is not the government's money. The surplus is the people's money.”
While Scott Walker, a Trump supporter now, chants Bible verse suggesting he's got the higher calling while still claiming success for doing nothing, he can't erase how Trump exposed the real Walker legacy...
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