Scott Walker: “the reason this budget should be passed this evening is not just numbers. It is because it has real effects on real…”

“the reason this budget should be passed this evening is not just numbers. It is because it has real effects on real people. Under the budget before the House this evening, real people will get to earn more, keep more and do more. That is what we should be all about. If we listen to what the other side is telling us, remember what their economics is doing to real people. According to Investors Business Daily, under the Clinton economic program we are now back to a situation where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Let me quote from Investors Business Daily. They point out that during the Bush years the average real pretax incomes for the very top income earners dropped, but they shot up in the first 2 years of the Clinton administration. As a result, the top 5 percent saw their average incomes climb more than $30,000 between 1992 and 1994, a 21- percent hike, even after controlling for inflation. The bottom fifth, meanwhile, saw their average real incomes barely budge over those years, and they are about $1,000 lower than they were in 1989. The typical measure to gauge what happens to middle-income wage earners shows that their actual income has dropped slightly despite 2 solid years of economic growth. As for the poor in this country, we are now at 14.5 percent of the population at the poverty rate in 1994, the last year for which the data is available, and that is higher than all but 3 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations.”