Not that we expect the clowns and criminals who run state government in neighboring Illinois to care, but we do hope, for a moment at least, they cast their collective gaze north of the border to Wisconsin.
Something is happening there that Illinois’ governor and most of its legislators no doubt will hardly be able to grasp. Ditto for legislators in California, New York and other fiscally dysfunctional states.
Wisconsin recently has been holding down spending and taxes, and the state has gone from a budget deficit of more than $3 billion to a projected budget surplus.
Imagine! Setting spending priorities and stopping further raids on the pocketbooks of businesses and individuals has achieved what more spending and higher taxes could not.
The Wisconsin-based MacIver Institute has the story, based on the Wisconsin Department of Administration’s latest budget projections.
A Wisconsin Tea Party group recently announced that it had found errors on more than a third of the same-day voter registration forms completed in Milwaukee County in the April 2011 election.
I am so not surprised.
On presidential election day in November 2004, I was a Republican poll watcher in Milwaukee. My experience was a complete and utter nightmare, largely due to same-day voter registration.
As previously related in Polling Place Chaos: Part 1 — Chicago, I am not an election law rookie. I’m a Chicago native, home of “vote early and often,” dead people voting, and other outright voter fraud. In Illinois, I was a Republican precinct election judge, until it looked like I might get arrested or disbarred from practicing law, as I relate in Part 1.
But my experience in Milwaukee was much worse.
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The massive success of voucher program expansion by intrepid legislators this past year in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio has commentators in nearby states begging their own legislators to share the love.
This recent report from the Allegheny Institute in Pennsylvania responds to criticisms of voucher programs, such as that they send money to religious schools and take money from local public schools. The report documents how the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled voucher programs constitutional, how states save money, and parents and kids benefit from better education options.
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Just a few hours after my guest appearance last week on WSAU-AM and FM radio in Wausau to talk about the Wisconsin recall elections, my phone rang.
The man calling was one of the program’s listeners, who said he tracked me down because he had a few questions. We’ll call him Sean. Sean is, it turns out, a victim of class warfare, though he wouldn’t call himself that. And, boy, was he pissed.
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I’ve been carrying on conversations with family members in Wisconsin (yes, I’m a born-and-raised cheesehead) concerning Gov. Scott Walker’s budget reform measures. Most of my family agrees with what he did, but many are pretty dismayed by how he did it. And to a person, they remain unconvinced that the austerity measures, if you want to call them that, will have any positive effect on the state’s economy that they will notice. New jobs and tax cuts would be nice but nobody is holding their breath.
During one such conversation, I mentioned recent employment growth in Wisconsin — 9,500 new jobs in June alone. The figure is controversial – the feds count jobs differently than the state does — but that wasn’t the point during our conversation. The point at that time was, “these are not good-paying jobs.” Well, how to respond to that?
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In 2011, until yesterday, Wisconsinites who favor limited government and responsible taxation and spending had to suffer in silence, as their voices were obliterated by union and leftist protestors.
But when Wisconsin’s silenced majority finally got its chance to speak out by voting in Tuesday’s recall elections, it positively roared.
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Scott Walker’s budget repair bill got a major boost yesterday when JoAnne Kloppenburg, a liberal attorney from Madison, conceded the state supreme court race to her conservative opponent, incumbent judge David Prosser.
If Kloppenburg had won the recount, the repair bill’s vitality would be in grave doubt. And if she had announced today her legal challenges to Prosser’s win would continue in the courts throughout this summer, the repair bill would be in limbo for a long time. Her announcement today that her challenges are at an end thus was welcome news to Walker supporters.
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In the aftermath of the union protests in Madison in February and March, some recent updates:
* About 90 matters, mostly death threats against state officials, were referred to the Division of Criminal Investigation of the Wisconsin Attorney General’s Office. About a dozen remain open cases. About 30 of the 90 threats were directed at Democrats. About the same number were directed at Republicans.
Some of the most violent-sounding threats were directed at Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose budget repair bill provisions limiting collective bargaining for state employees and teachers to wages and requiring employee contributions to health care and pension benefits provoked union protests. Some threats out-of-state were investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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A few weeks ago Connecticut passed a budget containing $2.6 billion in tax hikes on alcohol, tobacco, hotels, sales, and estates. At that time Governor Dannel Malloy “demanded” $2 billion in concessions from the public employee unions. Fast forward to this week…On Tuesday it was announced that the Governor only got $1.6 billion in concessions spread over the next two years and has precariously locked state taxpayers into a sweetheart union agreement that will run until 2022.
In short, the state agreed to take more money from the pockets of state’s taxpayers in order to further protect government employees and the public union’s political coffers for years to come.
Union negotiator Dan Livingston was quoted in the Connecticut Post as saying that “the toughest concession, in terms of money coming directly out of workers’ pockets, is a two-year wage freeze worth $138.8 million in 2012 and $309.5 million in 2013. In return, Malloy agreed to three percent raises each of the following three years and a four-year, no-layoff guarantee for current SEBAC employees.”
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I haven’t been able to figure out why state employees are so enraged at the possibility of having to contribute to their pensions and health care benefits. They took over the State Capitol in Wisconsin, eating, sleeping, and not showering there for many days and nights. They were banging on drums relentlessly, screaming obscenities at lawmakers and their staff, and blocking access to restrooms for all but their own. About 200 of them ganged up on one single Republican state senator until police could rescue him.
Sure, the money’s important, but that important? What I didn’t realize is that it’s also about working conditions. Silly me.
Some items subject to collective bargaining in Wisconsin, according to Governor Scott Walker’s office, include: [click to continue…]
