republican cynicism redux

            I am beginning to wonder if there is such a thing as a sane Republican, let alone an intelligent one.  Worse, I’m beginning to wonder if there is such a thing as a patriotic Republican, meaning by that one who puts the best interests of the country ahead of the perceived best interests of the party.

            What is becoming increasingly apparent is that the determination the GOP has shown for reducing the federal budget deficit is in reality a fixation on getting rid of programs the party has hated since FDR.  Here’s a lengthy, though incomplete, list.

            Because of the budget deficit, the GOP would have us repeal health care reform, privatize social security, severely reduce if not eliminate both Medicare and Medicaid—or privatize both of them. We also must  eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, cancel the S-Chip program, put Americorp to rest, avoid any meaningful investment in infrastructure, get rid of Pell Grants, do away with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts, close up the Environmental Protection Agency (or simply stop funding it), defund as well the Securities and Exchange Commission . . .

            The list is far more extensive than that, but you get the point.  Now the Republican governor of Wisconsin, abetted by Republican majorities in both legislative houses, wants to essentially get rid of public employees unions in the state.  Why?  The state’s budget deficit of course.  I talked in my last blog about what I see as the pervading cynicism of the Republican party.  This is one more example of it.

            If you aren’t familiar with Wisconsin’s situation, its budget is looking at a 137 million dollar shortfall for the coming fiscal year.  As governors around the country, from both parties, have been doing, Scott Walker wants to cut back on state employee benefits.  And to be fair, public employee benefits in Wisconsin are among the more generous in the nation.  Most Wisconsin public employees, for example, pay only 6 % of their health care premium costs, and most contribute almost nothing to their pensions.  Walker wants to double health insurance contributions for employees, and initiate a 5.8% contribution to the pension fund, which is actually a little less than the average for government workers around the nation.

            So where’s the cynicism?  Both of those reductions Walker wants to make are to benefits that were collectively bargained by the state’s public employees union and the state.  Getting the reductions should therefore simply involve sitting down with the union, showing it the figures, and reaching a new agreement.  Not so with Governor Walker. Toeing the Republican line that public employee unions are malevolent institutions, Walker wants to effectively eliminate them in Wisconsin. Specifically, he wants to bar the union from negotiating for anything beyond wages (no work rules, health benefits, pension, etc.), and he wants to tie any wage increase they can bargain for to the consumer price index.  In other words, the union could bargain for an increase in minimum wage levels, but only if the consumer price index had gone up that year, and then only for the percentage by which it had risen.  That plan would emasculate the union, but Walker isn’t done.  He even wants to make it impossible for union dues to be deducted from paychecks.  As President Obama succinctly phrased it, “that seems like an assault on unions.”

            Not surprisingly, the halls of Wisconsin’s capital building in Madison are currently jammed with protesters, and the state’s Democratic legislators have left the state to prevent a quorum from being reached and the governor’s bill from being voted on.  That is, to be sure, a childish response, but it may be the only appropriate response to a bill that is so blatantly ideological.

            No question Wisconsin’s budget shortfall needs to be addressed, and no question the pay and benefits of state employees should be one of the things looked at to accomplish that.  But how exactly does “breaking” the union do anything to lessen the budget shortfall?  Short answer is, it doesn’t.  What it does do is satisfy a long held attitude in the Republican party that any entity that functions to protect workers is endemically evil and needs to be destroyed.

            But here’s the kicker.  Last month, Walker and the Republican legislature gave away 117 million dollar in tax breaks to businesses that expand and for private health savings accounts.  The latter of course is the alternative to Medicare and Medicaid, generally only available to wealthier individuals,  that the GOP has been pushing for years.  In other words, 85% of the shortfall the Wisconsin budget faces next year is the result of give-aways the Republican governor and legislature chose to make to business interests.  The state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau recently issued a brief which flatly stated that, absent the tax give-aways, the state would be looking forward to a budget surplus.

            So, what we have here is a situation where the Republican controlled legislature, in league with a Republican governor, creates a budget shortfall by handing out tax breaks to businesses, then maneuvers to use that shortfall as an excuse to, at a minimum, diminish the take home pay of all state workers, and, if all goes according to plan, break their union as well.

            If this were an isolated example it might be ignored.  But if you look carefully at what the Republican party has been talking about since last November, it becomes increasingly clear that the budget deficit is not, for them, a problem but a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do away with as many programs aimed at helping the lower and middle classes as possible, while making sure that everything possible is done to help the upper class become more upper.  Go back to the top of this blog and review the list of programs the GOP wants to cut or severely underfund and you will not find one that would even inconvenience  the wealthy.

            It’s not hard to figure out what the Republican vision for this country is—a country where wealthy individuals, multi-national corporations and the Republican party are protected and preserved.  What isn’t clear, to me at least, is how they can be so short-sighted as not to recognize that the founders they claim to revere may not have envisioned a social democracy, but they certainly didn’t envision a plutocracy. 

            And it is toward the latter Republicans seem to be leading us.