Scott Walker’s Recall Is Not About Wisconsin
Scott Walker’s fate will be sealed on Tuesday when Wisconsinites
head to the polls and vote in the special recall election. Odds so
far are that he’ll survive. The Reason-Rupe poll last week gave him
an eight-point edge over his opponent, Tom Barrett. And the current
RCP average puts his lead at 6.6 points. However, regardless of
whether Walker wins or loses, it’s likely over for public unions in
Wisconsin (unless they manage to convince the state Supreme Court
in a pending lawsuit that Walker’s reforms deserve to be thrown out
on equality grounds because they don’t apply to firefighter and
police unions). The real after effects of his fate will be felt
outside the Badger State.
Here’s why.
Walker’s collective bargaining reforms have produced fiscal
benefits so palpable across Wisconsin that even if Barrett wins, he
will be hard pressed to undo these reforms without running into
massive taxpayer resistance. Walker has required public employees
to cough up more toward their own pension and health care costs and
limited union contract negotiations only to wages — putting
benefits, working conditions and the kitchen sink off limits. All
of this has given school districts and municipalities’ new tools to
deal with cut backs in state revenue sharing without massive
layoffs of government employees or one-time budgetary fixes. In the
past the state had plugged shortfalls by illegally raiding other
funds and raising “funny money.” For example, notes a
report by the Heartland Institute:
…to fix deficits in the 2001–02 budget, the state securitized
about $1.5 billion in tobacco litigation settlement payments
scheduled to come in through 2017, in return for a lump sum payment
of about $1.2 billion. In those two years, all of the tobacco
settlement money went into the general fund, where it was used for
general purposes and for shared state revenue payments to counties
and municipalities. Sixteen years’ worth of tobacco money thus
vanished into the black hole of the general fund.
But now for the first time in years, not only did the
state plug its $3.6 billion biennial deficit without tax increases
but has also restored
You can read the rest of this article at: http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/01/scott-walkers-recall-is-not-about-wiscon
Short URL: http://www.txwclp.org/?p=10545
Posted by rbutler
on Jun 1 2012. Filed under Libertarian News.
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