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.