Off-Topic

Couldn't a new governor/legislature just reinstate their collective bargaining rights?

The bottom line is this isn't about budgets anymore, it's about busting the unions and a powerful Dem interest. Which is his prerogative...he won, elections have consequences. But just admit that.

That is the highest of high comedy if you're talking about politics. Nobody does it the right way.

Looks like you posted this while I was answering it. :)

Yes, it's about busting the unions' hold on the state budget. Of course this is happening because they won the election. That's an obvious point that's been made repeatedly in this thread, but it's also with the express purpose of fixing the fiscal picture.

Sure, a future Dem governor and legislature could bring it back, but that's how it should be...negotiating some arbitrary moratorium isn't how it should be done. It makes the public unions a political football, and seeing as only a small % of the state population belongs to the public unions affected, I think they'd have a hard time campaigning on this every election.

Yeah, it shouldn't be the state's job to do the union's work for them. Let the unions collect their own dues.

"a reporter from the Buffalo Beast, posing as David Koch, appears to have managed to get Scott Walker on the line."

As rthhokie explained, it has everything to do with the budget. The public unions have a vested interest in keeping government spending on themselves high, while funneling money into the coffers of the politicians who promise to continue that.

A short history of how government employee unions came into being:

*************

Government workers were making good salaries in 1962 when President Kennedy lifted, by executive order (so much for democracy), the federal ban on government unions. Civil-service regulations and similar laws had guaranteed good working conditions for generations.

The argument for public unionization wasn’t moral, economic, or intellectual. It was rankly political.

Traditional organized labor, the backbone of the Democratic party, was beginning to lose ground. As Daniel DiSalvo wrote in “The Trouble with Public Sector Unions,” in the fall issue of National Affairs, JFK saw how in states such as New York and Wisconsin, where public unions were already in place, local liberal pols benefited politically and financially. He took the idea national.

The plan worked perfectly — too perfectly. Public-union membership skyrocketed, and government-union support for the party of government skyrocketed with it. From 1989 to 2004, AFSCME — the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees — gave nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections, with 98.5 percent going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why would local government unions give so much in federal elections? Because government workers have an inherent interest in boosting the amount of federal tax dollars their local governments get. Put simply, people in the government business support the party of government. Which is why, as the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga has been chronicling for years, public unions are the country’s foremost advocates for increased taxes at all levels of government.

Linked is an article that discusses your question.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/scott-walker-campaigned-reforming-wisconsin-s-collective-bargaining-rules_552370.html

That attitude should go over well with Joe Cheesehead...

^^ Walker's argument is that the way he is cutting the deficit is not just the $300 M saved (approx) from the pension and healthcare changes, but because he is going to drastically cut funding to local counties and cities. So his argument, for what it is worth, is that the local municipalities will need to be able to deal with the local unions without collective bargaining driving up prices.

I guess we can all pick and choose statistics to make our case, but I thought this table was pretty interesting, and much more accurate than cherry picking an unusual election season like 2010. 13 of the top 17 donors in the period of 1989 through 2010 donated pretty heavily in favor of Democrats, the other 4 were split between both parties. By my count, 10 of those 17 heavy Democrat donors are unions.

You could hardly blame the Pubs for wanting to put a dent in such a disparity. I don't think that crying the blues for the small changes (yes, SMALL) that Walker would like to make is really warranted here.

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

Public unions are like that too now though, do you think the president of the NEA or the AFSCME couldn't get a governor (or senator, or president) on the phone in short order if he wanted to?

Most economists agree that public-sector unions' political power leads to more government spending.

Therefore, removing that political power is very much a budget issue.

Anybody that accuses Walker and the Pubs of going after the unions for purely political reasons has to concede at the same time that the unions and Dems are putting up such a huge fight for the exact same reasons, IMO.