Josh Barro notes President Obama's tough approach to federal workers and asks the president to think about state budgets when he comes out to support public-sector unions:
As usual when a politician manages to get on both sides of an issue, Obama is right once, and I've written before that his wage freeze proposal is a good idea. But given that he wants Congress to aggressively use powers it has only because federal workers don't bargain wages, he should probably give some thought to the idea that states--which spend a much larger percentage of their budgets on employee compensation and can't run budget deficits--are even less able to afford collective bargaining.
In general, this is probably the right approach. But it doesn't apply to Wisconsin. To borrow from Brian Beutler's reporting, state employee benefits are mostly irrelevant to the state's budget deficit; to quote the Capitol Times of Madison, "To the extent that there is an imbalance -- Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit -- it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions." Collective bargaining isn't responsible for Wisconsin's shortfall, Gov. Scott Walker is: More than half of Wisconsin's deficit comes from budget items passed by Walker at the beginning of his term.
In other words, Obama can support Wisconsin workers because he hasn't engineered a budget crisis for the sake of permanently crushing a rival political constituency.
