Bloomberg News gives Scott Walker a lump of coal for Christmas

All right, Bloomberg News didn’t literally give Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker a lump of coal for Christmas, but they did figuratively give Walker a lump of coal for Christmas in the form of this article about how Walker, who is a likely Republican presidential nomination candidate in 2016, and his Republican allies in the Wisconsin State Legislature have wrecked Wisconsin’s economy:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has his eye on the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, and as he tries to boost his national poll numbers, there are numbers at home that also bear watching — his state’s finances.

Tax cuts and Medicaid spending are contributing to a projected budget deficit that may reach $2.2 billion in the two-year period starting in July 2015, according to his administration’s analysts. While Walker aides call the projections premature, Democrats say the figures prove the governor’s policies — especially income and property-tax reductions — turned a $517 million surplus at the end of June into a shortfall.

Tax collections and decisions by Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature will determine the size of the deficit. Yet the swing to a shortfall limits Wisconsin’s financial choices as the governor prepares his February budget presentation. Last week, he called for more property-tax cuts.

“What they’ve opted to do is a policy choice of cutting taxes,” said Gabriel Petek, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s in San Francisco. “They’ve changed the fiscal trajectory of the state that had been on course for higher reserves.”

(emphasis mine)

Obviously, Scott Walker deserves at least a figurative lump of coal for Christmas. That’s because his policies of cutting taxes for the wealthy, implementing a statewide school voucher program in Wisconsin, and handing out corporate welfare to his campaign donors have completely wrecked Wisconsin’s economy, finances, and business climate. Despite the fact that Walker’s policies of cutting taxes and spending money on bad policy that only benefits the politically connected have clearly wrecked Wisconsin’s reputation, Walker wants to hand out even more tax cuts to the wealthy. That’s absurd, since cutting taxes does absolutely nothing to reduce or eliminate a budget deficit, in fact, cutting taxes makes budget deficits even worse.

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Scott Walker absolutely sucks at holiday greetings

In case you missed it, Scott Walker, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin and likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 elections, greeted Franklyn Gimbel, a Milwaukee attorney who wanted a menorah, a nine-branched candle tree that is lit during the eight-day Jewish holiday Hanukkah, displayed in the Milwaukee County Courthouse when Walker was the county executive of Wisconsin’s largest county, by saying “Molotov”, refering to improvised incendiary devices consisting of glass bottles filled with flammable material, when he meant to say “Mazel tov”, a common way of congratulating someone in the Hebrew language.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time that Walker has royally fucked up a holiday greeting.

Walker, who will use virtually anything to raise money for his perpetual political campaign, sent out a fundraising email last year that asked his far-right supporters to not give their kids Christmas gifts and to donate money to his gubernatorial campaign committee instead, as I, Chris “Capper” Liebenthal, and many others in both the blogosphere and the news media reported on last year. That email earned Walker a lot of negative press in Wisconsin, nationally, and even internationally, and deservedly so, since only a narcissistic jackass who is only concerned about his own political ambitions would send out an email like that.

Scott Walker has proven time and time again that he absolutely sucks at holiday greetings. He’s not presidential material, and neither are any of the other Republicans who are either running or considering running for president.