Posted: Friday, October 19, 2007 12:00 am
We apparently have a budget deal for Wisconsin - at least a tentative one which will presumably be passed by the Senate and Assembly and bring some relief to the nervous agencies, nervous university students, and nervous municipalities awaiting state action so they can calculate their own budgets.
It's high time that we have this, yet it's not surprising that it took so long. As time went on, the dimensions of the budget struggle changed until it was no longer about the rest of us, the people who understand and desire a balance between controlling taxes and controlling government. The battle became selfish. It was about power, the getting and keeping of it, and especially about the presidential election season a year from now.
Power, the desire to enforce their vision, drove the no-new-taxes crowd. In truth, the alternative to no new taxes is higher old taxes because our system has functions which can't be capriciously disassembled. Talking tough on crime is empty talk if the prison system is so underfunded that prisoners must be released. Talking about attracting business is empty talk unless there's money for a highway system that can easily move goods. And expecting the food supply to remain safe is an empty expectation unless there is money for state health inspectors.
Power drove the people who want pet programs for their constituencies. While everyone would be cared for in an ideal world, there are realistic limits on what we can pay for, and drastically increasing state spending is not the wisest course when the economy is uncertain and unemployment is creeping up.
Power drove the self-aggrandizers, the self-anointed pundits and voices of the people who fueled emotions and tried to hold the power they have gained by shouting louder than anyone else. Unfortunately, the thought needed to balance services with taxes is too long to fit on a bumper sticker. Wisconsin has more than the two dimensions of Taxocrats and Republican'ts.
Privately some legislators said that they knew what needed to be done. But they felt they couldn't because they would instantly come under attack from their party extremists, endangering their chances of retaining power in the next election.
There is no question that as a society we are politically undecided, as evidenced by the split Legislature and by the slim majority in favor of John Kerry in the last presidential election. (He won Wisconsin by about 11,384 votes, or three-tenths of 1 percent.) Thus we heard much screaming as extremists try to assemble support for their view of the world.
In a September article on the ascent and fall of Karl Rove, Joshua Green wrote in The Atlantic that Rove believed he could force a societal shift like those which in the past had resulted in semipermanent political majorities. However, ideas such as the privatization Social Security crumbled in the face of strong public opposition.
If there is a political shift happening, it's not an issue to be worked out in this budget. It will be done policy by policy and election by election. Unfortunately, that will produce more screaming rather than less. On the bright side, unless lawmakers wish to take up some dull old issue such as health care, there won't be any more major legislating until after everyone is safely re-elected - or not.