Now the battle has been joined.
It has long been understood that the 2010 elections were just the beginning of the struggle to reverse America’s current decline. It will take at least two or three election cycles to correct decades of bad policy choices. We aren’t staring into the fiscal abyss because of any single policy or event, but rather the cumulative effect of dozens, if not hundreds, of flawed decisions made by fickle politicians who capitalized on the fact that the American public was largely disengaged. In the end, these decisions created a vast political class who live off the fruits of others’ labors.
When a business wants to increase its future earnings, it has to find new markets and sell more of its product. For the political class its the same, only their markets and products are government services. As a result, every year, public sector unions spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying for bigger government and filling the campaign coffers of the politicians who acquiesce to their demands. In addition to bigger government, they’ve won pay packages higher than the private sector, almost 100% job security and the ability to retire in their fifties with lifetime retirement income and health benefits. All paid for by us. Unlike private sector unions, every dollar funding government employees’ pay, pension and benefits comes out of our paychecks.
In other words, we’ve created an enormous taxpayer-funded lobby whose sole mission is to resist any effort to control government spending. As the old saying goes, we’ve seen the enemy and, while they may not be us, we are funding them.
This is why the current political fight in Wisconsin is critical.
As long as public sector unions maintain a near-monoply hold on government spending decisions, we will never be able to get our fiscal house in order. Breaking their hold isn’t sufficient to restore some fiscal sanity, but it is a necessary first step.
If there is any doubt how important the fight in Wisconsin is, look no further than the left’s reaction to it. Governor Walker’s proposal calls on public employees to pay more into their retirement fund and pay around 12% of their health insurance premiums. It also ends collective bargaining for most public employees, which mostly affects union bosses rather than rank and file members and is an important measure to forestall a future fiscal crisis.
For this, tens of thousands of public school teachers called in ‘sick.’ So many, in fact, that hundreds of schools across Wisconsin have been closed for days. They pressed school children into service as fellow protesters, most not understanding the issue at hand. They drew up signs comparing the governor to Hitler and called the GOP Nazis. Several GOP Senators have faced multiple death threats. When all of this wasn’t enough to stop the proposal, their allies in the Senate simply fled the state to prevent a vote from happening.
Now, President Obama is weighing in to support the unions and the national Democrats’ Organizing for America is helping to coordinate the union protest. The left-media industrial complex will give the unions cover to allow maximum pressure on the brave GOP Senators. Just a few years ago, all of this would have been sufficient for the unions to carry the day. But no longer.
Now there is us.
We have to win this fight. The Democrats are a wholly unserious party–they just had a press conference on Capitol Hill against spending cuts with a cartoon Aardvark. The GOP is better, but it is a bit like the shell-shocked soldier returning to the trenches. Yes, it is back in the fight, but it is a bit shaky and uncertain. It needs cover and support. When a politician like Governor Walker bravely steps out of the trench, he needs us to have his back. If we do, others will join him.
Tomorrow there is a rally of patriots in Madison, organized by the outstanding American Majority. Get there if you can. Make a phone call or send a note of support. Do anything…but Do Something.
As an American President once said, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”