Don’t be hoodwinked by the New Era when it editorializes “Wisconsin’s governor and lawmakers, including some brave Democrats, who support pension reform are in a difficult position, but they are responding admirably.”
The Wisconsin budget crisis is a sham , the result of hard times which are fast improving and $210 million in Republican tax cuts to favor the rich that took effect at the outset of 2011.
Nor is the crisis about balancing the budget. Rather, this is right wing Republican attempt to destroy what remains of the union movement in the United States, attacking the only segment of the labor force which has not suffered a two-thirds decline in union membership over the past decades, a decline in part due to the failure of the National Labor Relations Board to uphold the union rights to organize.
It is one thing to cut costs, to which the unions are prepared to negotiate and, as of yesterday, to concede; it is another to drive unions out of existence! Unions are the only effective organization that the middle class has to protect itself from that top one percent and especially the top 1/10 of 1% who are restructuring the laws and regulations to further their unparalleled share of the national earnings.
From the WISCONSIN BUDGET PROJECT:
At least eight new or expanded state tax cuts and taxcredits will go into effect at the beginning of 2011. These tax changes add up to an estimated $210 million cut in state taxes over the 2011-13 biennium.
After adding in other tax reductions with different effective dates, we calculate that tax changes contribute more than $320 million to the structural deficit for the coming biennial budget.
Tax increases often garner more attention than tax cuts. The 2009-11 biennial budget implemented several well-publicized tax increases, but what’s often lost in the discussion is that the budget also included a number of targeted tax cuts described in this brief…
Click here to read the full article.
Exactly.
And here is the national version of what is happening in Wisconsin. Written by Paul Craig Roberts who was once at the top of the conservative heap, on the big think tanks as a senior fellow, editor of the National Review and Wall Street Journal, and undersecretary of the Treasury for Reagan. Today, because he has strayed from all of that smoke and mirrors to the truth, his name is mud in those circles, persona non grata. He is one who knows where all the bodies are buried, having once rubbed elbows with the corporate elite who are behind both parties — and he’s telling. Here’s his latest on the Obama budget, below that a link to mine which is not too different (although I am less strident!).
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02182011.html
http://www.prosperityagenda.us/node/4653