These groups have been sosuccessful in recent years that few people even bother to examine theirsimple-minded economic theories any more. It is accepted as fact that everyonebenefits from paying less in taxes because all that is eliminated is waste ingovernment and a lot of overpaid government employees.
That’s why this year’scity and county budgets are chock full of manpower and service cuts in everydepartment and additional furloughs and unpaid days off for those publicemployees who manage to hang on to their jobs.
Politicians, who receivevery nice public salaries and generous fringe benefits themselves, seem tobenefit personally by advocating throwing as many other employees off thepublic payroll as possible.
There are several majorproblems with such shallow economic thinking.
You may have heard we arejust starting to emerge from the major economic disaster left behind by theBush administration. We have now pulled back from the brink of another GreatDepression and the economy is growing again.
The biggest drag onrecovery, however, continues to be employment. The government just announced anOctober unemployment rate of 10.2%, the highest since 1983. We can only imaginehow much worse it would have been if President Barack Obama had not succeededin passing $787 billion in economic stimulus spending over two years despiteangry opposition from the Republican Party.
Still, obviously it wasn’tenough. That is why the next order of business for Obama after health carereform will be even more government action to increase employment to put moreof us back on the road to economic recovery.
So at the same time thefederal government is spending our tax dollars to create more employment, whatare our county and city governments doing in the name of saving tax dollars?Creating more unemployment.
Milwaukee’s only hope isthat President Obama succeeds in creating jobs faster than County ExecutiveScott Walker and Mayor Tom Barrett can eliminate them. Walker, in particular,because he is running for the Republican nomination for governor as ano-tax-increase candidate, appears to be on a mission to eviscerate countyemployment.
The budget Walkersubmitted to the County Board not only would have eliminated nearly 400 countyjobs next year, but it would have slashed pay and benefits for the remainingemployees by 15%.
Of course, with Walker,it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s for political show.
The way to eliminate jobsand cut pay and benefits for unionized county employees is to negotiate suchreductions at the bargaining table with the county’s unions. Walker’s proposalswere never submitted to the unions. Instead, in September, the county’s largestunion reached tentative agreement with county negotiators on a two-yearcontract freezing (not cutting) pay in exchange for no layoffs and noprivatization of county services.
That agreement fell apartafter Walker unilaterally lobbed his proposal to fire hundreds of employees andslash the pay for everyone else into the 2010 county budget.
Those extreme proposalscannot take effect without agreement from the unions, which can be expectedshortly after Hell County freezes over.
Assuming the county andthe unions can’t agreewhich certainly appears to be the case right nowtheunion contracts ultimately could be settled by an outside arbitrator whosedecision will be final.
When union and managementgo to binding arbitration, both sides try to submit their most reasonableproposal to the arbitrator. Walker’s proposal is so extreme and unreasonablethere is little chance an arbitrator would accept it.
Employees Needed
Reducing unemploymentwould never be a reason to keep public employees on the city or county payrollsif those employees were not needed. But the other fact ignored byanti-public-employee conservatives is that during hard economic times weusually need more public employees, not fewer.
With more people out ofwork, the need for food stamps, health services and other forms of publicassistance goes up. So do public safety concerns.
Long lines of peopledesperately in need of human services get even longer. The situation becomes acrisis when public employees who provided those necessary services lose theirjobs and have to get in line themselves.
The real purpose ofgovernment actually isn’t to cut our taxes. We pay taxes to government toprovide services we need that we cannot provide for ourselves.
In a burst of irony, oneof the few areas of new spending in Walker’s proposed budget was $400,000 for anew county office of economic development.
After slashing hundreds offull-time county jobs in his budget, Walker believes county government muststart spending moreyou guessed itto create jobs.
