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Scott Walker on Budget & Economy |
WALKER: Clearly, Wisconsin faces a major challenge. We're going to push a growth agenda. It's about our focus in creating 250,000 jobs. The states that have lowered the cost of doing business, by easing their tax burden, easing their regulatory and litigation burden, gets you not only more job growth in the past couple of years, they've actually seen greater revenues coming in as more people are working. So part of our agenda is to cut the costs of doing business and getting more people working. On top of that, it's clear we're going to have to reduce state spending. To me, one of the prime examples is we can't have the public employees being the have's and the taxpayers who foot the bill being the have-nots. So I'm going to ask more of public employees, simple things like asking state workers to make the employee contributions to the pension system, 5%, exactly what the national average is.
Walker framed his budget bill as a bold but necessary action taken to get the state's finances in order and pointed to a $154 million surplus and the addition of 23,000 jobs this year as evidence his reforms had already produced results. "The mayor has said repeatedly throughout the primary he wants go to back and restore collective bargaining," Walker noted.
Barrett acknowledged as governor he would restore collective bargaining rights, but pushed back on the assertion that he would be a pawn of the unions. "The difference is I'll allow them to be at the table. He doesn't even want to have a conversation with them. They know that I'm not a pushover, but the difference is I respect them to be at the table," he said.