Sunday, August 7, 2011

[Archive] Wisconsin!

It's such a large issue that it's hard to tackle with a single post, but I'll try.

If you're here, you likely already know what's going on in Wisconsin, so feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph. If you don't know, I'll summarize. They've got a massive budget deficit. Depending on the source, upwards of $1.9billion. One of the state's own news papers rates their state in the top ten for worst budget problems in the nation.

The paper's take

Their budget problem was a major issue in the last state elections, in which the Democrats were ousted and the Republicans who were voted in ran on a platform on fixing this problem -- and doing it without raising taxes. Not an easy task, obviously spending cuts would need to be drastic. The new bill is just that, drastic. But it's what the voter's voted for, right? In order to balance this horrible budget, the Governor and the Republican house/senate proposed a bill that hurt public employee unions. It's important to note that these public employees are making bank -- the average public employee is getting paid upwards of $100,000/year including their benefits. So, the bill cuts that, and in response the democrats who managed to hold onto their seats fled the state to avoid the vote, teachers called in sick, students weren't being taught, it's insanity.

So, now that we're all on the same page, it's time for my opinion.


  1.      The teachers should all face penalties, as it's illegal for public employee's to strike, and mass sick-calls is pretty much a strike.
  2.      The senators should be forced to return to the state and take their vote. These senators are paid public employees, and it's a terrible use of tax dollars to pay them to hide.
  3.      This is obviously what a majority of the tax paying voters wanted, they hired (via election) to fix the budget and that's what they're doing. This is a democracy, right? What the majority votes for, everyone gets? That is why we're stuck with Obama after all, right?
  4.      It takes a lot of political courage to do what the Republicans in Wisconsin are doing. Instead of kicking the problem down the road and making the next guys deal with it, they're taking the bull by the horns and trying to fix the problem. They have my support, in the next election cycle, for sure.
You can view the original post and any comments here; http://werepoliticallyinsane.blogspot.com/2011/02/wisconsin.html


You May also enjoy

No comments:

Post a Comment