From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, relating to Governor Doyle’s announcement of state employee cuts and furloughs:

Risser said it’s unfair to require “dedicated and loyal” state workers to take unpaid furloughs.

He said he wants to consider other options, even tax increases, saying state workers aren’t responsible for the recession that caused tax collections to fall by 7.3% over the past 10 months. That drop meant state government collected about $790 million less in general-fund taxes over that period this year than in the previous year.

Translation: “Dedicated and loyal” state workers shouldn’t be punished for a recession for which they are not responsible, but everyone who pays taxes should be.  (That would be you “undedicated and disloyal” private sector employees, 115,000 of whom lost their jobs in the last year – while government employees actually grew by 5,700.)  

Does Senator Risser think taxpayers are responsible for the recession, since he wants to punish them for it?

Today was tax day – the day everyone rushes to the post office to file their returns.  That is, unless they work for the Obama administration and are in charge of actually spending that money.  They can get to it whenever they feel like it.

The Lord smiled on the Tea Party held in Madison today, as thousands of people showed up from all over the state to fight higher taxes.  (The Lord hasn’t specifically expressed a preference for lower taxes, although he was irked that one time Jesus got a ticket from the DNR for turning bread into fish.)  Warmth greeted 4,000 people who flooded the Capitol’s East Wing sidewalk to demonstrate against taxes, spending, and pretty much any gripe they have with any aspect of the current government.  Today was the day of airing grievances publicly – if you don’t like taxes, you were there with signs.  If you don’t like gun control, you were there with signs.  If you think the voting process on American Idol is rigged, you were there with signs.

Before the event even began, liberal groups were trying to cut the protest off at the knees.  Wisconsin Democratic Chairman Joe Wineke issued a statement deriding the “tea bag party” as an organized effort bankrolled by conservative interest groups.  As if union protests are completely organic events – like, some union guy shows up on a picket line completely unaware that other people are going to be there.  “Oh, you guys are protesting today?  Me too!”

I got there about an hour and a half before the festivities began.  Capitol police lined the outer rings of the Capitol, just in case they needed to jump in and beat down someone who might be throwing peanuts on the ground.  People with anti-tax signs were already filling up the sidewalk leading up to the doors of the Capitol.  The stage was set up right in front of the doors, with a large video screen on the left side of the stage.  The right sidewalk was flanked by a humongous 8 foot tall sign with orange letters that said NO NEW TAXES, brought here by Citizens for Responsible Government.  Naturally, their volunteers were handing out pamphlets pushing for Governor Jim Doyle’s recall.

At a quarter to 11:00, the thousand or so people who had already gathered began an impromptu rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.”  Apparently not knowing what their next move was, they began singing “God Bless America,” although clearly fewer people knew the words.  They then, for some reason, followed that up with “Amazing Grace,” and even fewer people knew the words to that song.  I figured that if it kept up at that pace, in about six songs, it would just be one guy singing the theme song to “Titanic” really loudly by himself.

The signs were all fairly standard anti-tax and spend sayings.  They ranged from the poetic (“Doyle is a Boil on the Taxpayers’ Ass”) to the scatological (“Flush the Doylet”), to the confusing-but-true-if-taken-literally (“Washington is on Crack”.  Marion Barry is protesting alone in D.C. with a sign that says “you have a point this time.”)  I was talking with a friend, and saw an execrable sign (“Obama Wants White Slavery”), then turned to my friend and said “I guarantee that sign gets mentioned in the press.”  It took almost a full hour before Wispolitics.com made good on my guarantee.  Wasn’t really a tough prediction – of the probably 500 signs there, that was clearly the one that was going to make the news.

(There was one sign that said “Yes, We Are a Christian Nation,” and I thanked them for holding me in such high regard.)

Speaking of signs and the media, our friends from One Wisconsin Now (an outfit funded almost entirely by union money) were there staging their own protest.  Their executive director Scot Ross was there, along with some of his buddies who were dressed as bankers, complete with top hats and awesome curly mustaches.  They were holding signs that said things like “Don’t Tax My Yacht” and, perhaps most ironically, “Get Back to Work.”  (You may recall the last taxpayer rally at the Capitol, which drew hundreds of government workers there to heckle the anti-tax folks on the taxpayers’ dime.)

Before things got underway, I sat for a while and watched one guy that had an awesome contraption – it was essentially like a bicycle seat attached to this long pole.  So anytime, anywhere you felt like it, you could whip this thing out and sit down on it.  As someone who specializes in laziness, this thing could be revolutionary.  See for yourself:

As I gazed at this technological marvel, the loudspeakers began playing Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” while the giant video screen flashed the words.  When this song came out in 1985, I’m guessing Twisted Sister hadn’t really envisioned it as a rallying cry for conservatives to urge lower taxes.  I’m thinking they were probably championing the cause of more irresponsible sex and heavier drug use.  (Finally, someone speaks on behalf of the drugs.)  Just in case the crowd missed the point of the song, they played it a second time, right after the first.

Twisted Sister was followed up by a an audio montage of Jim Doyle’s greatest hits – all of his past quotes about how “we can not, and I will not raise taxes,” and that “Wisconsin’s government problem isn’t that it taxes too little, it’s that it spends too much.”  By this time, the crowd was really getting big, and the boos washed over the people crammed in near the stage.

Then, the Conservative Bat Signal came.  It is the inviolable rule of conservative events – nothing really happens until Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” plays.  Once the final “God Bless the USA” plays, it’s go time.  Only this time, there was a lag between the song and the speeches.  The stage was still empty, although the sound checks had all been completed.  It took every ounce of self control for me to not run up to the microphone and start yelling “don’t take the brown acid, man!”  Sadly, I think few attendees would have gotten the joke.  Or they would have been stabbed by the Hell’s Angels, who were providing security for the day.

Finally, a crowd gathered on the podium, and Americans For Prosperity director Mark Block introduced the day’s first speaker, fiscal dreamboat Paul Ryan.  As Ryan walked out of the Capitol an on to the stage, the One Wisconsin Now guys berated him via bullhorn, blaming him for high unemployment in his district.  Ryan strode up to the podium, and immediately announced that “everyone is giving me teabags.”  This elicited only a fraction of the muffled laughter I expected, although it may have earned him an entirely new constituency that he has heretofore never courted.

Ryan gave an impassioned speech not unlike many of the speeches he’s given on the floor of the House.  It could have only been a couple minutes, then he was gone.  Following Ryan were a host of speakers, including Wisconsin GOP Chair Reince Priebus.  Priebus had a tough task ahead of him – a good number of the attendees in the crowd equally blame Republicans for the shoddy state of government finances, and he received a couple cat calls to that effect.  But he did a really good job of throwing out the red meat, and by the end of his speech, seems to have more than won the crowd over.

After Priebus spoke, I began winding my way through the crowd to try to observe some of the sights.  The faux-bankers at One Wisconsin Now were giving media interviews, accusing everyone at the rally of being the wealthiest 1% of wage earners.  (Apparently, the liberal groups are unaware that they RUN THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT now.)

Just by scanning the crowd, you could see that, if anything, these people were the exact opposite.  They are just regular people afraid of losing their jobs – something government employees rarely have to fear – and hacked off at having to pay more of their money to a government that is using it to drive the state’s finances into a ditch.  Aesthetically, they had the look of 4,000 regular, main-street folks – for the cost of Governor Doyle’s trip to the Masters golf tournament, you probably could have bought them all haircuts.

As radio talk show host Vicki McKenna took the stage to wrap things up, the crowd was clearly tired and angry.  The sun had been beating down on them for hours as they listened to speech after speech of depressing (and accurate) descriptions of our government gone bad.  McKenna’s speech hit all the right notes – pointing out all the hidden policy in the budget, urging people to take action, and ordering them to go in and talk to their legislators.  She got a big ovation, then rally attendees broke up and started going their separate ways.

Will it make any difference in the budget?  Not likely.  All of the legislators sympathetic to the protestors’ causes were in attendance – but none of them actually run anything anymore.  Around late July this year, the budget is going to pass in something close to its currentform.  As a result, all these people will be back – probably with a few thousand more of their friends.

So by now, you’ve most likely seen the video of European Parliament member Daniel Hannan excoriating British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the issue of deficit spending.  It hit the internet a week ago, but in today’s news cycle, it seems like it’s a year old already.

It appears that Hannan has become a favorite of conservative TV talk shows – showing up on Hannity, Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto and others.  Here’s a clip of him on “Morning Joe:”

Clearly, the appeal of Hannan’s speech was that he consisely articulated what many people have been saying about the economy all along.  But why do we all of a sudden revere a guy who really didn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said?

BECAUSE HE HAS AN ENGLISH ACCENT.

It’s true.  We here in America take anything British people much more seriously.  And there’s nothing we like more than to have the English deliver us bad news.

Think about it – on a show called AMERICAN Idol, Simon Cowell, a Brit, dishes out brutal, demeaning reviews to contestants.  And we eat it up.  He’s by far the most popular judge.  Remember that “Weakest Link” show, with the mean old British lady that yelled at people?  And doesn’t “Dancing With the Stars” have a British judge?  And “America’s Got Talent?”  (Perhaps the most ironically titled show on TV, as it is hosted by David Hasselhoff.)

This hits a sore spot for me, as I have spent months of my life killing brain cells, sitting at my laptop, wailing about the sorry state of Wisconsin state government.  Instead of cranking out report after report after report, I should have just done the easier thing – just start faking a British accent.  (This entire paragraph has been typed with an English accent – but you could probably already tell that.)  Suddenly, I could do a fraction of the work and be taken ten times as seriously.

Or, I could just import someone – this might be a good time to get my girlfriend Keira Knightley to come to Wisconsin to warn of the dangers of socialized medicine.  Better yet – since Johnny Depp spent like $30 million of our tax money on haircuts while he was here filming “Public Enemies” last year, we could have him pay us back by dressing up like Cap’n Jack Sparrow, adopting the accent, and lecturing our State Legislature on the dangers of utilizing debt for ongoing appropriations.  It’s FOOLPROOF.

There’s an old saying that talking to yourself doesn’t make you crazy – but when you start answering yourself, it means trouble.

A couple of days ago, Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan announced that he wanted pay freezes for the full Assembly.  Fair enough – although I maintain that if elected representatives cave on an issue like this after a mere hint of criticism, they’ll literally cave on anything.  But whatever.

In order to get the ball rolling, Sheridan had to make a request of the Joint Committee on Employment Relations – half of which he, as Speaker of the Assembly, controls.  So yesterday, Sheridan had to essentially send himself a letter requesting he call a meeting of this committee.  It turned out to be persuasive, as Sheridan apparently convinced himself that the commitee should meet.

In fact, we know Sheridan got the letter he wrote to himself, because he then actually responded to it.  In his public response, he said:

“Given the record budget deficit facing Wisconsin, and the tough economic challenges working families are struggling with today, freezing the next scheduled legislator pay increase is simply the right thing to do. As Co- Chair of the Joint Committee on Employment Relations, I will see to it that the committee will consider and approve this action at our next scheduled meeting.”

Of course, this is all necessary to create a paper trail, so Sheridan can take credit for freezing legislator salaries when it finally happens.  (Meanwhile, dozens of legislative staff will continue to make significantly more than their bosses.) But it just feeds the public’s view of the Legislature as being out of touch with how the real world works.

Whether they’re conservative or liberal, Wisconsinites can all agree on one thing:  We LOVE being from Wisconsin.  We love playing cardiac Russian roulette by gorging on cheese curds.  Nobody bats an eye when someone wants to be buried in a Packer jersey.  And we’re proud of the fact that the sub-zero weather gives us thick skins and warm hearts.

In fact, when our nation’s founders wrote the U.S. Constitution, this sense of regional pride may have been what they had in mind.  Our federalist system rewards state sovereignty, making each state what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis dubbed a “laboratory of democracy.”  If we think (or know, as the case may be) Illinois is a cesspool, we don’t have to live under their laws.  Better yet, now that we’re done renting their quarterback, we can go back to pretending Mississippi doesn’t exist.

However, over the years, state sovereignty has begun to erode as the federal government grows in scope and reach.  Each Congress births more federal programs for the states to implement, and more mandates for them to obey.  And at an alarming rate, Wisconsin has been drunk-dialing Congress at 3 AM, begging for more federal aid to keep the state’s programs alive.

Until this year, Wisconsin’s loss of independent governing authority has been a slow process.  But the creeping hand of the federal government has grown steadily for a quarter century.  Between 1984 and 2009, federal funds as a percentage of the Wisconsin budget grew from 18% to 25%. However, this year, the floodgates have been opened.

Governor Doyle’s proposed 2009-11 budget, on the strength of a $4.5 billion increase in federal funds, increases the federal share of the state budget from 25%to 30% in one year.  Commensurately, state general purpose revenue (GPR) drops from 50% of state spending to 45%.  In many cases, such as school aids, Doyle merely plugs federal money in where state general fund revenue had previously been used:

The skyrocketing use of federal funds to run our state’s budget is troubling on several fronts.  If the feds turn the “stimulus” spigot off after this biennium, Wisconsin is on the hook for billions of dollars that will likely be raised via tax increase.  Conversely, if Congress keeps pumping money into our state budget to prop up our spending, we will have ceased to be our own sovereign entity.  We might as well just shut down state government and declare ourselves the newly-created federal “Department of Wisconsin.”

The more federal funds Wisconsin accepts, the more it opens itself up for blackmail and micromanagement by Congress.  We all remember the feds threatening to pull transportation funding unless states changed their minimum drinking age and minimum drunk driving standard.  All this federal funding makes Wisconsin the federal government’s marionette.  Whoever holds the purse strings wields unlimited coercive power.

Think about your job.  If you didn’t get a paycheck from your boss, and he asked you to go through the office files and re-sort them in reverse alphabetical order, you’d probably graciously invite him to reproduce with himself.  But since you need the income, you glumly put your head down, mutter to yourself, and suffer through the paper cuts.

The erosion in sovereignty exacerbated by the Legislature this session hasn’t been limited merely to the use of federal funds.  A week before he introduced his current budget, Doyle signed a fiscal appetizer into law, known as the so-called “budget repair” bill.  This bill contained a provision known as the “Streamlined Sales Tax Act,” which increases sales taxes on goods and services in Wisconsin by forcing our sales tax exemption code to conform to other states.  Essentially, Arkansas and other member states will be determining the goods on which we can and can’t charge sales tax.  If our Legislature wants to promote the sale of a certain Wisconsin-made product by granting it a sales tax exemption in the state, too bad – the Interplanetary High Court of Sales Tax Exemptions must all agree to the changes.  And thus, we’ve sold our sovereign right to decide what’s best for Wisconsin in exchange for a few extra bucks.

In the early 1990s, Wisconsin was perhaps the most admired laboratory of democracy in America.  Wisconsin had the first school choice program, giving poor parents the right to send their children to better schools.  Welfare reform in Wisconsin was so successful, the state’s plan served as the model when Congress overhauled the federal welfare system.

In the ultimate irony, Wisconsin itself has now transformed itself into a welfare recipient.  Unwilling to do the hard work to balance his budget, Jim Doyle now sits at home all day in sweatpants, working on his correspondence art school Tippy the Turtle drawing, waiting for that federal check to come through.  And as long as our elected officials are willing to sell off the sovereignty that made our state great, this disturbing trend will continue.

At least until Nancy Pelosi tries a cheese curd.

Ever since he was first elected to the State Assembly in 1998, Representative Mark Pocan has had a soft spot in his heart for the Wisconsin Taxpayers’ Alliance.  In May of 1999, Pocan charged the WTA with being a shill for Republican interests, earning him a nice little article in the Wisconsin State Journal, which printed his charges verbatim.

A full decade later, Pocan is still at it, despite not having contradicted a single statement made by the Taxpayers Alliance over that period.  Recently, the WTA’s President, Todd Berry, earned the scorn of Democrats in state government by pointing out that a large chunk of the state’s then-$5.7 billion deficit was actually comprised of agency requests that had not yet been granted.  Fast forward to last week’s budget announcement, when Governor Doyle’s very own budget summary (p. 9) admitted that Doyle “cut” the deficit by $1.8 billion merely by rejecting new departmental spending requests.  (The line to apologize to Berry forms on the left.)  

Having apparently already solved the state’s budget deficit, Pocan yesterday sent out a glib press release instructing the media to refrain from calling the Taxpayers Alliance “nonpartisan.”  Recognizing that the media likely wouldn’t appreciate being lectured on how to label certain groups, Pocan made his request vapid and lighthearted, at one point joking about his likeness to Brad Pitt.  Conveniently, Pocan seems to forget about the “nonpartisan” label given to lefty front groups like the League of Women Voters, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, etc.

This release apparently infuriated Representative Steve Nass, who fired off an angry press release accusing Pocan of being anti-American, or something.  Then Rep. Leah Vukmir issued a release that invoked Orwell’s “1984” to defend Berry.  (I have to sheepishly admit that someone had to explain the press release to me for me to understand it.)

Responding to Pocan serves two ends, neither of them desirable.  It makes it appear as though legislators have nothing better to do.  Also, since it will likely  be exclusively Republicans running to Berry’s aid, it almost appears to strengthen his previously nonexistent point.

Todd Berry is a big boy.  I think he does an excellent job of defending himself, as he has had to do for years.  The work he does in explaining the budget to regular dopes like me is invaluable.  Responding to Pocan is merely taking his bait, in his attempt to get the GOP to talk about anything other than the disastrous budget his caucus is about to ram through.

Yesterday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a column I wrote about the disastrous state of Wisconsin’s finances, and how both parties were to blame for our fiscal collapse.  This piece was intended to be a counter-argument to another column, written from the liberal perspective, which attempted to explain that our taxes really aren’t very high, after all.

This editorial, which apparently it took seven people to write,  made a couple claims that popped out:

However, some argue for reduced spending, falsely claiming that profligate public outlay is the cause of today’s economic crisis. This analysis is wrong. Wisconsin has been careful in its overall taxing and spending. Between 2000 and 2006, total state taxes per person decreased from $2,740 to $2,475, when adjusted for inflation. In fact, there have been $12 billion in state tax cuts since 1999, more than twice the current deficit.

Apparently, in arriving at the fact that “total state taxes per person” have decreased, the authors used a Brookings Institution website that draws on census bureau data.  When you look at the “total state taxes” numbers they use, it contradicts the state’s own data as reported on the Department of Administration’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFR).  According to the Brookings Institution, the state brought in $14.7 billion in “total state taxes,” in 2000, and $13.8 billion in 2006 – thus, the drop in the per capita number.  There is no explanation as to what “total taxes” includes. Furthermore, the population in Wisconsin grew by 3.7% between 2000 and 2006, which alone would have contributed to the appearance that per capita taxes were dropping.

Yet when the state reports its General Fund taxes, the numbers are drastically different.  The state CAFR says that in 2000, sales, income, corporate, and other taxes collected $10.9 billion.  Due to a combination of tax cuts signed into law by Governor Thompson in 1999 and the 2001 recession, tax receipts dropped to $10.2 billion in 2001 and 2002, steadily climbing back to 10.4 billion in 2003.  By 2006, tax receipts had climbed to 12.4 billion, or a 9.9% increase over taxes collected in 2000.  And keep in mind, this is in the midst of a recession in 2001 that it took the state several years from which to recover.  The shrinking revenue was due, in large part, to people losing their jobs and buying fewer goods, not necessarily because the Legislature was being “careful” in our taxing and spending.

In fact, if you bypass the Brookings Institution website (which purports to use Census Bureau data) and go straight to the Census Bureau, the numbers look much different.  In 2000, the Census Bureau reported Wisconsin taxes at $2,344.51 per capita.  In 2005 (the most recent number available,) per capita taxes had increased to $2,375.77.  And again, this is after the state suffered a 4-year lag in collections due to the 2001 recession (which may be why they only chose these specific years to make their point.)

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, they’re right.  Let’s concede their point (that seems to be flatly incorrect) that somehow taxes are falling.  According to the CAFR, state general fund spending increased 13.3% percent (from $11.3 billion to $12.8 billion) during this time that our taxes were supposedly dropping.  This is exactly the point of my last report and subsequent column.  The state is spending more money than it is taking in.

So how did we increase spending by 13.3% while our revenue was supposedly dropping by $1 billion (according to their numbers)?  Our governor and legislators dumped in $2.4 billion in one-time money to balance the budget, blowing a hole in future budgets.  They artificially made it look like we were spending less by offloading general fund expenses to program and segregated revenue.  (Think cutting general fund aid to the UW by $250 million and replacing it with increased tuition – which makes it look like we’re cutting general fund taxes, while instead, we’re just offloading those expenses to students.)  They issued debt to plug holes in the budget, committing taxpayers to decades of paying those bonds off.

As for the $12 billion in tax cuts they claim we’ve had since 1999, I have no idea where they came up with the number.  But I can assure them of one thing – had the state collected this mythical $12 billion and spent it, the budget deficit would be much worse than it is now, as the spending base would be much higher.  If there’s something the state has proved, none of that money would have gone to a “rainy day” fund to ameliorate recessionary budget downturns.

As an aside, it should also be noted that almost all of the authors of this column are frequent contributors to Democratic campaigns, including UW-Madison economist Andrew Reschovsky, who has contributed $7,850 to Democrats since 2000 – including Governor Jim Doyle.  At one point (2002), Reschovsky was a vocal critic of structural deficits, yet now he says nothing about the current imbalance.  I wonder why?