Deficit Repair: Pulp Fiction from Scooter and the Gang

Winston Churchill, an intelligent, witty man, though he considered himself a conservative, once quipped of a political opponent, “There's less to that man than meets the eye,” slyly inverting a popular turn of phrase.

Wisconsin's new republican governor is a fitting target for similar appraisal, given his distorted conception of the legislative calendar. Without reason, explanation or sense, Walker and the republican-dominated legislature have connived to bull rush a budget repair bill into law. “Budget Repair” is a misnomer, however. It suggests their aims are responsible and self-evident.

Then you actually read the bill.

Better names for it soon percolate from the pages: The Payback Bill, or Corporate Rewards Come Quickly When Walker Wins Bill, The Union-Buster Bill, The Window Dressing Bill, The Bull Rush Bill to Kill Unions, The I've paid my dues can I join the Country Club? bill.

Wise minds ask, “What's the rush, Scooter?”

Readers, no emergency exists. And this is not the budget which Walker is trying to hurry through the legislature. If it were, you'd be wise to be even more alarmed at republican recklessness. Vote on the entire budget is months away, summertime, which allows plenty of time for the legislature to debate, amend and compromise on the contents and costs. That's how legislatures operate. The latest republican talking point used to justify this high-speed hijack is to say “Elections have consequences,” a statement fraught with ambiguities.

No, Walker and his wonks, worried about wobblies, have wushed this wascally wicked little bill because of its content.

Remind your grumpy conservative neighbors that unionized state employees have agreed (!) to help balance the budget by accepting some concessions. These do little to dent the deficit, true, but this is window-dressing that Scooter and the republicans can crow about in sermons to the true-believers. Even Dems don't mind if the loyal (to whom?) opposition get a chance to bask in the spray-tan glow of a contrived victory.

The devil is in the details, though, and here it's those lines of legislation that strip state unions of the right to collectively bargain over benefits. Pause here, make “grumpy” look you directly in the face and repeat very slowly to him, “This Bill? It ain't about the deficit. It ain't about the money, Sonny.” It is all about busting unions.

Unions, especially public-sector ones, resist the Reagan Doctrine of redistribution of wealth upwards to the already wealthy. That means they tend to vote Democratic, which irks the Corporate, er, I mean republican party. Public sector unions are alligators, solitary reminders that private sector unions once garnered similar deference, once protected their turf with similar tenacity. Before deregulation and the bubble economy of the nineties, the consequences of which most of us non-elites now must weather, when was the American economy last an undeniable powerhouse, last the envy of the world?

Look to the 1950s. Like some of those rose-colored-glasses-wearing social conservatives say, it was, in some ways, a better time. Not because minorities were equal participants in the American economy, or American society; they weren't. Not because alternate sexual orientation had stopped being a social and sometimes real death sentence; it hadn't. Not because the glass ceiling in management had been smashed; that wouldn't happen for decades.

But by many economic yardsticks, that decade had a stronger, more stable and robust marketplace than today, a comfortable standard of living within reach of a higher percentage of the population than today, wages and benefits more than keeping pace with inflation, unlike today, and importantly, much less economic stratification than today.

And get this. Post-WWII Americans paid their taxes gladly because it was the patriotic thing to do. They were the front line against communism. That was when the Berlin wall began to crumble. Real free-market forces, at work in an economy that had moderate government oversight and just taxation rates (90% on incomes over $400,000.00), allowed the U.S. to control and manage its huge war debt, retool for a peace-time economy, fund the Marshall Plan to rebuild a free and democratic Western Europe, aid Japan to rebuild and eventually become an economic powerhouse and ally, and weather several moderate recessions, yet operate at a level of economic efficiency and equity that the Soviet government could never achieve in its command-based economy.

Ordinary U.S. citizen-taxpayers were also a powerful voice in the socio-political sphere. They didn't hesitate to shame the wealthy again and again for grumbling about the tax rates in place at the time. Wealthy Americans were not permitted to indulge the belief that their wealth granted them nobility status, or exemption from contributing to the public sector redistribution. These just taxation rates recirculated money back into the economy. And Eisenhower, certainly no Democrat, had the foresight to leave in place New-Deal era agencies and mechanisms that made the federal government a permanent player in the nation's economy. Ike didn't like what he saw as the “creeping socialism” of New Deal-era government, true, but he saw that the private sector would never act to end the boom-bust economic cycles that have plagued this country since its founding. He saw that it was not labor which caused these boom-bust cycles, not labor which tried to corner markets or engage in reckless speculation, not labor which had once offered management only starvation wages, no pension or health care benefits, seven-day, ten-hour-a-day work weeks, not labor which had the arrogance to collect obscene profits while the entire citizenry and labor force were engaged in an all-out fight against Fascists, Nazis, and the mad empire builders ruling Japan. No, Eisenhower did not dismantle Roosevelt's welfare state, much as he disliked some aspects of it. In fact, Ike strengthened it: Social Security coverage was expanded, and he created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Eisenhower walked the tightrope between the party ideals (smaller, less-influential federal government, stronger state governments) and the need for the federal government to master and shoulder its responsibilities (regulating but not commanding the economy, military defense, equity for citizens who could not (or weren't allowed to) participate fully in the marketplace). Recall that it was he who warned us about an adversary as dangerous as the Soviet-bloc: the military-industrial-congressional complex. He could've added the word corporate to that cabal. While he promoted an economy in which corporate profits would boost the economy (a real economy, in which entrepreneurs build and earn their money through long-term strategies, as opposed to a bubble economy, in which short-term speculation and financial shell games destabilize markets and send the economy into recession/depression.), he also acted wisely and with farsighted vision in the role of public sector advocate/executive. He increased funding for the Federal Housing Administration, for example, making home ownership more accessible without promoting a real estate bubble-market.

Eisenhower was a form of politician now feared to be extinct; the moderate republican. His country came first, not his political party, and certainly not any corporate-puppetmasters.

Anyone looking to take the pulse of this new governor and gauge his credibility can look to his stint as Milwaukee County Executive. His bizarre record of statements followed by nonactions, the utter absence of any cohesive attempt to comprehend and address the complexities of funding county government, the list of non-accomplishements, the clear evidence of ATDD (Attention-to-Deficit-Disorder), all speak more loudly than any carefully calibrated list of talking points he utters today.