From
The Nation
Wisconsin's Legislative
Fiscal Bureau [1] was created in 1968 by a Republican governor, Warren Knowles, and a Republican-controlled state legislature.
The purpose was to establish a nonpartisan agency that would provide
honest fiscal analysis and information for Wisconsin Legislators. Across
more than four decades, the bureau has done just that, earning the
respect of legislators from both parties, including a young Scott
Walker, who frequently cited the bureau when he served in the state
Assembly.
Less than a month ago, a Fiscal Bureau memo [2] reported that the state had a $121.4 million surplus through the remainder of the current fiscal year.
That is a fact that is now under attack by Governor Walker, whom the conservative publication Human Events
refers to as the "new hero" of the Republican right. Walker argues
that -- as Republicans and Democrats have acknowledged for some time -- the
state's fiscal house is not in order and that unsettled issues relating
to a payment due Minnesota after the canceling of a tax agreement, as
well as rising healthcare and prison costs, could well create a
shortfall before the end of the year.
So it is possible that Wisconsin might need a budget repair bill of
the sort Walker has proposed before the fiscal year is finished, as it
has in many years.
But Wisconsin has not reached the statutory trigger -- roughly $188 million -- that would demand a repair bill.
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So why is Governor Walker rushing to act now? Why is he doing so with
a bill that massively extends his own authority over cabinet agencies
while creating new positions to be filled by his political cronies? And
why is he claiming that it is necessary to take away the collective
bargaining rights of state, county, municipal and education unions in
order to address the issue?
The governor says that he is doing so because trend lines point to
more serious shortfalls in the future. His concerns about those trends
are broadly shared, even by the state's public employee unions, which
have agreed to dramatic concessions in order to help avert fiscal
problems in the future. The governor anticipates a $3.6 billion deficit
in the next fiscal year, while independent observers say it might be
closer to $3.1 billion. That sounds pretty bad, until you recognize that
the previous governor, Democrat Jim Doyle, had to deal with a $5.94 billion budget deficit. [3]
Doyle proved that it is possible to deal with a serious shortfall without breaking unions or restructuring state government.
But Walker says the state's financial woes are now so serious that he
must go after the unions and dramatically increase his power to appoint
cronies to top positions.
What we cannot figure out is this: Why, if the state is in so much
trouble, did Walker engineer the enactment of roughly $140 million in
new tax breaks for multinational corporations, which the legislature
passed in January? Why did he rush to reject federal transportation
funding that other states -- states with similar or worse fiscal
challenges -- have rushed to collect? Why, in the very week that he was
pushing his budget repair bill, did the governor reject federal
broadband development money that Wisconsin's rural counties have been
seeking for years?
The answer to all of these questions is that the governor has made
his budget decisions not with an eye toward fiscal responsibility but
with an eye toward rewarding his political benefactors. Out-of-state
corporations, road-building interests that did not want competition from
high-speed rail, telecommunications corporations that want to cash in
on the demand for broadband all benefited from the decisions made by
the governor in January. Now, in February, the governor says that
Wisconsin needs to end collective bargaining for public employees and
teachers and alter the way in which the state operates on multiple
levels in order to address a fiscal "crisis."
The whole argument is absurd--so absurd that state Representative Mark
Pocan, a Madison Democrat who formerly co-chaired the legislature's
powerful Joint Finance Committee, accuses the governor of "spinning his
fake budget crisis."
Pocan bluntly declares: [4]
"The need for a budget "repair' bill is manufactured so that Governor
Scott Walker can bring in a "Trojan Horse' of bad conservative ideas
promoted nationally by the far right. The non-partisan Legislative
Fiscal Bureau said no statutory trigger was met to require a repair
bill."
Too harsh? Not at all.
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