Inquiring minds have been wondering for months just how Scott Walker plans to get Wisconsin out of a $2-billion budget deficit when his main idea has been to dig the hole $2-billion deeper with tax cuts that mostly benefit corporations and high-income people.
Now we have a partial answer: Walker wants to offset some of those fat cat tax cuts by taking health care coverage away from seniors, the disabled, working families, children and other vulnerable Wisconsinites.
Asked -- finally! -- by the Journal Sentinel what he would cut to pay for the high-end tax cuts, Walker coughed up changing eligibility standards for Medicaid.
When Walker talks about changing the rules on eligibility to save money, he ain't talking about making it easier to qualify. He's talking about kicking people out of the program, which now serves 1.1-million people in the state.
That would fit nicely with his plan to repeal or have the state opt out of the new federal health care plan.
If nobody had health care, maybe we'd have a lot of money to spend on other things, like -- more tax cuts for rich people, and some more eight-lane highways.
Now you're talkin, Scooter.
As One Wisconsin Now (which does far more research than I) points out, if Walker cut eligibility, Wisconsin would have to repay hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicaid funding. It would also put at risk hundreds of millions of additional Medicaid dollars. That ain't hay.
Let's hope that this is just the first indication that the state's news media covering the governor's race will begin to ask candidates how they plan to do actually keep the ridiculous promises they're making, instead of just lightly editing their news releases and putting them in the paper or on the air. What? I said hope, OK?