The Koch Brother’s favorite governor, GOP Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, is struggling to show positive results on the local economy as neighboring states, and the rest of the country, pass Wisconsin by. Since implementing Walker’s right-wing austerity-embracing economic agenda, Wisconsin has dropped in the state rankings for jobs creation from an already-bad 42nd to now 44th place.

The bright side of Walker’s reign has been a forecasted budget surplus for the state economy, though this means little to the unemployed. In January of this year, unemployment spiked in Wisconsin, while nationwide it’s going down. The best that could be said about February was that things didn’t get any worse. A few more years of Scott Walker’s Paul-Ryan-style austerity and Wisconsin’s going to start looking like Spain and the UK and Portugal and every other country that mistakenly thought right-wing austerity would bring recovery.

Why do Republicans keep insisting on imposing failed European solutions on America? Sounds like socialism to me.

Curiously enough what is keeping Walker’s state unemployment numbers from looking much worse is the addition of government workers. Somehow Walker and his supporters are quiet about that point.

Like the rest of the country, Wisconsin doesn’t have a budget problem, it has a jobs problem. The US economy is rebounding (slowly, in part due to the stimulus that was too small), as are the neighboring Midwestern states but not Wisconsin.

A local Wisconsin newspaper editor weighs in:

The most unsettling prospect with Gov. Scott Walker is the notion that he might actually believe what he is saying about the budget he is proposing for Wisconsin. When Walker assumed the governorship two years ago, Wisconsin was holding its own economically. Job growth was competitive with neighboring states and the nation. No more. Since Walker began implementing his austerity agenda, growth has stalled.

Just as president Obama is responsible for the national economy, Walker owns the state economy of Wisconsin. For all of his talk about creating private industry jobs, Walker and the state GOP have failed as miserably as the national GOP, and all of their far-right buddies in Europe. GOP austerity is a recipe for disaster – a fact that Wisconsin had to find out the hard way.