Scott Walker “shifts” on his promises — so why should voters trust him?

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Walker tries to spin excuses for why he's failed to deliver on jobs pledge

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In 2010, Gov. Scott Walker made a huge promise: that under his leadership, the state of Wisconsin would create 250,000 jobs in four years.

It was a promise that many derided him for. 250,000 jobs was overzealous, a lot of people warned. But Walker persisted, and even doubled-down on his pledge, saying that 250,000 jobs was his FLOOR, not his ceiling, for creating jobs in the state. In other words, he fully expected to create more than that amount.

Walker even said that his job depended on meeting this pledge.

This week the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that Gov. Walker has still failed to come close to his jobs pledge — more than two years after he said it would come about.

So how does Walker react? By stating that he’s shifted his goal. From Chuck Quirmbach of WPR:

"I qualify that now saying ... I got more people employed than ever before," Walker said. "You ask people on the street who are hiring, it's not how many jobs are created, it's how many people are there to fill them. And so, I've shifted from that, and said my number one issue is workforce. I need to find those people."

Someone should inform the governor that promises don’t work like that. When an elected official says that their job depends on something — which Walker said in 2010 — it should not be dismissed so easily.

Much more than that, Walker needs to keep in mind that anyone who became governor when he did would have “got more people employed than ever before.”

That’s like bragging about the growth of population — which has been slow, but has been growing. The same holds true for jobs growth...it has increased, to be sure, but at a snail’s pace.

As I pointed out last week, the pace of jobs growth under Walker is slower than his predecessor’s rate of growth. And Jake, over at Jake’s Economic TA Funhouse, points out that we’d have added more than 300,000 jobs by now if we had kept pace with the rate the U.S. overall had maintained since Walker took office.

So no — we should not allow Walker to “shift” his promise. Voters should not trust this governor to do what he promises for them. He failed to create the number of jobs he said he would. A respectable person would own up to that fact. Walker, on the other hand, makes excuses, including “shifting” his goals when they don’t come true.

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