Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker went on Meet the Press yesterday, and they actually asked him about the Milwaukee Bucks arena subsidy deal that he pushed through. His answer was unsurprising:
“For the state of Wisconsin, it’s less than $4 million a year to protect $6.5 million we collect. And over the next 20 years, that grows to a total of just shy of $300 million the state collects in income taxes for less than $80 million,” he said. “I’d be a fool.”
This is the “cheaper to keep it” line again, and we’ve covered the problems with it before: First off, that $300 million figure for future state income taxes is made up out of whole cloth, and almost certainly hugely overblown. And secondly, the $80 million (I have $75 million, but whatever) in state subsidies is only a small fraction of the $450 million in state, county, and city cash and tax breaks that will be going to the Bucks owners, meaning even by Walker’s numbers, Wisconsin taxpayers overall would be taking a large loss on the deal, even if the state treasury in particular might come out okay.
Fortunately for Walker, he distracted voters from his crazy-ass arena math by elsewhere in the interview calling building a wall across the Canadian border “a legitimate issue for us to look at.” To be entirely fair, Walker was just agreeing with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd’s question that “Why are we always talking about the southern border, and building a fence there — we don’t talk about the northern border?” Though to be even more fair, saying things that are no more crazy than Chuck Todd isn’t exactly something worth bragging about.
In John Carpenter’s “Escape from NY”, the filmmaker proposes walling off all of Manhattan and turning it into a maximum security prison in which there are no guards and no imposed authority, only the prisoners and the world they have made. Many people criticized such an idea as being completely unworkable.
Seems like Trump and Walker have greater plans than even Carpenter could have dreamed of….
Now that America will become a walled nation-state, protected from invasion by Canada and Guatemala, it seems the only threat would be from attack by water (yes, Sharknado…Jaws, the Man from Atlantis….), so surely Pebble Beach, Miami and Martha’s Vineyard will have to be concreted over to allow for the 40′ high defense walls that will need to be built….
I’m with Scottie on the Northern Wall. Not that we need it, but why should the southern states get all those construction jobs? Northern states should get a piece of the boondoggle. Then we should build high speed rail lines to shuttle workers between the two walls, and along the walls. Ha, I just tricked him into a stimulus project and improving our US rail network.
Reminds me of the sunk costs associated with large military programs being developed. Program managers were never supposed to justify continuing a program because of sunk costs. Of course, many times politicians would overrule the military.
“The Koch brothers-backed group Americans for Prosperity Wisconsin, which helped defend Walker during his recall election, has slammed the plan, saying it’s ‘based on fuzzy math, complicated accounting and millions of taxpayer dollars.\'”
Oh boy, the masters are turning on their puppet.