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http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/hey-who-wants-to-talk-about-wisconsins-economic-miracle/

Hey, Who Wants to Talk About Wisconsin’s Economic Miracle?

Posted By Gary Wickert On July 29, 2011 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized | 52 Comments

Over the past six months, Wisconsin has been nothing short of a miracle. Newly elected Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans in the majority in Madison got just about everything they wanted during the past legislative session, and a state facing a projected $3 billion budget shortfall with no end in sight now has a projected $300 million budget surplus. The amazing successes in Wisconsin have emboldened the legislatures and political leaders of other states, who have seen the wonders resulting from a little political backbone and fiscal common sense.

After being held hostage by 14 AWOL Democrat senators [1], Walker succeeded in passing his budget repair bill, “Act 10,” which instantly fixed the $137 million deficit by requiring public employees to contribute just a little bit toward their pensions and health care, and by limiting their ability to collectively bargain. Wisconsin also ended the ludicrous automatic pay and benefit increases [2] for public employee unions each budget year — closing a cash sinkhole which is eating states like California and Illinois alive. Last month the Wisconsin legislature passed its biennial budget [3], which Governor Walker promptly signed in a no-frills ceremony.

The repeal of much of Wisconsin’s collective bargaining law has already improved the quality and lowered the cost of Wisconsin government exponentially. There are approximately 275,000 government employees [4] in the state of Wisconsin. About 72,000 such employees work for the state, 38,000 for cities and villages, 48,000 for counties, 10,500 (full time equivalent) for technical colleges, and 105,229 for schools.

While only half of state employees are unionized, virtually all school district employees are unionized. Until recently, almost all conditions of unionized public employee employment had to be delineated in a collectively bargained agreement. Consequently, it was very difficult to remove bad teachers and to reward good teachers. It took an Act of Congress to remove even the worst teachers, and doing so could cost a community millions in attorney fees. A high school teacher in Cedarburg was fired for viewing porn at school while working on his school district computer, in violation of the high school’s computer use policy which strictly prohibited “accessing, sending or displaying offensive messages, pictures or child pornography.” (Among other images, Robert Zellner had retained photographs of female students of the district wearing bikinis [5] while on a school-sponsored trip to Hawaii that Zellner chaperoned.) Zellner was a union activist, so the teachers’ union dug in and resisted the personnel change, filing suit in federal court and taking the matter all the way to the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals [5]. The union eventually lost, but in its nearly three-year effort to keep fired teacher Robert Zellner from returning to Cedarburg High School, the school district spent roughly $267,000 [6] on legal expenses — enough to pay the annual salary and pre-Walker benefits of four teachers.

It has been well-reported that under collective bargaining, districts have been stuck with the teacher union health insurance company — like the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) in Wisconsin — which can cost $3,000-plus per teacher more over a plan that is virtually identical to that which another company is willing to provide. In Wisconsin, WEAC had grossly abused [7] that privilege for decades, resulting in the unnecessary siphoning of millions of dollars from Wisconsin public schools. Taxpayers were the big losers.

Under collective bargaining, any changes in the teaching schedule are not determined by the employer, but rather must be agreed to by the employees — the teachers’ union. If a school district wants to change their schedule to match private schools and save money on bussing costs, the union must first sign off. Seventy-page contracts [4] may also require that a teacher is entitled to 13 paid personal days — this for employees who may only be required to work 190 days a year in the first place.

The cost savings to Wisconsin school districts are already producing miraculous stories of fiscal recovery and educational improvement. In New Berlin, the school district went from a $3 million deficit to balancing its budget, and actually lowered school property tax by one percent. New Berlin’s director of financial services, Roger Dickson, says that the changes to collective bargaining gave schools the “tools” to plug most of the $3 million hole.

In Kaukauna, Act 10 has allowed the school district to hire additional teachers, and to reduce projected class sizes: 26 students to 23 students at the elementary level, 28 students to 26 students at the intermediate/middle level, and 31 students to 25 students at the high school level. In addition, time is now available for staff to identify and support students needing individual assistance through individual and small group exercises. Act 10 has allowed the district’s projected operating budget [8] to improve from a $400,000 deficit to approximately $1,500,000 in the black. Earmarked in the operating budget are $300,000 related to merit pay, a program being explored for all staff for the 2011-2012 school year. To top it off, Kaukauna is planning to hire more teachers.

Collective bargaining is harmful to schools and students, costs an exorbitant amount of money, and lowers the quality of education. Even some of the most liberal organizations [9] who otherwise support collective bargaining agree that it hurts not only teachers, but students, and our education system as a whole.

If one listened to the violent rhetoric of the public employee unions, one would have expected today to be a dark day for education in Wisconsin. “This is a disaster,” said Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader Mark Miller in February after Governor Scott Walker first proposed Act 10. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law, a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials, and protesters in the streets. Now the bill is law, and we have evidence of how wonderfully it is working. Instead of a catastrophe, it is a day of miraculous optimism, balanced budgets, educational improvement, and fiscal recovery.

There is a lot of speculation as to what the fallout will be in the wake of these conservative successes. Wisconsin residents witnessing the miracle may well vote to keep the state solidly conservative. And with other states witnessing the miracle in Wisconsin, states across the country could begin a reformation which will not only tilt the political momentum in other states to the right, but perhaps even serve as the template for Congress and become instrumental in saving a nation on the brink of insolvency.

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/unions-lose-big-wisconsin

An energized Democratic base was supposed to turn out yesterday. It was supposed to pry away from Republicans their total control of Wisconsin's state legislature. Republicans had gone after the state's public employee unions, and this was supposed to be an overreach that would cost them dearly in yesterday's recall elections. If Democrats could pick up three of the six seats under recall, they could win back the state Senate and block Gov. Scott Walker's agenda.

Every Republican I spoke to before the election expressed pessimism. The expectations were clearly in favor of a Democratic takeover -- so much so that Republicans in Wisconsin's legislature took the extraordinary step of passing an early redistricting bill.

And then...it just didn't work out the way the unions had hoped.

In the end, the union-backed Democrats picked up only two state Senate seats in Wisconsin last night, at a staggering cost in time, effort, and of course money. One of the seats was solidly Democratic, held by a Republican due to an apparent fluke of nature. The other was held by an alleged adulterer who had moved outside his district to live with his young mistress, and whose wife was supporting his recall.

As for the other four Republican incumbents the unions tried to recall, they didn't end up coming very close. And remember -- these weren't just any Republican incumbents. These were the ones that the unions judged most vulnerable, which is why they collected petition signatures against them.

How did Republicans hold out? It hasn't hurt that Walker's reforms have dramatically helped school districts within the state save millions of dollars by abolishing the main Wisconsin teachers' union's insurance racket. Nor does it hurt that Wisconsin, under the business-friendly leadership of Walker and a Republican state legislature, created more than half of the jobs created in the United States during the month of June.

To be sure, yesterday's contests offered few lessons for 2012, as far as the status of swing-state Wisconsin is concerned. But at the state level, and on the level of ideas, yesterday's elections have deep meaning. And with two Democrats in the state Senate facing recalls next week -- perhaps one is genuinely vulnerable -- we may have seen the unions' high political tide, especially if Walker's reforms really do weaken their clout.

"The people" were supposed to be on the side of the unions who protested at the state capitol when Walker's bill passed, limiting the unions' collective bargaining privileges against taxpayers and school districts. But it turns out that "the people" had other ideas. In the end, even a massive infusion of cash and union volunteers was not enough to deliver the three state Senate recall races the unions needed, despite the fact that President Obama carried all six of the seats in question in 2008.

This marks the unions' third huge defeat in Wisconsin this year. The other two were the passage of Walker's bill and the re-election of David Prosser to the state Supreme Court. The grand talk of recalling Walker himself next year seems a bit blustery now, given the great failure of last night.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Two of the six, and those two were politically embattled long before this union mess came to pass. One was the first (R) elected to a Democratic stronghold in generations, and the other left his wife and family to live with his mistress and did it very publicly.

For months, unions have told us that after their state-senate recall efforts in Wisconsin, lawmakers would learn not to scale back their collective-bargaining “rights.” The recalls would warn any state thinking about passing a law like Governor Walker’s to think again. Yet after Tuesday night’s recall elections, only one lesson is perfectly clear: It’s probably not a good idea to cheat on your wife.

In what might have been the most costly abstinence program in history, national unions dumped tens of millions of dollars in Wisconsin — yet their only notable accomplishment was to recall Republican state senator Randy Hopper, whose priapic misadventures sunk his campaign from the start. Polling leading up to the recall election showed voters were just fine with Hopper’s vote to scale back public-sector collective bargaining; they just weren’t so fine with his alleged affair with a then-25-year-old capitol staffer.

Thus, the 18th senate district, which had been represented by a Republican since 1936, went to Democrat Jessica King by a thin 1,100-vote margin. But saying Hopper’s defeat was about public-sector collective bargaining is like saying Top Gun was a movie about beach volleyball. In the end, as one high-ranking Wisconsin political figure told me, female seniors just couldn’t forgive Hopper for his transgressions. Despite being conservative, they decided they were voting for a husband and not a senator.

And yes, Democrats did also defeat GOP senator Dan Kapanke in LaCrosse, but that was more a feat of signature-gathering than electioneering. Once Kapanke was on the ballot, he was toast in a district that Barack Obama carried by more than 20 points.

It wasn’t surprising that Democrats won two of the six elections. What is surprising is the way Republicans won their four. Recent polls had many of the races within the margin of error — yet in the seats they retained, Republicans won comfortably. Rob Cowles in the Green Bay area destroyed his opponent, Democrat Nancy Nusbaum, by 20 points. Republican Sheila Harsdorf, once thought to be in danger, beat a teachers’ union official by a 58–42 margin. Luther Olsen and Alberta Darling, pinpointed as possible Dem pickups, won with 52 and 54 percent of the vote. Darling did so in a district that saw the greatest number of total votes cast, at nearly 74,000.

In fact, almost 350,000 people voted in Tuesday’s recall elections — and Republicans won 53 percent of the total vote. After blowtorching the state with negative ads and benefiting from a favorable timetable, the unions could still only get 47 percent of Wisconsinites to support their effort.

This should make the unions think long and hard about whether they want to embark on a mission to recall Gov. Scott Walker next year. Doing so successfully would easily cost them five times as much as they just spent — and even with their recent deluge of cash, most of the public still didn’t support them at the polls. Additionally, the extra time will also give Walker’s reforms more time to work — and once the public sees that schools can manage their affairs effectively without being hamstrung by union regulations, organized labor’s argument gets even weaker.

In the redistricting bill Scott Walker signed on Tuesday, the former Hopper seat gets more Republican in 2012, when Jessica King will face voters against a fresh Republican challenger. That seat seems to be an almost certain pickup for the GOP next year, which would almost immediately reverse any progress the unions made in this round of recall elections. If there’s any benefit from the Democrats’ temporary victory in that district, it might just be prompting some elected officials to buy their wives flowers a little more often.

Right, I think only 3 went to a vote, which was what I meant, but you make a solid point. The process started with 6, and ended with 2.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.