Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) is pushing a report from his administration’s Department of Workforce Development that puts the state’s net private-sector job gains at 32,000 for 2012. Federally tallied figures for all states won’t be available until June, as CBS affiliate WSAW explains, which renders comparisons impossible:

Walker’s Department of Workforce Development released the new figures on Thursday, but they can’t be compared to other states until next month. Walker has been releasing the figures before they are published officially by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Critics say the state’s performance can’t be adequately measured until the numbers can be compared with other states. The most current ranking, comparing jobs created between September 2011 and September 2012, showed Wisconsin was 44th in the nation.

Walker is claiming a two-year total gain of 62,000 private-sector jobs, and a table on page 3 of the state’s report acknowledges the public sector is employing about 8,500 fewer people than it did the month before he took office. That puts the governor less than one quarter of the way to his campaign pledge of 250,000 total jobs created in four years.

If any independent organization would be likely to defend Walker’s record, it would be the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But the Chamber’s most recent annual scorecard of state economies has the state near the bottom in job creation, as the Madison Capital Times noted shortly after the report was released:

Its annual scorecard on state economies ranked Wisconsin 44th for overall economic performance and 50th — as in dead last — for short-term job growth as measured between September 2010 and November 2012. It also has Wisconsin 39th in “business climate” — on par with the state’s ranking under Gov. Jim Doyle.

Walker’s early-term agenda focused on busting public worker unions in the state and slashing state spending. His successes in pursuing those legislative goals amount to a localized version of the austerity approach to economic growth which Republicans have pressed with less success on the national level. Following the billions in budget cuts he pushed upon taking office, Walker has proposed both further cuts to school budgets and a tax cut that’s heavily slanted towards the state’s wealthiest residents.

Those policies have pulled demand out of the state’s economy, undermining Wisconsin’s growth prospects. Beyond the paltry jobs progress Walker is touting, U.S. Commerce Department figures show the state ranked near the bottom in terms of personal income growth over the 2011-12 period.

A slew of Republican governors have proposed massive tax cuts that they say will help generate job and economic growth in their states, with some pushing for the abolition of income taxes altogether. That is a misguided approach, though, according to an analysis of past tax cuts from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The five states that implemented deep tax cuts during the 1990s experienced slower job growth over the next economic cycle than states that did not, and none of those states experienced income growth that exceeded inflation, CBPP found:

Similarly, the five states that enacted the deepest tax cuts during the boom years of the middle and late 1990s saw job growth over the next full economic cycle (2000-2007) of less than 0.3 percent per year, on average, compared to 1.0 percent for the other states (see graph). They also had slower income growth than the rest of the nation on average.

CBPP’s report also noted that of eight major reports that studied the effects of state-level tax cuts on economic growth, six found that the cuts did not spur growth. Another found inconsistent results and only one supported the idea.

Still, Republicans in Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Nebraska are pushing massive tax cuts that largely benefit corporations and the wealthy under the banner of boosting economic growth. Those tax cuts will leave lower and middle class families with higher tax rates and fewer services on which they depend. What they won’t deliver, however, is a stronger state-level economy.

Our guest blogger is Rachel Curley, an intern at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has been described as a “collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators”, is waging a campaign against workers, especially those in minimum wage jobs with few to no benefits.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) recently released a report that tracks “the concrete legislative campaign that ALEC has conducted over the past two years to translate economic ideology into law.” Since 2011, 105 bills “aimed to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the local level” have been introduced in 31 state legislatures, and of those 105 bills, 67 were “directly sponsored or co-sponsored by ALEC-affiliated legislators,” according to NELP. Already, eleven of the 67 bills sponsored by ALEC members have been signed into law.

The report released by NELP highlights three types of bills introduced in state legislatures that reflect “model” legislation already written by ALEC. The report focuses on living wage and prevailing wage repeal and preemption bills, but it also points to other bills designed to repeal, suspend, and weaken state minimum wage laws, as well as ones that weaken overtime compensation policies.

The first one of these preemption bills surfaced in Wisconsin in 2011. The bill targeted a 2008 Milwaukee ballot measure passed with 69 percent of the vote that required city businesses to provide paid sick leave to workers. In response, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law directly nullifying the paid sick leave ordinance. Judge Thomas Cooper of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court upheld the state law, noting that the Wisconsin legislature had “put a bull’s eye on paid sick days” and that the state was completely within its right to void the Milwaukee ordinance.

One sponsor of the bill in Wisconsin was state Sen. Glenn Grothman, a confirmed ALEC member. He previously supported Gov. Scott Walker in repealing the state’s equal pay law by claiming that “money is more important to men” and that “to attribute everything to so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”

The strategy of ALEC-affiliated legislators, according to NELP, is to repeal current living wage policies or to preempt city and local governments from “establishing a living wage or prevailing wage policy in the first place.” Living wage and prevailing wage policies require employers who receive local government funds to pay their workers according to the cost of living in the area or industry standards for the region.

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) last week unveiled a supposedly “middle class tax cut.” “”Our middle class tax cut is a down payment on my goal of reducing the tax burden in our state every year I’m in office. I want to cut taxes over and over and over again until we are leading the country in economic recovery,” Walker said.

But according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Walker’s definition of middle class is a bit off. In fact, his tax cut plan would deliver the majority of its benefits to the top fifth of Wisconsin earners.

Meanwhile, “the lowest 20% of tax filers would receive a tax cut of just $2 a year.” People in the middle fifth would receive a whopping $43 dollars per year in tax relief. Meanwhile, those in the richest fifth would receive nearly $300:

As the Wisconsin Budget Project noted, “The estimated cost of the tax cut is $342 million over the two year budget period. To put that amount in context, that is more than the state plans to spend on the entire Wisconsin technical college system over that period.”

Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) is proposing a budget that would fund a variety of right-wing priorities by slashing support for public services and local communities, according to an outline of the plan given in Walker’s “State of the State” address Wednesday night. Walker, who had already cut taxes significantly in his first term, proposed an additional $630 million in cuts (about half of which come from income taxes):

With this in mind, I am pleased to announce an income tax cut of $343 million. You, the hardworking taxpayers of this state helped to create the budget surplus, so it is only right that we put more money back into your hands. Over the next decade, this will lower income taxes $1.7 billion…Overall, our budget includes more than $630 million in tax cuts.

Walker touted the tax cuts as a way to boost Wisconsin’s economy, but they give relatively little money back to middle-class families, limiting their stimulative effect. A four-person family with a total yearly income of $80,000 would only see an extra $8 per month under Walker’s plans. But even tax cuts with limited effects cost the government money — $1.7 billion over the next decade, according to Walker. And while he says it will be paid for a projected surplus, that’s the same thing former President George W. Bush said about his budget busting tax cuts.

Moreover, Walker’s budget proposes several dangerous changes and cuts to critical public services that could hurt the economy. Despite the fact that “a decade of research has shown no academic benefit from sending students to voucher schools,” Walker proposes a significant expansion of voucher funding, which will come at the expense of public schools. He also plans to freeze state financial support for municipal and city level programs. A similar move in Ohio caused problems for localities when it came to funding fire and police departments.

Walker also doubled down on his refusal to accept Obamacare Medicaid support, a move too irresponsible even for Florida’s hard-right Governor Rick Scott. Walker’s proposed budget also contains provisions requiring “non-elderly, able-bodied adults” on food stamps to attend job training programs in order to get food support.

When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) initiated a high-profile effort to bust his state’s public sector unions in 2011, he said that he had no interest in pursuing similar efforts against private sector unions. “Private sector unions are my partner in economic development,” Walker has said. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that he “has consistently downplayed seeking any restrictions on private unions in public statements.”

Walker also said in December that “he wouldn’t pursue any new bills on public or private unions in the coming legislative session.” However, word evidently did not get down to his Republican colleagues, who introduced and are fast-tracking a bill to allow employers to cut hours of union workers without the unions’ consent:

Republicans are hurrying bills through the Wisconsin Legislature that they say could prevent layoffs by allowing companies to cut back workers’ hours, but Democrats on Tuesday called them a renewed GOP attack on unions.

The bills wouldn’t require companies to negotiate with unions about cutting back hours, in contrast to almost all similar laws in other states. But a spokeswoman for the author of the Assembly version of the Wisconsin proposal said there was no intent to harm organized labor.

The Wisconsin GOP is moving this bill under the guise of creating a “work-sharing” program, which is an idea aimed at using government support to allow businesses to cut back worker hours while not laying off employees (with the government picking up the tab for the hours workers miss). However, “in all but one of the 24 states with work-sharing laws, union representatives must agree to the reduction in hours for their members.” Wisconsin’s bill does not include a similar requirement.

“Republicans began their war on bargaining rights with Act 10, and with this bill they have now turned their attention to private sector unions,” said state senate Minority Leader Chris Larson (D). “This bill is a clear opening shot at undermining private sector unions.” “The Farrow-Brooks bill says that private sector unions shouldn’t be able to negotiate for their members. It’s one more step toward their goal of ending the right of Wisconsin citizens to have their voice heard in the workplace,” added State Senator Julie Lassa (D).