Christian Yelich's last 14 plate appearances:
— Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) September 30, 2018
Three-run homer
Walk
Walk
Walk
Walk
Walk
Two-run homer
Walk
Walk
Strikeout
Walk
Two-run homer
Strikeout
Solo homer
The House on Wednesday evening passed an $853 billion spending bill that does not include money for President Donald Trump’s border wall, but he indicated he would sign it anyway.
“We’re going to keep the government open,” he said after a photo opportunity in New York City, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly.
That decision means Trump will finish the first half of his term failing to make any progress on his campaign’s most famous promise: the construction of a wall along the southwestern border. For the year and a half of his campaign, he vowed he would build a 30-foot-tall concrete wall and would force Mexico to pay for it....
From that point forward, Trump has been occasionally issuing angry statements on Twitter about the Republican-led Congress not giving him wall money, threatening a veto of a spending bill that fails to fund the wall and — alternatively — falsely claiming that the wall was already under construction.
But given an opportunity to make good on his veto threats, Trump has backed down and instead appears to be going along with congressional Republican leaders’ advice not to shut down the government just weeks before the midterm elections.
...when faced with the opportunity this week to veto the legislation that didn’t provide any money for his wall and actually to shut down the government, Trump ran from the fight he had been threatening so loudly for so long. While he was 250 miles away from Capital Hill in New York, Trump meekly said he would avoid the confrontation with Congress and sign whatever he was sent.Like with a lot of other Republicans (hi, Scott Walker!), Donald Trump can't seem to connect his big talk to actual policy that can work in the real world without wrecking a lot of other stuff in the process.
In other words, Donald Trump is a federal budget wuss.
This was a not strategic retreat by the White House. If anything, it’s going to be even harder for Trump to get what he wants on spending and taxes in a lame duck session than it was before. This was his best chance.
This is especially true of funding for his wall. Congress has already refused multiple times to provide the funds Trump wants and that isn’t likely to change after the election. That’s particularly true if the Democratic wave many are predicting actually happens and Trump’s policies become even less important to Republicans.
It’s also true of Trump’s other budget priorities. The two “minibus” appropriations that Trump’s signature will enact will provide funding for the full fiscal year and include the majority of the spending the president gets to approve. Trump simply won’t be able to have that much of an impact on what’s left even if he tries.
The unemployment rate is equal to the number of unemployed people as a percentage of the entire labor force. In order to be part of the labor force, a person must be working or seeking work. (When a person stops seeking work, that person is no longer counted as unemployed or as a member of the labor force.) Whenever the percentage growth in employment exceeds the percentage growth in the labor force, the unemployment rate falls.
Thus, it is possible to have weak employment growth and still have a drop in the unemployment rate—provided that growth in the labor force is even weaker.
This has been the Wisconsin route. From December 2007 to August 2018, employment in Wisconsin has increased by 4.7%—well below the national growth rate of 6.3%. However, Wisconsin’s labor force growth has been even more anemic: 2.9% versus a national rate of 5.1%. The relatively weak job market in the Badger State likely discourages workers from looking for work, thus restricting growth in the labor force and lowering the unemployment rate not through job growth, but through frustration.
Minnesota, meanwhile, has achieved its low unemployment rate with job and labor force growth well above the national average. From December 2007 to August 2018, Minnesota’s employment and labor force increased by 8.8% and 6.7% respectively—both rates significantly above the national average and approximately double the Wisconsin growth rates.
Since the previous North Star article was published last fall (based on October 2017 data), Minnesota’s employment and labor force have increased by 1.6% and 1.1% respectively, compared to 0.8% and 0.6% in Wisconsin.† Over this period, Minnesota has added nearly 1.9 jobs for every 1.0 in Wisconsin. The most recent Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Minnesota has surpassed Wisconsin in terms of the total number of jobs, despite the fact that Minnesota has over 200,000 fewer people.Along with Minnesota, I also want to compare Wisconsin’s record with another mid-size state that has a lot of natural beauty, one major metro area, a lot of snow and an unemployment rate just below 3% – Colorado.
To a significant extent, Wisconsin’s low unemployment rate is driven by a weak job market that discourages workers from entering or staying in the labor force. Meanwhile, in Minnesota the low unemployment rate results from strong labor force growth combined with even more robust growth in the number of jobs.
If yesterday's hearing confirmed one thing, it's that Brett Kavanaugh is a serial liar about even the most casual, trivial matters.
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) September 28, 2018
There is a peculiar moral ugliness to this type of routinized, low-level lying:https://t.co/KoSQihrlge pic.twitter.com/fZUqJNwOeo
Komatsu Mining Corp.'s proposed new office, manufacturing and training operations in Milwaukee's Harbor District are expected to eventually total around 1,000 jobs, including 600 local employees who will move there.It does sound like a great project, particularly because it moves Komatsu’s operations to the harbor, which makes it much easier for them to ship large cranes and other equipment via freighter.
And that will provide a huge boost to the city's plans to redevelop the Harbor District by converting vacant lots and underused buildings into a hub of jobs, housing, retail space and other new uses.
Komatsu's future $285 million corporate campus will house manufacturing operations now based at 4400 W. National Ave., West Milwaukee, as well as corporate offices at Honey Creek Corporate Center, 135 S. 84th St., on Milwaukee's far west side.
Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. announced it has agreed to provide the company $59.5 million in state income tax credits over the next 12 years.There's also $15 million that the City of Milwaukee is putting up for a public Riverwalk in the area, and complementing a new 8-story mixed use facility of housing and the headquarters ofd Michels Corporation's 400-employee Milwaukee headquarters.
The amount of those tax credits will depend on the number of jobs created and retained, the amount of capital investment and the amount spent on purchasing equipment, goods and services from Wisconsin-based companies, the WEDC said.
Also, the city is proposing to provide up to $25 million in funds through new property tax revenue generated by the corporate campus. That would come through a tax incremental financing district, which would need Common Council approval.
Speaking at a Milwaukee Rotary Club event Tuesday, Evers cited an August United Way of Wisconsin report that found almost 40 percent of Wisconsin families struggled to pay for basic needs like transportation and child care.Along with dumping the tens of millions we give away each year in WEDC welfare we can have around $325 million a year come in from dumping the MAC giveaway. Then add in $200 million a year that the state saves from stopping its sabotage of the ACA and taking the Medicaid expansion, and that’s well over $1 billion extra in the next budget that can be used for real investments and tax cuts for people that could use a break.
Evers said giving these families a tax cut would boost the state’s economy more evenly. Funding these cuts, he said, is a matter of priorities….
Evers maintains the state can find savings in parts of government, including the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the state’s job creation agency, which Evers has vowed to eliminate and replace.
The Trump administration is providing up to $12 billion in emergency relief funds for American farmers, with roughly $6 billion in an initial round. The three-pronged plan includes $4.7 billion in payments to corn, cotton, soybean, dairy, pork and sorghum farmers. The rest is for developing new foreign markets for American-grown commodities and purchasing more than two dozen select products, including certain fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, meat and dairy.There is grumbling in that story about the level of those subsidies (you can click here to see what they are), which varies widely based on the crop. Corn farmers are complaining about only getting 1 cent a bushel, and wheat farmers would only get 14 cents a bushel. Neither of those subsidies seem likely to come close to covering the losses that farmers are taking.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced last month that soybean growers will get the largest checks, at $1.65 per bushel for a total of $3.6 billion. China is the world's leading buyer of American soybeans, purchasing roughly 60 percent of the U.S. crop. But since Beijing imposed a 25 percent tariff on soybean, imports prices have plunged.
The dairy provision in the current farm bill, the Margin Protection Program, was a disappointment. Based on an insurance system in which farmers paid premiums to get taxpayer-subsidized insurance to protect against losses, the system proved to be a money-loser.Right now, the new Farm Bill is sitting in the House, where Paul Ryan's crew are figuring out if they want to hurt the working poor by taking their food stamps, or if they actually want real policies that might help farmers survive these times. It isn't scheduled for action, despite there being only 5 days left in the current Farm Bill, and the 2018 Fiscal Year.
The Senate and House versions of the new dairy insurance program are slightly different, but both offer a stronger safety net. A University of Missouri professor concluded the new program could offer six times the benefits of the old program, depending on the size of a farm and the choice of coverage.
For taxpayers, the new insurance program should be more cost-effective. The current bill’s dairy program has a budget baseline of about $50 million a year. The new program should cost taxpayers about $100 million more over five years. For that extra expense, consumers should gain more stability in dairy product prices and supplies.
"Nobody wants to have an aid package. I mean, if you're a farmer you're in the business of producing a crop. We just want a fair price for it," said Joel Schreurs, a soybean and corn producer near Tyler in southwestern Minnesota who sits on the board of both the American Soybean Association and the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association.
His personal operation is about 1,000 acres. He farms an additional 500 acres with his son-in-law and other relatives. He estimates that the tariffs would cost him $40,000 to $50,000 in lost income and that he would get $16,000 to $20,000 in emergency aid.
Schreurs worries that it will be hard for farmers to get back the buyers they'll lose as a result of the trade wars. "And in the short term we have to find another home for those beans, otherwise they're going to pile up and it will keep prices depressed," he said.
In the midst of ongoing criticism of his transportation record, Gov. Scott Walker doubled down Tuesday, highlighting savings he says the state will see after finishing a 12-mile stretch of Interstate 39/90 one year early.Walker can SAY whatever he wants about that project’s timelines and its costs. But reality often is very different from that, and I’m not going to trust that interstate is ahead of schedule until the project is actually finished.
Walker also affirmed that the savings, along with extra money in his next budget, will cover a 50 percent increase in funding to county road programs he announced in La Crosse earlier in the week.
The state will save about $70 million by finishing a portion of Interstate 39/90 from Janesville to Edgerton in July 2020, Walker said. The entire interstate expansion project is 45 miles and will reconstruct the interstate in both directions from four to six lanes. Moving up a piece of the project will have a “cascading effect” to fund other transportation projects in the state.
In a Feb. 7 letter to Democratic lawmakers, DOT official Dana Burmaster said that other road projects wouldn't be affected by the state taking on $102 million to $122 million in extra costs from seven additional projects to pave the way for the Foxconn factory. That's because the state managed to save $127 million last year on other projects, Burmaster wrote.In addition, Walker's claims of extra money available doesn’t seem to take into account all of the added needs that are the result of the many rainstorms that washed out roads throughout the state in the last month.
But the fiscal bureau report found that most of the savings last year and this year were used in other ways and covered just $32 million of the Foxconn costs.
The remaining money for reconditioning and resurfacing roads would total at least $1.53 billion over two years, or just slightly more than would have been available if lawmakers had not increased funding levels from the previous budget…
Even with $1.7 billion a year in funding, the share of state roads in "fair and above" condition would fall from 79% to 62% over the next 10 years, the report says. At current funding levels, an even lower percentage will be in good repair, it found.
Wisconsin taxpayers will foot a bigger share of the bill to replace local bridges due to a new funding policy at the state Department of Transportation, county transportation officials say.It’s just another Walker shell game that allows Scotty to maintain his higher priority – staying on the good side of RW BubbleWorlders like Grover Norquist and the Kochs by claiming he didn’t raise taxes.
While the agency says the new policy spreads money to more projects around the state, some counties are seeing their costs increase by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
After years of bridge replacement delays due to a lack of state funding, the DOT has rolled out a new program called "Replace-In-Kind." It directs local governments applying for state bridge aid to design replacements to minimum state engineering standards based on current traffic. If the application qualifies, the state promises to pay for 80 percent of the replacement cost with local governments picking up the rest.
If counties or municipalities want to design bridges that go beyond the minimum standards, the "Replace-In-Kind" policy lets them do it but on their own dime.
“I fundamentally disagree with the reports that many allude to, reports paid for by the special interests that are running ads attacking us on transportation,” he said. “If the media is now using reports that are paid for by groups as the basis of their information, than maybe I should go out and create a group and pay for my own studies."This is such a rich quote. Not only does this completely bought puppet of a governor complain about “special interests”, but we also know why Scotty would make up his own study. Because when a legitimate report was put together by the Wisconsin transportation Policy and Finance Commission in July 2013, Walker promptly ignored its calls for more taxes and fees to pay for the state’s many highway needs, and claimed he had a better idea. 5 years later, we have Scott-holes all over Wisconsin.
Another revelation from the indictment which jumped out at Jamieson was that the Russian hackers had stolen the Clinton campaign’s data analytics and voter-turnout models. A month later, when we met in Philadelphia, Jamieson said, “So we’re starting to close in on a pretty strong inference that they had everything needed to target the messaging” at “key constituencies that did effectively mobilize in this election.” Cocking an eyebrow, she added, “The possibility that this happened starts to become a probability—starts to become a likelihood—pretty quickly.”
Joel Benenson, the Clinton pollster, was stunned when he learned, from the July indictment, that the Russians had stolen his campaign’s internal modelling. “I saw it and said, ‘Holy shit!’ ” he told me. Among the proprietary information that the Russian hackers could have obtained, he said, was campaign data showing that, late in the summer of 2016, in battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, an unusually high proportion of residents whose demographic and voting profiles identified them as likely Democrats were “Hillary defectors”: people so unhappy with Clinton that they were considering voting for a third-party candidate. The Clinton campaign had a plan for winning back these voters. Benenson explained that any Clinton opponent who stole this data would surely have realized that the best way to counter the plan was to bombard those voters with negative information about Clinton. “All they need to do is keep that person where they are,” he said, which is far easier than persuading a voter to switch candidates. Many critics have accused Clinton of taking Michigan and Wisconsin for granted and spending virtually no time there. But Benenson said that, if a covert social-media campaign targeting “Hillary defectors” was indeed launched in battleground states, it might well have changed the outcome of the election….
Benenson said that, when he first learned about the theft, he “called another consultant on the campaign and said, ‘This is unreal.’ ” The consultant reminded him that, in focus groups with undecided voters in the fall of 2016, “we’d hear these things like ‘I really hate Trump, but Hillary’s going to murder all these people’—all sorts of crazy stuff.” Benenson admitted that many Americans had long disliked the Clintons, and had for years spread exaggerated rumors of their alleged misdeeds and deceptions. But he wonders if some of those conspiracy-minded voters hadn’t been unknowingly influenced by Russian propagandists who were marshalling the Clinton campaign’s own analytics.
Six months after the election, the Washington Post broke a story that solved the mystery. At some point in 2016, the F.B.I. had received unverified Russian intelligence describing purported e-mails from Lynch to a member of the Clinton team, in which she promised that she’d go easy on Clinton. An unnamed source told the Post that the intelligence had been viewed as “junk.” Nonetheless, Comey has reportedly told aides that he let the disinformation shape his decision to sideline Lynch.Which should remind us that James Comey is not a good guy, and lauding him because of what he has said against Trump in 2017 and 2018 should never forgive him of the disgraceful and unsavvy act he pulled in 2016.
Fearing, in part, that conservatives would create a furor if the alleged e-mails became public, he began to feel that Lynch “could not credibly participate in announcing a declination.” A subsequent report, by the Justice Department’s inspector general, described Comey’s behavior as “extraordinary and insubordinate,” and found his justifications unpersuasive.
Nick Merrill, a former Clinton-campaign spokesman, describes Comey’s actions as “mind-blowing.” He said of the intelligence impugning Lynch, “It was a Russian forgery. But Comey based major decisions in the Justice Department on Russian disinformation because of the optics of it! The Russians targeted the F.B.I., hoping they’d act on it, and then he went ahead and did so.
JSOnline keeps false headline up all afternoon. I spelled out how to cover pre-existing conditions during my State of the State address in January.
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) September 20, 2018
The state affirmed that it has retired the delay and reliability metric, which tracks congestion on roads, from its quarterly Mobility Accountability Preservation Safety Service (MAPSS) reports because the federal government has changed how it monitors congestion. Wisconsin's Department of Transportation says it will still measure congestion in some form for reports it sends to the federal government.I’m sure this is just a coincidence, and it has nothing to do with the recent national TRIP report from an pro-infrastructure organization which showed that $1.9 billion a year is wasted due to road congestion, and that Wisconsin motorists pay over $3 billion a year in additional costs as a result of bad roads.
Critics say that federal change should not preclude the state from measuring congestion on its own as it has for years and regularly sharing that information with the public. Congestion was not included in the agency's latest MAPSS report from April or July, nor is it considered in the DOT's latest state budget request that was released this month, a departure from past reports and budget requests.
From 2000 to 2016, annual vehicle miles of travel (VMT) in Wisconsin increased by 12 percent, from 57.3 billion miles traveled annually to 64 billion miles traveled annually. Vehicle travel in Wisconsin increased eight percent in the last three years (2013-2016).The inconvenient truths of the TRIP survey and other metrics leads the head of a group representing county highway officials to say that WisDOT chose not to include the congestion information for an obvious reason - it would make WisDOT look bad.
Tracking congestion levels is often the most visible, direct way for drivers to understand how roads are functioning and a key indicator for transportation officials to evaluate what system changes might be needed. Without timely, consistent measurement of it, said Dan Fedderly, executive director of the Wisconsin County Highway Association, it is hard to hold the DOT accountable.While Fedderly may have a special interest in his theory, the overall point is correct. How are we going to make the best decisions on how to prioritize highway projects if we’re not going to use data that shows how heavily traveled those roads are?
"The whole MAPSS program is, in very simple terms, to rate DOT's performance. So once they start changing the parameters around that then it becomes difficult to rate their performance," he said. "I suspect partially it's due to the fact that it's not a metric they're going to do well on based on some of their other policies."
The 18.5-mile upgrade that runs from south of College Avenue to Highway 142 in Kenosha County is intended to ease congestion on a roadway where traffic is expected to grow from a current range of 83,000 to 153,000 vehicles a day to 100,000 to 200,000 vehicles daily by 2034, according to the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.Oh wait, Foxconn kickbacks and free federal money were in play here. Got it.
Another key focus, state officials say, is that the upgrade will help Foxconn Technology Group automate the shipping of goods and people for its Mount Pleasant campus, and move freight from Mitchell International Airport to operations in Racine County.
The tech upgrades being built into the freeway were a key selling point when Wisconsin received a $160 million grant for the project from the U.S. Department of Transportation in June.
Asshole Culture has carved out a very clear, unsavory role in American film, literature and life. Entitled, wealthy, bros who take what they want, treat everyone around them like shit and then rise to positions of power is practically a cliche it's so common.
— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) September 22, 2018
Kavanaugh, Judge, the GOP leaders in the Senate and above all Donald Trump embody this subset of the ugliest Americans to such a degree you can hardly believe they are real. Cartoonishly smug and convinced that morality is for poor people...
— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) September 22, 2018
Despite their sense they are the heirs to America, raised to take the reins of power, of course it is their moral and ethical emptiness and their greed and ambition that has corroded what's best about the country and led to institutionalized inequality & corruption of today.
— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) September 22, 2018
Our revulsion at Kavanaugh is therefore compounded not just by his lying to the Senate or his extremism, not just by his callous abuse of women but by the reflexive response of Asshole Culture to come to his defense to protect themselves and their past and future transgressions.
— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) September 22, 2018
As Republicans were accusing Dems of "weaponizing" sexual assault accusations, the GOP was working with a right-wing PR firm to fabricate & peddle a false narrative implicating an innocent person to take the heat off Kavanaugh.
— Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) September 21, 2018
so yea. this is how disinformation operations work.
The Grassley staffer who just resigned for sexual harassment is also the staffer who works at CRC Public Relations, the same firm Whelan used to push his conspiracy theory. This entire charade is tainted. https://t.co/NrDquEh8yT
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) September 22, 2018
One Republican just canceled his campaign for inappropriate contact with his daughter while another was caught slippin’ his mistress an abortion pill.
— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) September 23, 2018
This is the same party that considers Brett Kavanaugh “the victim.”
[Moore:] What I really want to know is, How did you do this? [Bannon] said, “Look, it’s very simple — we go for the head wound and your side has pillow fights. The head wound will always win over the pillow fight.” And that seemed so true and so honest, because liberals and Democrats are constantly about compromising. Never about having real health care that’s universal like in other countries; half-measures like Obamacare. I knew what he said was true.It's a sickening comment, but Bannon's got a point. Too many voters have been too weak to fight off these simplistic, gut appeals, and Dems haven't slapped back hard enough at the evil, racist, garbage that GOPs spew. And the other mistake too many Dems do, is that they let things drop, instead of pounding a meme of "the GOP are crooked bastards" into people's heads - a meme that would have the extra benefit of being true.
In Wisconsin, people living with a pre-existing condition are covered. In Jan, I called for adding a state law to affirm that coverage. You can see and hear for yourself: pic.twitter.com/heOx0w9EBH
— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) September 20, 2018
Gov. Scott Walker said Friday that he would consider seeking a waiver to let insurers raise premiums for people with pre-existing medical conditions if the House Republicans’ health care plan becomes law.Oh please. The only people who were disappointed were health care lobbyists, and Koched-up oligarchs who read Walker's comments in the right-wing Washington Examiner. But of course, that's who Walker was speaking to, since they pay bigger donations than destitute people with pre-existing conditions.
House GOP members narrowly passed the bill Thursday that would roll back former President Barack Obama’s health care law. Part of the bill would allow states to seek waivers exempting insurers from Obama’s prohibition on higher premiums for people with pre-existing problems. States could then use federal dollars to fund government-operated insurance programs for pools of expensive patients.
Walker, a Republican, told reporters that he would consider seeking such a waiver, saying Wisconsin has run high-risk pools well in the past.
“We had a very effective program before,” Walker said. “I think a lot of people were disappointed that Wisconsin was not allowed to have that under the Affordable Care Act, under Obamacare. So that’s something we’d certainly consider.”
Headlines may change, but meta tags live on. pic.twitter.com/8WkiFmeWuT
— Chuck Engel (@chuckk_) September 20, 2018
Gov. Scott Walker's transportation secretary told business officials and others last week he had talked to a London financier about selling off Wisconsin's highways but had rejected the idea.Nice to see Walker Cabinet officials floating this our to their puppetmasters at WMC in private, isn’t it? Banana Republicanism at its “finest.”
Transportation Secretary Dave Ross told a group last week that Walker's administration was adopting new ways of getting its work done and mentioned in passing his discussion about selling off roads, according to people familiar with the meeting.
He then said he was not pursuing the proposal because Wisconsin has good contractors to maintain the state's roads...
[DOT Deputy Secretary Bob] Seitz was present when Ross made his comments last week at a meeting at Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce headquarters in Madison. He said he hadn't heard about Ross' meeting with the businessperson until then and didn't know the person's name.
What happens when the wave of the future files for bankruptcy?
That’s what they’re asking in Indiana now that its privatized toll road, lauded as a new era in public/private infrastructure partnerships, has filed for a “pre-packaged” Chapter 11 bankruptcy…
For one, the Indiana Toll Road, as well as many others, experienced dramatic drops in traffic due partly to the Great Recession. In 2010 it was estimated that the road needed nearly 11 million toll-paying trucks each year just to break even, but only half as many traveled the highway.
While the revenue situation improved in 2012, the road’s financing structure may have had an even bigger impact. Using a common project finance tool called anaccreting swap, the consortium hoped to exchange low debt service costs early on with higher costs later, and then eventually refinance. But the consortium’s inability to meet these increasing debt costs that ultimately prompted the filing. The road’s total debt obligations now stand at nearly $6 billion, up from $3.4 billion at the time of acquisition.
Robin and other commuters we talked to didn’t know about the rate freeze that kept the cost of a trip down the entire length of the toll road to just $4.65. Robin was surprised to hear that the same trip would cost $10.52 on Thursday.And just this week, Indiana and the new operators of the Toll Road worked out a deal where the operators will send the state $1 billion over the next 3 years, while the tolls for trucks and other heavy vehicles will go up 35% next month.
“Why is this happening? Why am I being charged this much? “What is the reason for it,” asked Robin.
There has been some debate over just whose best interests were being served by the freeze. “It did some favors for the people who enacted it,” said Ind. Rep. Scott Pelath, (D) Michigan City. “It kicked the can down the road past a few elections.”
“Now the money for paying the subsidy has worn off,” added Ind. Rep. Ryan Dvorak, (D) South Bend. “The true cost of the toll increases are going to be borne by everybody.”
Within the past two years, Isolux has been replaced on jobs in Brazil, Bolivia and Chile. The company is near insolvency. The bonds it used to finance I-69 construction, to use the industry's term, are "junk."The State of Indiana gave I-69 Partners the boot on the project after Pence left office, and now the project will have to be re-bid to a new vendor at a much higher cost and be completed well behind schedule. But hey, Pence doesn’t have to deal with that fallout, now does he?
Even a supporter of public-private partnerships, Robert Poole of the libertarian Reason Foundation, had a harsh assessment: "This is one of the worst failures that I've seen in the state-level [public-private partnerships]"…
Just four months after construction finally started, one of the subcontractors, Aztec Engineering Group, issued a Notice of Default to Isolux for not paying for work on time, according to a court record.
Isolux made the payment but was the target of two more notices in March and June 2016, due to an outstanding balance of more than $4 million.
At various times that summer and into fall, as Pence campaigned for vice president, unpaid subcontractors walked off the job site. In June, Aztec suspended its work altogether and was replaced. In September, Crider & Crider of Bloomington stopped work.
Some who were familiar with the meeting said Ross referred to the businessperson as a billionaire, while one said he referred to the person as a financier.In other words, selling Wisconsin highways was Walker’s bright idea as to how to get road projects done, while not getting on the bad side of Grover Norquist, the Kochs and other out-of-state oligarchs by (gasp!) raising taxes to pay for this work.
The idea comes as road funding emerges as a central issue in the GOP governor's re-election bid. Walker has fought raising the gas tax, but has faced pressure from some of his fellow Republicans who want to do that to get more projects done.
The graph below comparing Wisconsin and Minnesota shows the measure that ALEC uses in rating the states’ policies, its so-called “Outlook” score: The bigger the number, the worse the policy, in ALEC’s view. As can be seen, the measures are heavily skewed towards low taxes, particularly taxes on wealthy people. Conversely, states are penalized for such measures as minimum wage laws that are aimed at helping lower-income people. In most cases, Minnesota (in blue) has a higher and thus worse rating than Wisconsin (in red).If ALEC were honest, they would then adjust its criteria in the face of Minnesota’s clear outperformance. But they wouldn’t dare do that, because then they’d have to rethink their whole low-tax/wage-suppression agenda, and honest analysis is not why the oligarchs who fund ALEC give them big money.
In their overall “Outlook” score, Wisconsin ranks 19th best, easily beating Minnesota, which ranks 44th best among the states. Yet when it comes to ALEC’s ranking of the states’ performance, Minnesota, in 22nd place, is far ahead of Wisconsin at 37th.
The best-known attempt to apply supply-side principles at the state level is Governor Sam Brownback’s in Kansas. Taxes were radically slashed, as was state spending on services like education. The cuts in services led to a backlash and a split between moderate and very conservative Republicans. Another governor entranced by the supposed economic magic of tax cuts was Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal in 2008-2016, who left his state in dire financial straights without creating the promised economic boom. As can be seen below, both attempts failed to generate the promised economic gains from businesses rushing in to take advantage of the lower tax rates. instead, job growth in both states badly trailed the nation.Also notice that the chart shows Kansas finally going back on the upswing for jobs in early 2017, which coincides with 14 ALEC/Brownback puppets getting booted out of the State legislature in the 2016 primaries, followed by tax hikes in 2017 that were passed over Brownback’s veto to get the budget more in balance.
This brings us to Wisconsin and the eight years of Scott Walker administration. As a whole, Walker’s policies follow the supply-side prescriptions—cut taxes, weaken regulations particularly on the environment, and keep labor cheap to attract industries. Has this worked? As the chart above shows, Wisconsin has seen job growth during this period that is moderate but well below the national average.And Thompson is being kind. If you assume Wisconsin would have grown at the same rate as the US as a whole since January 2011, we’d have around 140,000 more jobs today. This is illustrated through the Walker jobs gap, which includes today’s report which shows 2,000 fewer private sector jobs in August than we thought we had, after July’s totals were revised down.
The question then is how much of the gap results from things inherent in Wisconsin (cold winters, dependence on manufacturing, the state’s culture, etc.) and how much on Walker’s policies. In a recent column, I presented one way to get at this question. Calculating Wisconsin’s relation to six other upper Midwest states in the period before Walker took office and projecting it to the Walker period results in a prediction about 80,000 jobs higher than the actual Wisconsin count. Walker’s policies, in short, have cost the state 80,000 jobs.
Supply-side economics suffers from three strikes. First, at a time when growing economic inequality is raising increased concerns, its recommendations help increase the gap. Second, it results in more pollution and a less-desirable environment. Finally, the evidence indicates it fails as an economic development strategy. With the support of wealthy people who benefit from supply-side’s prescription, the theory has lasted long beyond its expiration date. The sooner it is taken out back and buried, the better off we will all be.You got that right, Bruce and it’s especially true in Wisconsin. But burying this supply-side BS won’t happen until we get rid of the Dropout Governor and the ALEC-owned GOP legislators that have been his rubber-stamp through these underperforming years in the 2010s.
