It's NOT working.

An anonymous reader left me a question that I think is fair: what about Walker's policies, wither things he did or did not do, that you specifically disagree with?

To be clear, I'm not the one who told Scott Walker it would be a brilliant idea to promise a defined number of jobs during his first term.  That person should be fired.  And Walker should have his head checked for promising voters something he could never realistically deliver.  By his most important measure in the campaign, Walker's first term in office - if he even completes it - will be an abject failure.

But beyond the job numbers, let's take what the Philadelphia Fed had to say about Wisconsin's economy earlier this month.  For those of you who don't know, the Philly Fed releases leading indices, which are six-month economic forecasts for the 50 states.  Wisconsin is one of only four states on the mainland 48 projected for economic contraction in the next six months.  The others are Wyoming, Louisiana, and Rhode Island.

Here's a graph of the leading index measures for Wisconsin for the last three years.  We see steady improvement into early 2010, a plateau, and then a precipitous decline immediately after Walker's inauguration, with further worsening predicted.

The Philly Fed also releases a measure called a coincident index - a numeric measure of nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing, the unemployment rate, and wage and salary disbursements.  Here, Wisconsin is one of only four mainland states whose score is still dropping - the others being Wyoming, Minnesota and Rhode Island.

Using the coincident index, one also notices an interesting phenomenon.  Scott Walker is the opposite of Barack Obama.  Obama inherited an economy that was tanking, and after about two or three quarters, things turned around and have been improving ever since.

By this measure, Walker inherited a state economy that was on the uptick from late 2009 through mid-year 2011, when suddenly things began turning south once again.

Is the argument going to be that things would've been worse under Tom Barrett?  Conservatives have refused to accept that argument when Obama makes it, so surely it can be no more acceptable in this context without exposing an inherent hypocrisy in their ability to process information.

So as it goes, Wisconsin is one of the worst economic performers in the country right now, and using two major measures of economic performance, things have gotten measurably worse subsequent to Scott Walker's election.

Coincidence?  Maybe.  Correlation?  Maybe.  Different from what Scott Walker promised?  Absolutely.

In my mind, the failure is simple.  When an economy is weak, don't take spending out of it and don't severely diminish the spending capacity of many of its participants.

Walker's proposals are failing for the same reason that Obama's Making Work Pay tax credit bombed.  The theory behind Making Work Pay was that people would be more inclined to spend their additional money if they got it a little bit at a time instead of in one lump sum.  But what behavioral economists found is that if the money received on an incremental basis is relatively insignificant, it doesn't get spent at all.

So while some conservatives are wildly rejoicing at a  $20 or $30 savings on their property tax bills courtesy of Governor Walker, the reality is that their $20-30 came at the expense of many public employees losing their jobs, or the tens of thousands of public employees who are now taking home thousands of dollars less each year as the result of higher health insurance and pension costs.

In other words, less economic activity is generated in Wisconsin by 200 people with 20 extra dollars than is generated by one person in Wisconsin with 4,000 extra dollars.  Not really rocket science, but we should note that the Obama administration got this one wrong as well.

Furthermore, you can throw all the tax cuts you want at producers, but if there's no demand, they're not going to take advantage of them.  The problem is with consumption, not production.

I'm firmly for balancing budgets, paying for what you buy, running surpluses in good economic times, and spending those surpluses in recessions.    But if government hasn't been responsible in that regard, cutting spending in a recession is the wrong way to start.