Walker Did the Right Thing - Part 1

This article is part one of a two part series. In this article, I plan to go over the obvious, which is that Walker was right to limit collective bargaining by comparing our results to that of other states.

In the next article I plan to deal with the more interesting question, would it be immoral to remove the limits to collective bargaining? I want to also make it clear that that I am not referring to collective bargaining in private sector.

The first and most obvious comparison is to compare to Illinois, both faced large per capita budget shortfalls in 2010 budgets. Illinois refused to deal with their spending issue, as sold out lawmakers raised taxes 67% for personal income taxes and 46% for corporations. One year later all or most of corporate tax increases have been used to keep large companies from moving out of state, Illinois has $6.8 billion in unpaid bills, only 45% of pensions funded, Illinois dropped the 48^th in list of best states to do business, and Illinois received a credit downgrade that is increasing borrowing costs.

Compare to Wisconsin, where Moody’s praised Walker’s changes as credit positive, Wisconsin has a projected budget surplus, Wisconsin paid back Democrat fund raids, and Wisconsin moved from 42^nd to the 24^th best state to do business. Wall Street Journal referred to Illinois as the Greece Next Door. Clearly we have real leadership in Wisconsin while Illinois is out of control.

Illinois and Wisconsin were not alone in facing budget cuts last year. According to a liberal think tank 38 of 47 states made major cuts to core services. Obviously, the stimulus package allowed states to delay dealing with serious issues for two years, but in 2010 the hard work had to be done in many states. In these 38 states, 23 made significant reductions in K-12 education. Some states did get concessions from teachers without limiting collective bargaining. But this led to massive layoffs of teachers. In New York City they planned to save $300 million, but only got $60 million in concessions. In Massachusetts they passed limits to collective bargaining on health care, showing even Democrats recognize the root cause of budget issues is their scam they set up to fund their campaigns.

I have heard some union people try to claim that limiting collective bargaining was not necessary to get the concessions. This defies logic and experience in this state in 2011. We saw in the time between when the law was proposed and when the law passed, unions across the state pushed for deals with less concessions than state workers took. The most obvious evidence of this lie is the vote by MPS teachers to choose layoffs over concessions. The other issue is that the budget needed to be cut last year, meaning we could not risk taking months to negotiate concessions. Allowing that could lead to layoffs and disruptions to schools.

In addition, the limiting of collective bargaining will provide districts opportunities to pursue big reforms without begging unions to care about the kids. This of course will require better leadership in those districts, but the excuse is gone and the opportunity is there.

As I said this article covers the obvious fact that Scott Walkers changes to collective bargaining were the right thing to do. It eliminated the corrupt system of allowing WEA trust to rip off education dollars, allowed school districts to balance lower budgets without hurting education, and to get this done without delay. I think anyone who has thought this issue through and is honest knows this to be true. In the next article, I plan to take on the more interesting question would it be immoral for Democrats to repeal these changes or just wrong.