Assembly Majority Leader from Kaukauna blames Milwaukee for Republicans' destroying Wisconsin's State Budget and Economy

The Assembly Republican Majority Leader, Jim Steineke from Kaukauna (pictured at the left) tweeted that,

“MN doesn’t have a first class city that is a drain on the rest of the state."  

This illustrates again how the Republicans are incapable of understanding anything about economy, demographics, cultural geography and society in general.

The recent article in the American Prospect that compares Minnesota’s “high road” to Wisconsin’s “low road” summarizes the difference in the two state’s major metropolitan areas below.

The two states’ metropolitan structures are shapers of population and economic growth paths. The Twin Cities metro of Minneapolis and St. Paul hosts the state’s capitol, the flagship public university, several highly ranked liberal arts colleges, many corporate headquarters, the state’s top arts and cultural institutions, the bulk of the region’s non-storefront financial sector (including the Ninth District Federal Reserve Bank serving Minnesota, northern Michigan, northwestern Wisconsin, and three states to the west), and the state’s major philanthropic foundations. The region may benefit from what economists call agglomeration economies, where the density of labor markets and employers attracts and hold jobs and incomes. In contrast, Wisconsin’s major private, nonprofit, and public employers are split between Milwaukee and Madison, with the state capitol complex and the state’s top-rated university (arguably superior to Minnesota’s to date) in the latter, and the state’s financial, manufacturing, and philanthropic leadership in Milwaukee. 

Since the Republican Coup of Wisconsin in 2010, legislation has continually punished both Madison and Milwaukee.  Steineke knows that because he has deliberately done it. The rejection of $810 million for the train to connect these two engines of the Wisconsin economy was just the first step.  The most recent assault has been the on the University of Wisconsin’s budget and governance.  The combination of ignorance and arrogance has enabled slow witted politicians to follow the ALEC script as if it was actually their own plan and devastate Wisconsin’s state budget and economy.

At every step since 2010, the Republican governor and legislature have enacted legislation that has attacked either Milwaukee or Madison or both.  This has been a clear political vendetta and it is outrageous that Steineke would even imply that Milwaukee was a drain on the state.

One Wisconsin Now sums Steinke’s statement as follows;

“While the entire country recovers from the 2007-08 Great Recession, the Republicans have bankrupted the state over the last four years. But Steineke offers up this dogwhistle racism that Milwaukee is to blame.”