[SackAttack]

Originally Posted by Dutch

Not saying I'm interested in this dude, but I didn't feel like I was getting the whole story on him.

Quite possibly. That cuts both ways.

So back to Wikipedia! I'm sure there are better places for information, but I don't know where and depending on it's layout, probably wouldn't care enough to research. Wiki is nice and succinct...albeit very tricky to determine the intent of the writer's tone.

If you're basing it off of the writer's tone rather than examining the sources cited by the article, you're doing it wrong.

Anyway, cliff notes.

Re-reading the Wiki page....more on Walker...He boosted state health care by $1.3B to account for increases in Medicaid costs at one point.

You want "the whole story"? Yeah, he boosted spending on Medicaid by $1.2 billion. He also drastically overhauled the state's "BadgerCare" program. Cliffs notes on THAT: BadgerCare was the state's low-income health insurance program; you had to be at or below 200% of the federal poverty line to qualify, and benefits differed between childless adults and parents. If you were between 200-300% of the poverty line, your children could qualify (although their parents would not) as long as you paid some of the premium.

The change? Reduce eligibility to those between 0-100% of the federal poverty line, but eliminate the waiting list for those who met those requirements. Everybody from 101%-300% who previously qualified no longer does.

Gov. Scott Walker says he didn’t cut Medicaid, but instead added $1.2 billion | PolitiFact Wisconsin

Walker's Medicaid gamble: Shrinking BadgerCare could cost Wisconsin in the long run - Isthmus | Madison, Wisconsin

$400M increase in the transportation budget. He saved nearly $1B by turning down federal money for a high speed railway that wasn't expected to make money.

Walker bypasses gas tax hike, wants $1.3 billion in transportation bonds

From the article:

Paying past debt takes up about 19% of the state money that flows into the transportation fund each year. That percentage would rise under Walker's plan, though his office did not provide specifics.

If you fund a department at an increase but borrow all the money that's going to the budget increase, which results in a greater percentage of that budget being used for debt service, are you really increasing spending?

In 2012, after 10%-20% of all Democrat recall signatures were suspected to be fraudulent, he still won the recall more handily than the election. Following the Democrat corruption of signatures demanding his recall, he implemented Voter ID requirements which the Democrats sued him for saying that wasn't legal. Kind of ironic. He did in fact eliminate $800M from education budget. It doesn't mention a $4B loan, but it does say he wiped a $3.6B deficit left to him from the previous governor.

Three things:

1) Used as an adjective rather than an appellation, it's "Democratic," not "Democrat." That's what the party calls itself: "The Democratic Party." They don't, and never have, called themselves "The Democrat Party." Using the pejorative variant pushed by conservative talk radio doesn't do much to make anybody think that you're just an open-minded bloke looking for the truth.

2) You know what the thing is about petition/recall signatures? There's a difference between "fraudulent" and "unverifiable." If I, John Doe, sign a petition naming myself as John Doe, living at 123 Deer Hunt Drive in Podunk, WI, but I'm renting a room from a homeowner or something like that and my name doesn't show up on any kind of paper trail (utility bills, home ownership deeds, that sort of thing), that doesn't mean my signature is fraudulent. It means it's unverifiable.
2a) that 10-20% was of a limited sample, and STILL wasn't remotely close enough to head off the recall. Think about that. They still needed valid signatures accounting for at least 1% of the voter base from the previous general election to trigger a recall, and that threshold was easily crossed, even with the irregular signatures.
2b) Revisionist history. Scott Walker signed the voter ID bill in May of 2011, just a few scant months after he took office. The gubernatorial recall was in June of 2012. That's not ironic, that is a flat out lie.

3) He eliminated more than that. You're looking only at the K-12 aid. Technical schools and the state university system lost another $250 million each. And that was just the funding cut under Act 10, and ignores later funding cuts (including the $300 million he wanted to cut from the state university system in this year's biennial budget).

Recall candidate Kathleen Falk says Governor Scott Walker enacted "the biggest cuts to education in our state's history" | PolitiFact Wisconsin

Scott Walker cut school funding more than any governor, Greater Wisconsin Committee claims | PolitiFact Wisconsin