Walker already campaigning on state time, and on backs of poor

In a taxpayer-paid pre-2018 re-election statewide tour Monday aimed at inflaming base voter resentments, right-wing Wisconsin GOP Governor and accomplished food thief-from-the-poor-Scott Walker is pushing yet another way to drive low-income state residents from our-already low-wage, stalled-economy state to more morally-centered and humane settings elsewhere:

Wisconsin would expand work requirements for food stamp recipients to parents of school-age children, under a welfare proposal with many planks but few details Gov. Scott Walker issued Monday.

Walker said his plan to require Food Share recipients to work a job or receive state job training would begin as a pilot program and not affect the children's benefits, but the measure would affect able-bodied adults receiving housing assistance. The announcement contained few other details, from where the pilot would start and when to how many people would be affected, with the governor saying he would detail the costs and savings from the plan in his budget bill.

Things to note in what masquerades as compassion but is just round two of an intentionally punitive program:

*  The proposal is thin on details and legality, but no matter to Walker because he's only interested in using the poor for political and electoral purposes.

*  He's touting his previous work-for-food plan as a success, but as the newspaper story linked to above indicates, for every person who found a job to keep their food aid, three did not.

Using for an undisclosed number of parents with children between the ages of 6 and 18 the same Food Share work requirements he put forward in 2013 for able-bodied adults without children. 

That proposal required beneficiaries to either work 80 hours a month or receive some basic job training...and have led to 21,200 able-bodied Food Share participants in the state finding work and also led to 64,200 state residents losing their federally funded benefits.

Where are those 64,200 people now? Are they starving? 

The state does not tell us because their value to the state never mattered and has expired, except as raw numbers to fill out Walker's next campaign's ads and talking points, or as dinner conversation when meals have been served from the state-provided kitchens in the state-provided mansion Walker enjoys along with a $12,000-monthly salary and unlimited time off for state-paid travel and other excursions.

*  The program does not include his lifting the state's rock-bottom minimum wage above $7.25 per hour where he has stubbornly kept it frozen despite its poverty-reinforcing consequence.

*  Disgraceful that former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson tagged along on this Walker publicity stunt.

As their new party leader Donald Trump would say, 'sad.'