Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker who recently survived a recall effort says the federal government needs to “reign in” both the National Labor Relations Board and the Environmental Protection Agency. In remarks at a Jobs Summit hosted by the Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday the resilient governor said both agencies have “run amok”.
During an event press conference Walker said, “(We) need to reign in, particularly two key areas, the National Labor Relations Board and the EPA so that our employers have certainty as to know exactly what’s going to happen in the future in those two critical areas. Because we can do all the good in the world at the state level, but if you have federal agencies run amok like that, that stand in the way of economic growth and prosperity, we’re never going to be able to deal with this challenge”.
Alluding to his recent recall election victory over Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett on June 8 Walker said, “A couple of the other folks who covered Wisconsin know I’ve talked about this for some time, having just come off of … guys, I’m the first governor ever elected twice in the same term, so it’s kind of nice to hold that distinction”.
About one year after implementing reforms to trim the state budget in Wisconsin and curb the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions, Walker defeated his challenger 53 to 46 percent.
“But we had — at obviously a smaller level — but it was very parallel to what we face in Washington,” Walker said. “We came in last year, we had a $3.6 billion budget deficit — one of the biggest ever — and we had just come off of three years of losing more than 100,000 jobs and having an unemployment rate at the peak that was over 9 percent.”
“We knew we had both an economic and a fiscal crisis we had to tackle, and so we took swift stern action and it paid off,” said Walker. “It paid off with results. We’ve now seen, instead of job loss, we’ve seen job growth. We’ve seen the lowest unemployment rate since 2008 and we see budgets that are balanced now at the state, at the local level. In fact, we have a budget surplus and for two consecutive years we’ve set money aside to put in our rainy day fund.”
“We do it at the state level, there’s no reason why it can’t be done here (the federal level),” Walker said. “But it’s got to be the two together. It can’t just be frugality, there’s got to be growth.”
Walker compared the current state of the economy to circumstances during the 1980 presidential campaign. “It was 30 years ago that we were facing the same, in fact in 1980 — some of you will kick me for saying this — but in 1980 when President Reagan was elected, two days before I turned 13 and yet I still can remember it wasn’t just a referendum on President Carter’s failed policies and the fact that life wasn’t better four years later.”
“It was fundamentally about a clear vision that President Reagan had, or candidate Reagan had at that time, about limited government, lower taxes, strong national defense and he carried that out,” said Walker. He then added that Reagan’s economic recovery act led to the “largest peace-time economic growth in American history.”