In Wisconsin, where public employees are protesting in an attempt to prevent a Republican governor from gutting their collective bargaining rights, Brian Beutler reports that Gov. Scott Walker's legislative agenda turned a surplus into a deficit, which Walker is now using to argue in favor of not merely cuts in benefits but outright eliminating public worker's rights to bargain collectively over anything but wages. Ezra Klein writes:
But even that's not the full story here. Public employees aren't being asked to make a one-time payment into the state's coffers. Rather, Walker is proposing to sharply curtail their right to bargain collectively. A cyclical downturn that isn't their fault, plus an unexpected reversal in Wisconsin's budget picture that wasn't their doing, is being used to permanently end their ability to sit across the table from their employer and negotiate what their health insurance should look like.
That's how you keep a crisis from going to waste: You take a complicated problem that requires the apparent need for bold action and use it to achieve a longtime ideological objective. In this case, permanently weakening public-employee unions, a group much-loathed by Republicans in general and by the Republican legislators who have to battle them in elections in particular.
This isn't "keeping a crisis from going to waste" in the sense that Democrats wanted to see more regulation of the financial sector because lax regulation helped lead to an economic crisis. The two were directly related. Wisconsin's fiscal crisis isn't the result of public worker benefits. What Walker is doing is "keeping a crisis from going to waste" in the same way a doctor would be "keeping a crisis from going to waste" if he shot you in the face and then charged you for reconstructive surgery.
It would be one thing if the state's fiscal problems hadn't resulted from the governing agenda of the person currently in office. What Walker is doing here isn't "fiscal responsibility," it's a just naked attempt to crush a Democratic political constituency. When President Barack Obama called this an "assault on unions," he was right. And it's one that isn't at all justified.
