The second GOP candidate debate is tomorrow evening, live from the Reagan Library in California. The 11 candidates fortunate enough to make the main stage will undoubtedly try and
channel their long-time Republican hero Ronald Reagan, but if you look at the
policies they are touting on the campaign trail, it is clear that they have
moved way to the #RightOfReagan.
So,
I look forward to watching all these Republican candidates compare themselves
to Ronald Reagan, and hope you will follow along on our live-feed of the #RightOfReagan fact-check we’ll be
doing on You Got Schooled tomorrow evening.
Scott Walker is running for president. Are we
shocked? Probably not. What is shocking, is that after his track record running
Wisconsin this man thinks he should be left in charge of the entire country. It
might have something to do with the Koch confidence boost he’s been given. His last name might not be Bush, but that doesn’t mean that rich,
white dudes (e.g., Charles and David Koch) won’t dictate his every move in a
throwback to the Bush-Cheney years.
Now we could sit here and tell you what a jerk he is (who has
that kind of time?), but instead we want to show you the negative effects Scott
Walker has had on Wisconsin, and who’s paying the price for it.
To make this story even more interesting,
let’s compare Scott Walker’s Wisconsin with its next-door neighbor Minnesota. It’s a tale
of two states: Both economies grew from foundations in manufacturing, farming
and mining, with strong histories of organized labor. Then came the 2010
elections. Both states, still reeling from the recession, elected new
governors. Those two governors took these two states down two very different
paths. No need to keep score at home, we’ll do that for you.
Today, Minnesota’s unemployment rate is 3.6 percent—far below the national rate of 5.7 percent—while Wisconsin’s
job growth has been among the worst in the region and its income growth has been among the worst in the
nation. Also, when Scott
Walker said, “We showed that when we say ‘Wisconsin is open for business,’
we mean it,” the operative word was show.
Last we checked, as soon as Wisconsin passed “right to work,” this 100-year-old Wisconsin company decided to move to Minnesota.
We’ve got news for you, Scott Walker: Trickle-down
economics doesn’t work for the majority of us, and
frankly, it never has—it’s
only great for rich people. We
want a healthy middle class, and we need a different approach that begins with
a high-quality public education that gives future generations the skills they
need to get good jobs with fair wages, helping everyone climb the ladder of
opportunity. And you say you want that too:
What has
made America amazing has been the fact that throughout our history, throughout
the more than 200 years of our history, there have been men and women of
courage who stood up and decided it was more important to look out for the
future of their children and their grandchildren than their own political
futures.
“No society that regulates firearms suffers from the absence of any liberty at all, save the liberty of lunatics to murder their neighbors as they choose.”—Adam Gopnik, “Charleston, and the Next Time” (via newyorker)
Jeb Bush had quite the op-ed in the New York Post this morning. It didn’t make today’s cover, or the homepage, but we’ve pasted it for you below. Jeb makes more than a few claims about his expertise in education, but clearly this needed some #Fact checking. Jeb’s greatest education hits just got remixed.
“Nine people were shot dead in a church in Charleston. How is it possible, while reading about the alleged killer, Dylann Storm Roof, posing darkly in a picture on his Facebook page, the flags of racist Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa sewn to his jacket, not to think that we have witnessed a lynching?”—David Remnick on Charleston and the Age of Obama (via newyorker)
Tax day doesn’t sting much if you live at the gilded edge, according
to new data on how the top one-hundredth of one percent and the top
one-thousandth of a percent of all filers pay their income taxes. People
who make tens of millions of dollars enjoyed falling income tax rates
and ballooning wealth for a decade as middle-class taxpayers floundered.