Mary Burke recently said that she disagreed with Gov. James Doyle’s decision to raid various segregated funds (illegally in the case of the Patients Compensation Fund) to fill state budget holes.
That’s interesting given that she said she was in favor of Doyle’s fund raids when Doyle was governor. Now with the transportation fund referendum about to be enacted by referendum after the Nov. 4 referendum, suddenly she’s against fund raids.
Readers might want to remember Doyle’s views on government finance and accounting. The Wisconsin Conservative Digest passed on two Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stories from the bad old days:
Gov. Jim Doyle said Thursday that the budget deficit has exploded to up to $6.5 billion – a historic gap he wants fixed by laying off up to 1,100 employees, furloughing non-emergency workers eight days a year, rescinding 2% pay raises and making new cuts in aid to schools and local governments.
Doyle said the $5 billion deficit he and lawmakers faced in March has soared because tax collections are running far below estimates. The potential $6.5 billion gap will occur over a three-year period ending June 30, 2011.
“We are facing tougher choices than ever about what level of state services we can sustain at a time when people need them most,” Doyle said. “I am fighting to protect the middle class, education, public safety and health care.”
Doyle said he would not propose any additional tax increases to rebalance the 2009-’11 budget and said he hopes Democratic legislators go along with the cuts he proposed Thursday. The budget the governor gave to the Legislature in February included $1.7 billion in tax and fee increases.
Democrats, who control the Legislature, promised an independent look at Doyle’s cuts.
“We’re a co-equal branch of government,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Madison), co-chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee.
Assembly Republican Leader Jeff Fitzgerald of Horicon said state government must become smaller, but Doyle’s new cuts don’t cancel tax and spending increases that he signed into law or has proposed.
“It is unfortunate that Governor Doyle has just now begun to consider budget reductions so late in the budget process and after significant tax increases have already been imposed,” Fitzgerald said, referring to $1.2 billion in tax and fee increases the governor signed into law in February in a separate budget-repair package.
Thursday was Doyle’s third attempt to realign state spending and tax collections in five months.
Taxpayers would notice new reductions in state services if the cuts become law, Doyle added. There would be longer lines at state Transportation Department offices, for example, he said. …
The governor soon will give lawmakers what amounts to a new 2009-’11 budget, rewriting his February proposal
Under Doyle’s plan:
• Non-emergency state employees will be required to take 16 days of unpaid leave in the next two years, saving up to $120 million a year. Those furloughs equal a 3% pay cut, the governor said. Prison guards and those who care for the disabled would not be furloughed.
• As many as 10,000 nonunion state workers, including University of Wisconsin faculty and academic staff, will not receive the 2% pay raise they had been scheduled to get in June, saving about $30 million a year. Legislative leaders must approve this change.
• The state will ask union members to reopen contract negotiations to achieve a similar 2% in payroll savings, or about $36 million a year. If the unions don’t negotiate the pay cut, about 400 workers would be laid off over the next two years.
• A new cut of up to 5% will be made in state spending, which Doyle said will force the layoff of about 700 other workers.
• Deeper cuts from what Doyle proposed in February will be made in aid to public schools and local governments and on health care spending. The size of these new cuts won’t be known until the Legislative Fiscal Bureau issues a report on state finances next week.
Today, the state budget is legally balanced, if not factually balanced (as by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), with substantial reserve funds. The budget should be balanced by GAAP, but no governor has been required by law to GAAP-balance the budget. Do not expect Democrats to insist on GAAP-balanced state budgets when they take over at some future point, since Democrats cannot even be bothered to keep segregated funds segregated.
Back when public-employee unions ran the state, things like this happened:
Megan Sampson was named outstanding first-year teacher by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English last week.
Second-year social studies teacher Kevin Condon, also at Bradley Tech High School, has four licenses and can command the attention of 40 students in an open-concept classroom.
Both are among 482 educators – more than 12% of the full-time teachers in the district – who have received layoff notices from Milwaukee Public Schools.
On Monday – the last day of the year for schools in MPS and the first day teachers reunited after hearing the news of the layoffs – some teachers expressed frustration at losing their jobs because of experience, not performance. Others said they were disappointed the teachers union had not solicited input from those with the least amount of seniority. …
Milwaukee School Board President Michael Bonds said the situation in Milwaukee reflects economic reality and has nothing to do with teacher performance. The district has to lay off teachers based on seniority, he said. …
Sampson and her laid-off colleagues, all who have less than three years of teaching experience, also expressed frustration that their jobs would be filled by more veteran, but not necessarily better, educators.
Sampson and Emily Kaphaem, a world geography and citizenship teacher at Tech, said they have received exemplary performance reviews.
“I feel kind of let down by my city today,” said Kaphaem, 25, as she lost the fight to hold back tears in Principal Ed Kupka’s office.
Kupka is equally frustrated. He hand-selected the new teachers because of their talent and enthusiasm for turning around Tech, recently designated as one of the worst-performing high schools in the state.
“Based on the pressures we’re under as a low-performing school, I absolutely would have chosen a different nine (for layoffs),” Kupka said. “Not everyone is on board with the cultural shift, or has the skills to implement it. The people that are leaving are among the most transformation-minded people on staff.”
Teachers at Alliance School, known as a safe haven for bullied children and those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, also have concerns. Four of the small charter school’s 10 educators received layoff notices. Earlier this year, Lead Teacher Tina Owen trimmed the staff from 13 to meet the district’s budget.
Owen said it’s impossible to know whether new educators assigned to Alliance will embrace the school’s culture.
“Just because you have a great teacher doesn’t mean you have the right teacher for the school,” Owen said.
As divisive as Act 10 was, Act 10 put the right people in charge — the people paid to run schools, and the people voted to run schools. Notice that only Da Union is calling for Act 10’s death — not school administrators, not school boards, and not parents.
Unions asserted they were willing to negotiate on benefits. That was not a credible statement for two reasons. First, no state union official can tell the members of 400 teacher unions what to do. Second, the closed-door nature of contract negotiations means that union officials could say one thing in public and do the exact opposite in private.
David Fladeboe adds:
In no universe real or otherwise were powerful labor bosses and their unions ever going to make meaningful concessions that benefited hard-working teachers and public safety workers, let alone Wisconsin taxpayers.
How quickly we can forget: Walker’s labor friendly predecessor Democrat Jim Doyle failed to successfully negotiate new labor contracts with state workers on his way out of office. Instead of working with a governor who was sympathetic to their self-serving, budget-busting concerns, the labor bosses decided to take their chances with a newly elected chief executive and state Legislature.
Unfortunately for organized labor, things didn’t go their way in November, and when Scott Walker was elected as Wisconsin’s governor, they got desperate. How desperate, you ask? So desperate, in fact, that in late 2010 during a lame-duck session, the outgoing Democrat majority was so eager to force through lucrative union-friendly contracts that they bailed an outgoing state representative out of jail and rushed another member down to Madison shortly after undergoing surgery in an effort to deliver the booty for their union-boss masters.
In fact, it was only principled and prudent leadership by outgoing Democratic Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker, a longtime labor supporter himself, that prevented these sweetheart deals from getting rubber-stamped into law.
After witnessing firsthand the depths big labor and their allies in Madison were willing to sink to in order to get their way and stick taxpayers with a massive bill, can Walker or any legislator — or conscientious taxpayer for that matter — be blamed for not expecting a good-faith effort from organized labor in future contract negotiations?
Try as the Journal Sentinel editorial might to whitewash the unions’ efforts from history, Walker’s first round with statewide labor interests was never going to be easy. Instead of forgoing the tough decisions that were necessary to get Wisconsin’s fiscal house in order and limit the tremendous partisan power that organized labor held in Madison, Walker and a majority of representatives and senators did right by taxpayers and said, “enough already.”
The results as noted by the Journal Sentinel are undeniable: More than $3 billion in savings, increased autonomy and flexibility for our schools and our local governments, and a system that allows hard-working Wisconsinites to choose if they forcibly want money from their hard-earned paychecks going to support policies and causes they might very well staunchly oppose.
Doing the right thing isn’t always easy, so let’s not pretend for the sake of our editorial pages that it is. Tough choices are needed to move our state forward. We should be thanking the politicians bold enough to do what is right instead of rewriting history.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 