Troubled Walker Agency Picking Winners With Public Dollars
Scott Walker accused Tom Barrett during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign of using government programs and public dollars to pick business sector winners and losers.
Conservative talker Charlie Sykes even put the reflexive righty allegation on his website when Walker sent him an email about it and said to Sykes (bold-face and italics in the original):
But the bottom line is that people create jobs and not government. The Mayor's plan is limited to tax credits which allow the government to pick winners and losers.OK: You tell me how just this one example - - among many - - from the Wisconsin State Journal's eye-opening disclosure story about federal claims of fiscal and legal mismanagement at Scott Walker's Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation - - whose board he chairs - - doesn't completely give the lie to the Sykes/Walker/boiler-plate rhetoric about job creation and picking winners and losers:
In the case of Kapco, a metal fabricating company, HUD questioned both the per-job cost of the $3 million loan to create 152 jobs at its Osceola plant — $20,000 versus the $10,000 "maximum" set in state policy — and the fact that the loan is forgivable.
2 comments:
If the loan is "forgiveable", it's not a loan!
Claining that Barrett "chose winners and losers" via tax credits sounds a little hollow when, if I remember correctly, WEDC head Paul Jadin faced charges of bid rigging just prior to the June 5th recall vote. His response was to deny everything, claiming the WEDC didn't have to play by the normal rules of job creation that the previous Department of Commerce had to abide by.
What happened with those accusations on Jadin? Was anything done about them? Might his leaving WEDC in November have anything to do with those bid-rigging accusations?
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