Wisconsin has cut taxes by more than $4.7 billion. More people are working than ever before and Wisconsin's labor force participation rate of just over 68 percent is one of the highest in America.Bottom line: Make people work for their welfare and many will choose actual jobs instead. Give them "free money" and watch them choose idleness because you allow it.
Walker's policy priorities have inspired others. Right-to-work laws have already been signed into law in Missouri and Kentucky this year.
Now he's focusing his attention on another critical, yet broken, system: welfare.
As part of his executive budget, Walker is proposing an expansion of work requirements to able-bodied adults with school-age children on food stamps. In addition, he calls for extending these work requirements to childless adults on Medicaid and pursuing a pilot program to implement work requirements for able-bodied adults in public housing.
B.F. Skinner demonstrated many decades ago that, to put it crudely, "you get more of the behaviors you reward." Reward idleness, it continues. Reward work but not idleness, see less idleness going forward.
Perhaps to some degree, Walker's reforms have encouraged the determinedly idle to move to other, less demanding states. From the point of view of the Wisconsin tax payers who voted for Walker, that's no bad thing.
