What happens when Democrats flee the state
Republicans make it difficult to hike taxes:
Madison – Today, Governor Scott Walker signed Special Session Assembly Bill 5 which requires a 2/3s vote to pass tax rate increases on the income, sales or franchise taxes.
Naturally, that left-wing blog is up in arms over it:
This is really depressing. The fight is still ongoing over public employee union rights, but without the ability to obtain needed revenue, I don’t see how they’ll matter a whole lot. The state government will say their hands are tied and that they must have concessions, and either the workers will suffer, or the recipients of their services. Revenues, half of what a budget comprises, have now been walled off. This is a budget crisis requiring shared sacrifice, says Scott Walker, but that sacrifice doesn’t extend to any Wisconsinite who doesn’t receive government services.
Good Lord.
Interesting.
Update: And the governor has a free shot at pitching his ideas to the citizenry.
Update again: What I did notice is this:
It’s quite striking the way almost every lie the left ever told about the Tea Party has turned out to be true of the government unionists in Wisconsin and their supporters:
• Extreme rhetoric. The Wisconsin Republican Party has produced what Mediaite.org calls an “incredibly effective” video juxtaposing liberal complaints about allegedly extremist Tea Party rhetoric with unionist signs likening Gov. Walker to Hitler and other dictators. Left-wing journalists are making similar invidious comparisons: “Workers Toppled a Dictator in Egypt, but Might Be Silenced in Wisconsin” read the headline of a Washington Post column by Harold Meyerson last week. The other day on CNN we saw scenes of a Madison crowd chanting, “Kill the bill”–which was said to be violent and invidious a year ago, when “the bill” was ObamaCare.
• Violence. Blogress Ann Althouse, a state employee based in Madison, posted a video of municipal salt trucks blowing their horns in support of the unionists. A YouTube commenter responded (quoting verbatim), “whoever video taped this has no life and should be shot in the head.” Unlike Frances Fox Piven, Althouse has never advocated violence, but don’t expect the Times to give this the kind of coverage it gave Piven’s claims that she had received threatening emails.
• Partisan AstroTurf. …
• Refusal to accept election results. …
• Stupidity. Remember “Teabonics,” a photo album of misspelled Tea Party signs? The unionists can’t spell any better–and some of them are teachers! …
Turns out it was mainly projection. Who knew?
Great, he just turned Wisconsin into California — without the surfing.
I agree with Greg. Wisconsin essentially passed Proposition 13. That worked out beautifully for California.
You see, Republicans are really bad at recognizing reality, so they don’t get that tax cuts are spending by other means. Worse, they haven’t even seen the reality that tax cuts haven’t been particularly stimulative in the last decade. The Bush tax cuts produced the smallest growth in nearly a century and Obama’s stimulus – over a third of which was tax cuts – accomplished nothing.
Tax cuts aren’t going to do much of anything in the absence of consumer demand. And with nearly half of America’s privately owned single residence houses underwater, I wouldn’t expect any consumer demand for awhile.
Walker has basically created a way to give away money without raising revenue, which is retarded. Worse, he’s not allowing local governments to tinker with the sales tax to make up the shortfall, which California did.
How did these people get so goddamned stupid?
Yah, prop 13, THAT’S the problem in California. They haven’t raised taxes enough. God knows their house would be in good fiscal order if they had just continued to raise taxes more.
Cliff,
Having a regime where people can vote themselves new, unfunded program spending by ballot initiative while making virtually impossible to raise revenue is a recipe for disaster.
Worse, Prop 13 hasn’t just crushed the state government, it’s hobbled the municipalities as well. They still have to pay for things like cops, fire fighters and teachers, but don’t have the resources to do it because the main mechanism for doing so, property taxes, was frozen 35 years ago.
Bitching about a “spending problem” is fun. I get that. But it turns out that people like that spending, as indicated by the reelection rates of the people doing the spending. At some point, folks are going to have recognize the revenue side of the equation.
The only thing worse taxing and spending is tax cutting and spending. All that’s ever done is create mountains of debt that is going to ruin the United States much sooner than anyone thinks.
I knew they were projecting. Anybody who’s ever been around unions in a political campaign capacity even for a little bit knew. I worked on a State Rep. race in 2002 in my home state and saw a lot of the same kinds of things they were talking about coming from the unions (the race I was working on was a traditionally very D seat that none-the-less had a strong Republican candidate and a weak Democratic one. The D’s pulled out all the stops and won by 500 votes). So yah, the second I heard the complaints about the Tea Party, I was like “Oh, I get it..” Watching the Unions in Wisconsin only confirms my theory.