I recorded it because it was worthwhile watching twice and showing it to my husband. The best part was he was talking about the economic recovery of the state. F Chuck tried to paint him as a failure.
Here are my favorite parts, sans Todd’s leading questions.
re: That he can’t seem to get above ONLY a 53% win.
“Our state’s a blue state historically, it’s been a blue state. We can’t win without independents. We won, again, with double digit votes from independent voters. And probably one of the most exciting things for me was 18 to 24 year olds was statistically essentially a tie. So we reached out to young voters, not just traditional voters, who were voting our way. “
re:Can WI ecominic model work elsewhere
“Well, I think in our case, certainly we had a little bit of a slow down early on with the protest. But in the last year, we saw the best from September to September, the best private-sector job growth we’ve seen in more than a decade. Our unemployment rate’s down from 9.2% in 2010 down to 5.5%”
re:ste revenue going down
“No, that’s just the opposite. The reason revenues are down is because we cut withholding. Withholding at the state and the federal level level is where the government takes more of your money than you actually owe them and holds onto them without getting you interest. We cut that in April. So we anticipated that reduction of revenue because we gave the hardworking taxpayers more money back. And that $1.8 billion is based on a projection of no growth and no changes to the budget. That just doesn’t happen.
In our case, if we have the average of the last five years of revenue growth, we actually have the next budget starting with more than a half a billion dollars in surplus.”
re: not taking Medicaid like Kasich did
“No. From our standpoint, we did something unique, unlike just about any other state in the country. For the first time ever, not a person in our state is on a waiting list for people living in poverty. They all have access to healthcare through Medicaid, but those living above it are transitioned into the marketplace and we don’t put our taxpayers at risk. I mean, think about it. States that have taken the Medicaid expansion are betting on the fact that the Congress and the president, who can’t deal with the $17 trillion are going to magically somehow come up with new money. They haven’t paid that money for Medicaid even to the states as we speak.”
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Good catch. A lot of that is from Walker’s stump speech which he gave to every gathering willing to listen. The news media and his opponent tried to paint a very negative picture of the state of the state. It’s clear that the voters kenew the difference.