Here & Now

On the Issues: Jobs and the Economy

Shawn Johnson:

Right now we look at where the candidates stand on creating jobs and building Wisconsin’s economy. The candidates differ on how to build the economy and how well we’re doing at generating new jobs.

Frederica Freyberg:

What’s the right road to follow when it comes to the economy and good-paying jobs? We put that question to all the candidates and in alphabetical order, here’s what they had to say. Starting with the incumbent governor and his challenger.

Scott Walker:

So we’re at an all-time high in employment. We’re all-time low in unemployment. We took a $3.6 billion budget deficit and turned it into a surplus every single year since we’ve been in office. We did so well with that, with a growing economy and positive reforms, that we were able to cut both your property and your income taxes so that they’re lower at end of this year than they were before we started.

Frederica Freyberg:

The republican challenger Robert Meyer.

Robert Meyer:

Most people don’t know this but Wisconsin has the opportunity to become the leading tech producer state in the Midwest and the venture capital companies on the coast are advocating for this. Which midwestern state is going to do this? We have all the strategic advantages. We’re a destination state. We’ve got the I-94 corridor. We have the service industry concentrated here, the airports and so on.

Frederica Freyberg:

Democrat Tony Evers.

Tony Evers:

I think as we move forward with economic development in the state, you know we’ve gone down the Foxconn rat hole frankly. We need to make sure that other parts of the state actually have economic development money. We need to reinvest all across the state, not just in southeast Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

Milwaukee attorney Matt Flynn.

Matt Flynn:

Right now our transportation budget is 20% debt service. In other words paying interest on what we’ve already borrowed. It’s going up. We can’t have that. We’re going to pay as we go. And we’re going to repair our roads and I’m also — there are 13 east/west roads from highway 2 down to highway 14, many of them, only highway 29 is really four lane. I want to make them all four lane. As soon as we can do that, it’s going to revitalize rural and western, northern Wisconsin as well.

Frederica Freyberg:

Here’s Mike McCabe.

Mike McCabe:

I come from that farming background. It was a small family dairy farm. We’ve lost over 10,000 family farms in Wisconsin in the last decade and we’re still losing more than one a day. I just think our government should be on the side of incentivizing small scale sustainable agriculture and helping to rescue those family farms so that they don’t all go away.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now Mahlon Mitchell.

Mahlon Mitchell:

I think we gotta give the state of Wisconsin a raise. When middle class and those that live below middle class wages and working class families have money in their pocket, they spend it. When they spend money, they actually boost our economy. So I’ve come out for $15 an hour way before it was sexy. A lot of my other opponents are saying that now but I’ve been fighting for 15 for a long time. That’s going to boost our economy.

Frederica Freyberg:

This is Josh Pade.

Josh Pade:

The purpose of economic development dollars should be to grow home-grown businesses. If you look at economic development across the country, what programs work, what don’t work. The ones that provide the highest rate of return for the state are ones where you focus on growing jobs in the state, growing businesses in the state. Foxconn, we’ve committed to bringing a new industry, a new company to Wisconsin. We need to think about two big things: how do we move forward in a way that maximizes what we’re going to get on our investment, be strict and hold them accountable on what they’re committing to and the environment, and then three, ensure once again that workers here in Wisconsin can have the skills to work in advanced manufacturing and get those good-paying jobs.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now Kelda Roys.

Kelda Roys:

I think we have to increase wages because a lot of people– it’s reflected in that unemployment rate, might be working two or three jobs and still unable to make ends meet. We have too many people who are working full-time and they are still living in poverty. So we have to increase wages. That’s true for the middle class as well as the working poor. And to do that, we need to be much more supportive of small businesses, whether it’s a family farmer or a main street business or somebody with an idea for a tech company.

Frederica Freyberg:

Madison mayor, Paul Soglin.

Paul Soglin:

If you’re spending 35, 40% of your income on housing, you are not going to be able to take care of food. You’re not going to be able to get internet services so the kids can do their homework. Housing is the first and most essential thing for a robust family so that everyone can then participate in the job creation in all the other economic opportunities.

Frederica Freyberg:

This is Kathleen Vinehout.

Kathleen Vinehout:

We need to raise wages. Wisconsin is 18th worst in the United States in wages, worse that Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee. We need to make — open wide the doors of higher education, which is why I so believe in free tuition for two-year and tech colleges. It’s a bill that I’ve written, that I fully funded. It’s actually taken after the governor of Tennessee who looked at his people and said, “Our people don’t have the education that they need and they don’t have the wages.” And we can change that in Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

So Shawn, on jobs and the economy, Governor Scott Walker does have bragging rights on low unemployment, but remember when Scott Walker was promising 250,000 jobs. Has he yet reached that number?

Shawn Johnson:

He has not reached it and signs suggest that he will not reach it in his second term as governor. Remember it was a first-term promise. But there was a time in democratic politics when it seemed like they thought that if they repeated that enough times, it would sink the governor. That he would sink under the weight of his own promise that he did not meet and that didn’t happen. I mean he ran in 2014 and we basically knew that the jobs promise was going to be well short and he was okay. If you listen to what democrats said in that rundown there about what they’d with jobs, you didn’t hear a mention of the 250,000 job promise. That’s not to say they don’t talk about it, but they’re not making it central to their campaigns this time because the governor can come back and say, “Hey, about that unemployment rate which is at a record low.”

Frederica Freyberg:

That’s right. And also he can talk about Foxconn and the promise of 13,000 or more jobs and Foxconn looking all across the state to buy buildings and set up headquarters and that kind of thing.

Shawn Johnson:

That one they like to talk about though because that’s viewed differently depending where you’re at.

Frederica Freyberg:

All the time. Right. I mean they always talk about Foxconn as being a $4.5 billion drain that they could then go ahead and put that money into infrastructure spending or other places that they’d like to spend money.

Shawn Johnson:

Right.

Frederica Freyberg:

The one thing though that it seems to me needs to actually be acknowledged is the Chicago Federal Reserve takes a look, a snapshot of the regional economy. They suggest that Wisconsin, among other states in the region are in dire need of workers and workers with skills. That also ties into some of what the democrats are saying in terms of the need for skill development and education needs, but it also ties into something the Walker Administration has been doing with its ads trying to lure young people back to the state.

Shawn Johnson:

They have been running ads in Chicago, Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, trying to get millennials to move to places like Madison, kind of try to build a tech corridor here in Wisconsin. Another issue that could be prominent in this race as it pertains to the economy is tariffs. How that is going to play out in Wisconsin, whether Scott Walker is blamed for the trade war that Donald Trump is engaged in right now on a national level. What that means to Wisconsin farmers and businesses like say Harley Davidson.

Frederica Freyberg:

That’s right. Farmers who are already in some big trouble.