Move on liberals: the number 99 died in Wisconsin

The Wisconsin recall election of Governor Scott Walker was concocted by liberal Democrats and was to be a liberal’s dream come true.

There wasn’t a charismatic politician on the right, a personal or religious scandal to cloud the issue. Months of debate were conducted about union rights and the management of the state’s financial affairs. Each side had plenty enough money, campaign professionals, and neighborhood volunteers to get their message out, and repeat their message over and over.

Nothing is airtight in politics. Some voters didn’t think a recall election was justified in the first place. However, a strong majority voted to keep Walker as governor and, according to CNN exit polls, a good half of those voting openly supported his legislation to restrain the public payroll and the power of public sector unions.

Walker didn’t just complain about greedy unions. He severely reduced their rights and their financial capacity to advance their interests in the future. Liberals asked voters to side with the unions—to stand as 99 per centers. They declined.

Walker, of course, didn’t settle the issue for all time, for Wisconsin, or for America. However, his re-election does demonstrate that middle-class America is not of one mind on bread-and-butter issues and will not automatically unite with liberals, even when conservatives aren’t messing up their heads with religious and patriotic gimmicks.

Liberal Dean Bakolpoulos in Salon isn’t yet ready to learn anything from what happened:

“If Barack Obama plans to win in November, he needs to unite two factions of the Rust Belt population: The middle-class of public workers and union members and teachers, and the other middle-class, which ranges from self-made entrepreneurs to struggling service industry workers. How does he do it? With an honest message that points to the real villain: An increasingly greedy corporate culture that stops at nothing in its quest to consolidate power and wealth.

“There is, in fact, a 99 percent in this country. But right now, a big chunk of it votes in the interest of the 1 percent.”

Click on: www.salon.com/2012/06/06/whats_the_matter_with_wisconsin/singleton/

Barack Obama has had the good sense to reject this advice. He hasn’t singled out the 1 percent as villains—or their wealth as the salvation of all America’s problems.

To redress the federal government’s structural deficit, he has frozen federal salaries, endorsed in principle the Bowles-Simpson recommendations, and he has offered a “grand bargain” that would accept as much as three times more in federal spending cuts as in new taxes.

Obama and fellow Democrat pragmatists in state governments today didn’t create all the unfunded liabilities of federal and state governments. They needn’t defend past excesses. Liberals in office, like popes, make mistakes and needn’t treat what they have inherited as infallible.

America without strong unions would become an even tougher place to live. However, the middle class will not buy the argument that the ambitions of public unions and their ambitions are always the same.

If pro-union policies by public employers were invariably in the best interests of the middle class and the less so, states like Illinois, for instance, wouldn’t have an unfunded liability of $83-billion in public employee pensions.

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/wisconsin-recall-vote-shows-its-about-math-not-politics/article4237376/

Keynes wasn’t a Keynesian every time he saw a tough problem. He would have collected necessary taxes to pay for all operating expenses, including salaries and benefits—and accounted for how future liabilities would be met.

When the interests of the middle class and positive government are aligned, they will vote for “tax and spend” liberals. When liberals believe in what they’re doing in government, they should ask for the money.

Wisconsin radicalism

Conservatives have long been skeptical about the right to full collective bargaining by public servants, especially the right to strike. It’s not that public servants are too headstrong or radical.  Rather, the problem is that the interests of the other side of the table—management—are so poorly represented.

The citizen—the shareholder—can be harmed seriously by a strike or lockout but will feel nothing for years if their representatives simply agree to overly generous wage and benefit settlements to avoid work stoppages. This so-called asymmetry has led to excessive pensions and benefits and, recently, to measures to redress the imbalance at the bargaining table. However, Republican legislators in Wisconsin have gone further: their actions would weaken both unions and good public sector management.

Along with constraining the ability of unions to collect union dues and thereby build up financial resources to assert themselves, the government of Wisconsin has also sharply limited what workers can bargain for and what public managers can offer their workers. Specifically, workers can only negotiate for wage increases and management can only grant wage increases up to the cost of living.

If the government believes that, in fact, they should raise wages in real terms they must secure public support in a state-wide plebiscite. In other words: the most important positive tool available to reward productive workers and attract the best is removed from public managers and assigned to the taxpayer. Not trusting themselves to say “no” or “yes" they’re turned to the people to do it for them.

This isn’t an austerity measure. This is the politics of impoverishment.

Making it more difficult to operate an attractive innovative public sector will only make it less likely that Wisconsin will succeed in attracting new industries and high wage jobs. Excellent private firms can find low tax rates all over the continent. However, they won’t go to a low tax jurisdiction that hasn’t the competence and public support to operate first rate social services and infrastructure.

A superior social environment doesn’t exist in this world without strong government. Only nihilists and dreamers would imagine otherwise.

Historically, Conservatives don’t play dice with good government. They usually wait out revolutions—and counter-revolutions—rather than try to lead them. Unlike Tea Party wordsmiths, they don’t imagine wiping away the political and social fabric of the 20th century and dragging America back to its birth.