Funding of the Attack Ads on Mary Burke

If you are watching TV at all currently it is hard to miss the attack ad on Mary Burke. These ads are being sponsored by the RGA (Republican Governors Associations) and cost in the 6 figures area according the Associated Press.

The attacks include Burke outsourcing jobs to China. The company she led was Trek Bicycle Corp, which employs about 1,000 worker here in Wisconsin. It also pumps in over $100 million into the state economy yearly. The also said she drove jobs away whereas the data shows that when she was the Secretary of Commerce, 84,000 more jobs were created than under Walker.

The RGA has raised $50.3 million in comparison to it Democratic counterpart which has raised 28 million. So where does that money come from? Surprise the Koch hedge fund kicked in a million, the Reynolds Tobacco Company, and Health insurer Wellpoint along with Koch industries all chipped in a half million each. Now I’m none too thrilled about Democrats getting this money either, just more outside interests messing about in politics and raising money without limits.

Related to this are things that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office; nonpartisan) reports that some seem to Republicans ignore.

First minimum wage, which the Republicans say will cost jobs, they say 500,000 or a million jobs. The CBO says, “Real income would increase, on net, by $5 billion for families whose income will be below the poverty threshold under current law, boosting their average family income by about 3 percent and moving about 900,000 people, on net, above the poverty threshold (out of the roughly 45 million people who are projected to be below that threshold under current law).

Next is the immigration reform palaver. The bill that passed the Senate would reduce the deficit by $158 billion from 2014 to 223 and in the next decade another $685 billion.

Though under G.W. Bush Republican extended emergency unemployment benefits they don’t want to do it now. This would cost us another 200,000 jobs according to the CBO.

The Democrats worked the Affordable Care Act over to be fully funded and to shrink the deficit. Yet Republicans keep saying it will make the deficit worse. This is what the CBO finds: What Is the Impact of Repealing the ACA on the Federal Budget?
Assuming that H.R. 6079 is enacted near the beginning of fiscal year 2013, CBO and JCT estimate that, on balance, the direct spending and revenue effects of enacting that legislation would cause a net increase in federal budget deficits of $109 billion over the 2013–2022 period.

It will also cut the unemployment rate.

Finally Republicans insist that the stimulus program did not work even before it was enacted. The vast majority of economists believe it reduced unemployment: The CBO figures released Tuesday estimate that the stimulus package raised the gross domestic product this past quarter by 0.3 percent-1.9 percent.

The CBO report provided a broad range of the estimated number of full-time jobs created because of the stimulus — from a low of 500,000 to a high of 3.3 million jobs.