Grim News For Walkerites - - Madison Attracts College-Educated Youth

You would think the news about Madison's leading the nation in the percentage of young adults with college degrees would be trumpeted by the powers that be as a sure sign that growth and prosperity are in the cards.

In a review of data by CardHub.com, under its heading of Most Learned Citizenry, it said this: "One can learn anywhere, including by example. The following cities have the most highly educated citizens, who can promote positive habits among and lend words of wisdom to the next generation."

The state's second-largest city attracting brainy, creative young people? Great news for a sluggish economy statewide, right?

Don't bet on it.

The Scott Walkers and Steve Nasses and Glenn Grothmans now running state government, and the right-wing think tanks that provide them with their 'ideas,' will see this as the true threat it is to their goal of making Wisconsin into Grover Norquist's shrunken and drowned model state government.

Because they know that most of those young, educated Madisonians and others attracted there do not buy into current GOP/Tea Party policies that are hostile to public education, science, transit and full equality for women and minorities.

The Walkerites are already planning to make the UW-Madison campus more comfortable for the kind of people who funded Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's 2012 national campaign because it is the campus that brings liberal kids to Madison, so look for a new UW system president who will want fewer liberal arts classes and programs on the Madison campus.

And curricula more favorable to ideological free-marketeers.

Walker has already diminished Madison and UW research connections to counterparts in the Midwest by killing the Chicago-Milwaukee Amtrak extension; voter ID and other proposed ballot box restrictions are designed to reduce turnout in Democratic-leaning college towns and urban areas, so Madison, along with Milwaukee, are already paying a price from these GOP policies

So the far right will look at the education data for Madison and double their efforts to squeeze Madison politically and economically.

Because nothing threatens the far right's punitive agenda in Wisconsin - - shuttered women's clinics, forced ultrasounds, jammed public schools, reduced health insurance, filled wetlands and lakefronts, trashed treaties -- than smart young people armed with facts and open minds.