Walker had to acknowledge he won't come close to fulfilling his campaign promise to create 250,000 new jobs. (Incredibly, he blamed the protests in 2011.) So he made up 11,000 fictional new businesses instead. The Uppity Wisconsin blog has the story, which would be hilarious if Walker weren't damaging so many Wisconsin families.
Some of the 'businesses' Walker claims to have created are The Reedsburg Girl Scout troop, Madison Ping-Pong Club, Waupaca Rotary Club, Columbus Historical Society, Oconto Jaycees, Blue Mound Nordic Ski Club, Clyman Lions Club, Three Rivers Bird Watchers Club, Menomonee Falls Choir Association, and Pepin Yacht Club.
Here's Uppity Wisconsin:
...he was judging his accomplishment with his own measuring stick. Most economists will tell you that the most reasonable way to count new businesses would be to use the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) count of new businesses. Walker, in fact, has insisted that QCEW is the "gold standard" when it comes to counting new jobs created and should be the source everyone uses, given the QCEW’s quarterly review of the records of 98% of all businesses in the state. The problem for Walker, though, is that the most recent QCEW's numbers show that he has only created 4,024 new businesses since he took office and that he isn't on pace to hit his pledge of 10,000 new businesses by the end of 2014. Instead of admitting his shortcoming, Walker searched high and low for a different measuring stick. He discovered that the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions (WDFI) keeps track of something called "business entities" created and... voila! ...found that as of August of this year, over ELEVEN THOUSAND new "business entities" had been created since he took office! Cue the victory lap!
The problem with the WDFI numbers is that a great deal of the “business entities” it counts are not, in fact, the "new businesses" that Walker had in mind when he made his pledge. Many are out-of-state corporations that have to file papers in Wisconsin, but have no real physical presense in the state, many are multiple filings for one business, and over 35,000 of the "businesses" Walker is using in his formula are something called "non-stock corporations" which are business-sounding but are actually Little League Teams, Girl Scout Troops, Lions Clubs, and other community organizations or non-profits.Walker, by the way, has actually written an entire book filled with lies, and he's out peddling it. You don't need to read it, but you might enjoy Esquire's Charles Pierce review of what he calls 'a book-like product.' Pierce refers to Walker as the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. And this:
Walker certainly is not intimidated by mendacity, prevarication, or by inflating his own ego until they tie a rope to it and enter it in the Macy's Parade in a couple of weeks, I can tell you that.No surprise there.
