It seems that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) might have been overreaching when he promised to create 250,000 new jobs in his first term. While Walker has spent the last twelve months slashing state budgets and busting unions, Wisconsinites have been dealing with the consequences. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Walker’s state saw the largest decrease in jobs over the last year, dropping nearly a full percentage point:

Over the year, nonfarm employment increased in 45 states and the District of Columbia, decreased in 4 states, and was unchanged in Alabama. The largest over-the-year percentage increase occurred in North Dakota (+6.5 percent). The largest over-the-year percentage decrease in employment occurred in Wisconsin (-0.9 percent).

Walker, meanwhile, told Newsmax this week that, “We ultimately saw a net increase in jobs this year.” That is incorrect, unless by ‘we’ he means a group other than Wisconsinites.

This just adds more evidence to an already existing trend: states with the most drastic budget cuts are seeing the most job losses. Budget slashing at the state level is stalling growth and reducing GDP.

Supplementing that argument are the employment totals for just the month of March. Ohio, which is led by austerity-happy Gov. John Kasich (R), lost 9,500 jobs. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) saw his state drop 8,600 jobs. And Wisconsin dropped 4,500 last month.

The era of austerity clearly hasn’t worked. Instead, these statistics show that conservative budgets have made things worse in the states where they were supposedly going to turn economies around.

In late 2010, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) scuttled a proposed tunnel beneath the Hudson River, saying that the desperately needed infrastructure project would be too expensive for New Jersey. “It’s a dollars and cents issue,” Christie said at the time, claiming that New Jersey would have to pay a disproportionate amount of the project’s costs.

However, a new report from the Government Accountability Office shows that Christie vastly exaggerated how much of the project would be paid for by New Jersey:

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

After canceling the project, Christie steered money earmarked for the tunnel into the Garden State’s transportation trust fund, rather than fixing the fund’s obviously broken revenue stream (which might have included raising the gasoline tax). “[The tunnel] was critical to the future of New Jersey’s economy and it took years to plan, but Gov. Christie wiped it out with a campaign of public deception,” said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) in a statement. “The future of New Jersey’s commuters was sacrificed for the short term political needs of the Governor.”

At the moment, both Amtrak and New Jersey transit trains share a pair of 100 year old tracks under the Hudson River, which are operating at capacity. Demand for mass transit between New York and New Jersey is expected to increase by nearly 40 percent by 2030. But instead of financing this important project, Christie used it for his political advantage, and then turned around to throw money at a boondoggle of a mall project.

Back in November, we noted that New Jersey was foolishly set to give the food company Goya $80 million to create just nine (nine!) jobs. But according to the New York Times, this is just par for the course for New Jersey Gov/ Chris Christie (R), who has already approved a record number of corporate tax subsidies:

Since taking office in 2010, Gov. Chris Christie has approved a record $1.57 billion in state tax breaks for dozens of New Jersey’s largest companies after they pledged to add jobs…The critics pointed out that even when the promised jobs have not materialized, the Christie administration has merely reduced, not withdrawn, the subsidies. And they say that the administration is mortgaging the state’s future by forgiving so much tax revenue for the next 10 to 15 years.

One program Christie has run doled out $900 million in tax credits. The companies receiving that largesse “have promised to add 2,364 jobs, or $387,537 in tax credits per job, over the next decade.” In one instance, Campbell Soup was given $42 million to create jobs in Camden. When the company proceeded to cut 100 jobs, Christie merely slapped it on the wrist, reducing its tax credit to $34 million, with the stipulation that the company add five jobs per year over a decade after it regains its previous employment total. For those keeping score, that’s $34 million for 50 jobs.

As the Economic Policy Institute and the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center found, “a growing body of research suggests that state and local tax cuts and incentives cannot create jobs in a cost-effective manner.” Citizens for Tax Justice calls corporate tax incentives and business exemptions “deeply flawed as policy.”

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), despite the budget woes faced by the Garden State, has seen fit to twice veto a millionaires tax passed by his state’s Democratic legislature. Christie, backed up by his chief economist, Charles Steindel, claims that enacting a millionaires tax would drive wealthy New Jerseyans out of the state. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you tax [millionaires], they will leave,” Christie says.

However, just a few months before joining the Christie administration, Steindel had a very different view, as Bloomberg News noted. In a report for the New York Federal Reserve, Steindel and his co-authors wrote that increasing taxes on high-income households was a good tool for balancing the state’s budget, as it has the advantage of placing the burden of deficit reduction on those who can afford it:

Another approach to closing sizable budget gaps like New York’s and New Jersey’s is to follow a policy rule of temporarily raising income taxes on high-income households during a downturn. The advantage of this approach is that it places a larger burden on households that are less liquidity-constrained than the average household during an economic decline (and less liquidity constrained than the state itself). Such a tax would be removed once the economy begins to improve. Edgerton, Haughwout, and Rosen (2004) point out that New York City has adopted this balancing strategy in the past, adding temporary surcharges to the top income tax bracket during downturns.

The report is careful to caveat that all the proposed approaches have drawbacks, but there is nothing resembling Steindel’s denunciation of a millionaire’s tax that he officially released one year later for the Christie administration. “I would assume [Steindel] had to take a special course at the University of Christie to reorient his economic thinking,” said state Senator Loretta Weinberg (D).

A study released last week by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts found that contrary to conservative beliefs, millionaires don’t move to avoid higher taxes. “The evidence available in the research literature suggests that the worst fears of the policy debates over raising additional revenue from high-income households to sustain spending on public services are unlikely to materialize,” the study says. “They will not cease working, stop investing, or even move.” And once upon a time, Christie’s own economist seemed to believe that was the case, as well.