High Stakes

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

“You can’t dictate democracy.” -Rep. Mark Pocan [D], Wisconsin

“Public employees,...didn’t cause our budget problems and they should not be blamed for something that’s not their fault.” -Ohio Senate Leader, Capri Cafaro [D]

“When I returned to North Dakota to teach, I heard the term ‘public servants’ spoken often by extended family members of the conservative persuasion.  In this state, the emphasis is on ‘servants’.” -Anon. North Dakota Teacher

“...the economy needs to be reorganized so the broad middle class has enough buying power to rejuvenate the economy. Until we take this lesson to heart, we will be living with the Great Recession’s aftershock of high unemployment and low wages, and an increasingly angry middle class.” -Robert Reich

As political freedom breaks out in the Middle East, the Republican Party in Wisconsin is doing its best to destroy the economic freedom of public employees in the American Middle West.

In an attempt to preserve and extend tax breaks for a few of those who created the Wall Street meltdown in the first place, Wisconsin Governor, Republican Scott Walker, is using methods bordering on “Constitutional Dictatorship” [Clinton Rossiter] by attempting to ram through enabling legislation that will gut the hard fought rights of working people in Wisconsin.

In defying Governor Walker, Democratic Senators from Wisconsin are exercising rights of parliamentary procedure deemed perfectly proper by Mitch McConnell and Republican Senators in the U.S. Senate for a period of two solid years without provoking President Barack Obama to anything more radical than outsmarting them.

While methods of constitutional dictatorship have been employed in the past by Abraham Lincoln to preserve the Union and end chattel slavery, Scott Walker’s motives are far less noble.  He simply wants to destroy public employee bargaining rights in order to avoid extending progressive taxation which, of course, requires more dollars from the rich, than from the less well-to-do.

Walker’s example is being watched by Republican Governors in Ohio and New Jersey, where public employee unions also have been successful in raising their teachers above the gentle poverty common to states like North Dakota.
The stakes are high.

In Indiana, where Governor Mitch Daniels succeeded in eliminating bargaining for state employees six years ago, employees with 20 and 30 years on the job were fired for the sake of a smaller budget, with no consideration of their families or the people of Indiana they served.

Republicans like Mitch Daniels and Scott Walker apparently believe that, for the sake of keeping tax breaks for the wealthy, it is important to make teachers not work less, just worth less.

In North Dakota, of course, public employees have little memory of what it is like to be rewarded economically with some degree of fairness as their counterparts in Wisconsin today, and Indiana in yesteryear.

Unlike voters in North Dakota, Wisconsinites historically have been willing to tax themselves progressively at a greater rate for the sake of the public sector: their policemen, firemen, snow plow operators, veterans and teachers. However, economic disaster unleashed by the Wall Street for which Scott Walker fronts has diminished much of the economic base in the Badger State. 

Many wealthy people care deeply about those who are less fortunate and act accordingly, but some stray to the dark side and, like Walker, strive to make an inequitable situation even worse.

In taking a page out of Karl Rove’s class warfare playbook and blaming public employee unions for an economic crisis brought about by Wall Street’s out-of-control deregulation, Scott Walker merely updates the old strategy of pitting one set of working people against another.  The plan was that the bitterest citizens would turn on public employees in the last election cycle, not because teachers were greedy, but because they were easy targets for those who wanted lower taxes at any cost, even quality public services.

Rove’s contempt for the better part of human nature worked all too well in 2010, but it didn’t fool members of Wisconsin’s police, fire and private sector unions in 2011.  Although exempted from Walker’s latest legislation, they know that their nest eggs will be next, and they demonstrated in solidarity with the other 70,000 in Madison, WI and 50,000 other supporters of public employees around the country on February 26.

Badger State police and firemen know from experience and union loyalty how unfair tax burdens can be unless they are more carefully thought out beforehand by Legislatures and Governors than is the current case in Wisconsin.

Moreover, many tax breaks make sense and are fair minded. Some are not.
One of the least fair tax breaks is “carried interest,” enshrined for years by Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. Tax Code.  As explained by North Dakota’s former U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan [Dem/NPL] in his book “RECKLESS”:
“‘carried interest’ is a sweet term for some of the wealthiest Americans who earn mega- incomes and yet are able to pay income tax to the U.S. government at a 15 per cent rate.

...Meanwhile, most Americans who file income tax returns every year are paying tax rates from 10 percent at the lowest levels of income to 35 percent for those with higher incomes.  When you add to that the payroll tax of 15.3 percent, the lowest-paid Americans who are required to pay taxes are paying a combined tax rate of 25 percent for income and payroll taxes.  That is a full 10 percent higher than the tax bill for those earning billions.” 

By contrast, down in Illinois, voters decided to move away from subsidizing millionaires and in a different direction from North Dakota and Indiana.
Forward.

Illinois rejected a Republican Gubernatorial candidate last November who, like Scott Walker, made no secret of his contempt for public employees.  Instead, the Illinois Democratic Legislature and Governor Pat Quinn campaigned for and recently raised the State Income Tax by two percent, to share pain brought about by a bad economy.

The Illinois message falls on deaf ears among Republican elected officials in North Dakota, many of whom talk and behave as if this State were facing a budget deficit similar to Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois, rather than an unprecedented surplus.

Maybe public employees here at the local, State and federal level need to have a talk with themselves in the mirror:

Have I voted for any Republicans recently?

These Republicans, unlike my grandfather’s Republicans, don’t care if my family thrives or starves.

What was I thinking? 

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