This nice looking fellow, and the Wisconsin legislature, and our governor are "all about" bringing down the budget deficit (at least until they move on to concealed carry, capital punishment and the like), and we are told that the Budget Repair Bill isn't about Union Busting. Like every state, Wisconsin has had a revenue problem in the Great Recession and the next biennial budget is in trouble. If we are going to avoid running a biennial deficit, which by law we can't do, we have to do one of three things: cut costs, enhance revenues, or a combination of both. Those are the three tools in the tool box.
Now you would think that legislators, fully committed to preserving every tool that might need to be available to them for balancing budgets, now and in the future, would want to make sure that old tool box was as packed full of options as it could be.
But you would be totally wrong when it comes to some Wisconsin legislators. (Well, really just wrong about the ones in red ties.) Just this past Tuesday, Governor Walker signed a bill passed on a party line vote by the Republicans that now requires that any decision to use one of the tools in the tool box, enhancing revenues, can only be done if two-thirds of both the Wisconsin assembly and senate agree to do so.
I can imagine the floor debate: "Fellow legislators, we must have this law to protect us from our own stupidity."
Here is the best part. This "protect us, Lord, from ourselves" law passed three days before the Governor "dropped his bomb" (as he described to his good buddy, Fake David) in the BRB to seek to kill Collective Bargaining. Do you think the legislative debate on the super-majority vote needed for any tax increase would have sounded any different had the order been reversed?
Could you make this up if you tried?
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