2012 Voting Booth Vol. III

"It's like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, martini all that stuff ... And then, just as you're sitting down ... they leave ... and accuse you of running up the tab."
        ~President Barak Obama on the National Debt.

This is a very good analogy, but he didn't finish it. Here's the rest of the analogy:

"As soon as they stand up you realize that you don't have your wallet! You can't pay for your meal, let alone what this irresponsible person who just left ordered. So what do you do? You order a lobster, caviar, and the house specialty. And to wash it all down? A 100 year old bottle of brandy. Then when the tab comes in, you point to the person who ordered the steak and say, 'Well, he started it.'"

The premise of his original analogy is that the irresponsibility of the first party excuses the irresponsibility of the second. And not just similar irresponsibility, but excessive and boarder-line obscene irresponsibility on the part of the second party.

On the right is a graph of the National debt from 1940 through 2011. Take a look at how this president has exponentially increased the national debt in his single term! (click on the image for a larger view)

What can we see from this graph? We borrowed for WWII. Then Carter and Reagan started the modern practice of over spending. Bush I continued it. Clinton leveled it off. Bush II built a skyscraper. And Obama sent it to the moon!

Perhaps this is an easier way to understand the situation:
There are lots of things that this country needs to be worried about right now: The environment, Equal Rights, Terrorism, and Healthcare to name a few. But the most pressing, the most important, the one that needs to take top billing is the massive budget deficit and the monstrous national debt. We cannot continue to exist borrowing 43 cents of every dollar that the US Government spends!

If Obama wants to be taken seriously, he needs to stop trying to justify is adolescent-like spending by continuing to blame the previous administration and do the responsible thing with the national budget. I know the old saying goes "Dance with the one that brought you" and the "Blame Bush" mantra got him into the White House but now it's old, stale, and worn out. Let's try something new.

Who Runs America?

Consider this: A politician runs for office promising to balance the budget without raising taxes. Impossible. Some might be reluctant to even cast a vote for this optimistic statesman considering his questionable touch on reality. If he were to be elected, he'd get a pass from most voters if he wasn't completely able to fulfill this campaign promise provided he gave it the ole 'college try.'

Now imagine that he was able to follow through on this promise! A year into his first term he has a balanced budget and has not raised taxes! What do the citizens do? A week of parades in his honor? Rename the capitol after him? Alter the constitution so he can serve more than two terms?

Force a recall election to try to get him out of office?
You didn't misread that. Wisconsin residents were the recipients of a balanced budget without an increase in taxes (which proves it can be done, by the way) and they thanked their Governor Scott Walker by trying to vote him out of office.

Their biggest beef with Gov. Walker is that he encouraged a bill be passed that limited the most government employee union's collective bargaining ability (not including Police or Fire Fighters). According to Gov. Walker, this was necessary in order to balance the budget so that some of the overly inflated salaries of public workers could be brought back in line with the national average. (Teachers were fairly heavily hit in this budget).

Does this make Wisconsin the only state in the union where public employees are not allowed to bargain collectively? (This does not mean that individual unions are not allowed to collectively bargain, just that employees of the DMV cannot bargain along side those who work for the department of children and families. The teacher's union, for example, can still go on strike.) Hardly. In fact there are 5 states where collective bargaining is illegal and 11 where it is merely permissible. Wisconsin joins 32% of states that do not require collective bargaining. (This is likely as much for the state as it is for the employees. Who wants to bargain with every union individually?)

Now, the government employees of Wisconsin claim that they had already agreed to all of the proposed cuts that Gov. Walker wanted to make in order to balance the budget. It is their contention that the removal of the collective bargaining rights of the state's employees was not a budgetary move, but rather a political one. Of course, if that is indeed the case, then the very thing they are shaming the governor for is the exact thing those that desire to recall him are doing: making a boldly political act.

Of course, this brings up a very important question: Just who runs the government? The voters who elected Scott Walker or the members of the unions who didn't like his solution to their state's budget crisis? The fact that they were even able to get sufficient signatures to hold a recall election is fairly troubling. I find it interesting that Gov Walker's opponents were able to get over 1 million signatures in order to force this recall election and yet with just about 80% of the votes counted, Gov Walker's challenger has only managed to get just over 800 thousand votes.

This may be an encouraging turn of events for those hoping to see a change in the White House in November. President Obama campaigned (albeit somewhat passively as he didn't even visit the state much to the chagrin of his Democratic teammates) for the challenger Tom Barrett. Hopefully, this means that the citizens of Wisconsin value economic responsibility in the face of governmental entitlement.

As I conclude this post, I'm happy to say that it appears as though Gov Walker will be the first sitting governor in US history to win a recall election. I looks like the answer to the most important question raised by this political wrangling is that the voters of Wisconsin run their government, and they've made it known that it's gonna stay that way for a while.