The fine print in Wisconsin is all too familiar:
The state’s entire budget shortfall for this year – the reason that Walker has said he must push through immediate cuts – would be covered by the governor’s relatively uncontroversial proposal to restructure the state’s debt.
By contrast, the proposals that have kicked up a firestorm, especially his call to curtail the collective-bargaining rights of the state’s public-employees, wouldn’t save any money this year.
“What we’re asking for is modest, at least to those of us outside of government,” Walker said in a televised address Tuesday night.
In January, the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported that the state would face a $137 million shortfall before the end of the fiscal year on June 30. The governor’s budget repair bill proposes a debt restructuring that would save the state $165 million in the near term, more than covering the shortfall.
The legislation would also borrow money from a federal welfare program to cover further state shortfalls, and it includes a provision that would allow the sale of the state’s public utilities without a bidding process or public oversight.
So, restructure, borrow from dread federal guvmint, and a massive under the table handout to favored GOP allies, in this case the Koch Brothers who stand to create a pretty fantastic (for them, anyway) vertical monopoly there in WI. And, oh, may as well fuck the Unions while we’re at it. This last part excites the Tea Klanners so that they don’t even notice they’re taking up the side of their supposed enemy.
Who says this isn’t the new gilded era? Legal and even expected child labor, here we come.
Lemkin 