The Wi job blame game

[Alaska Dave]

On the Hypocrisy and Logical Inconsistency of the Jobs Blame Game By Brian Fraley
Anyone within a thousand yards of the Wednesday edition of the Journal Sentinel could read the huge, screaming headline regarding the state’s job numbers. The lengthy article examining old data was filled with speculation regarding how the information reflects upon Governor Scott Walker, his policies and his political future.
You ran a much smaller article the next day that showed how the employment numbers in the Metro Milwaukee Area are the worst in the state. Yet that piece made no mention of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, his policies or his political future. It is also notable that the unflattering article ran on the last page of the business section.
It’s also humorous that, in general, the same Big Government liberals in this state who believe George Bush is to blame for the current national jobs picture are putting all the blame for Wisconsin’s employment situation at the foot of our current governor. By their logic, President Obama needs more than 3 ½ years to assume responsibility for the nation’s economy, yet every bit of bad news here in the last 16 months is all Governor Walker’s fault.
Moving beyond that ridiculousness, the fact of the matter is for Wisconsin businesses to succeed, we need economic policies that:
1) Encourage risk and capital investment
2) Appreciate and work with those who wish to bring new jobs here
3) Does not punish success through oppressive taxation
4) Invest in sound infrastructure like roads, ports and airports rather than boutique novelty trains that move too few people to too few places
There are those who support a government-driven economy who believe we need to increase the taxes on the rich and the corporations. If we do so, they argue, our government will be stronger and in a position to fund programs and projects that will lure business and jobs here.
To them, I say: Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.
The 2009-10 state budget created a new custom computer software tax; Increased taxes on combined reporting; Applied sales tax on all transactions between affiliated businesses; Eliminated tax deduction for domestic production activities; Increased taxes on “throwback sales.”
In all, that document increased overall taxes by several billion dollars.
The failed policies of the past further increased spending by 6.2% or $3.6 billion; Increased borrowing to $3.58 billion and left this current Administration and legislature facing a $3.6 billion hole from which to climb out.
All of that fiscal irresponsibility cost Wisconsin far more jobs than have left the state since last January. When government extracts dollars from the private sector, there is less private sector economic activity. When there is less private sector activity, there are fewer jobs created. So, although this never resulted in a 6 column above the fold headline in this paper, it is nonetheless true: In the final 3 years of the Doyle Administration, Wisconsin lost not 15,000 jobs, but rather a staggering 150,000 jobs.
Since then, the labor reforms, tax cuts, incentives and tort reform legislation enacted in Madison provided a good start toward a better direction.
However the legislation that would have given Wisconsin the single-biggest jobs boost, the mining bill, was mired in partisan politics and died an unmerciful death earlier this spring. A mine in Gogebic Range in Northern Wisconsin would have brought thousands of good-paying family-supporting jobs for generations there. It would have helped large manufacturers here in the Milwaukee area for several years, too.
Indeed, the same agitators who are joyfully directing people to your Wednesday headline didn’t care about those jobs.
Bad timing, I guess. Heaven forbid a favorable jobs-related headline in the heat of the recall, right? Not one Democratic state senator supported the mining bill.
Too many Big Government agitators were too busy rallying around the Angry Blue Fist of Big Government to raise a finger to help attract private sector mining jobs to the state.
To quote a familiar refrain from Madison, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

aving already saved an estimated $600 million over the next two years through employee contributions to health and retirement plans, department heads will now be given the freedom to assign overtime in an efficient manner without regard to seniority, a move that will save more than $5 million in one state agency alone.
“Overtime is one of the major areas that will be affected as agencies will now have discretion in determining how overtime is assigned,” Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch wrote in a letter sent to all state employees Tuesday.State Employee Letter re Comp Plan
The new Compensation Plan gives administrative officials discretion over compensation differentials, but there is no bump in base pay or cost of living adjustments that had been commonplace with the union pacts of the past.
In the absence of a contact, a Compensation Plan governs pay and benefits for formerly union-represented state employees, as has always been the case for non-represented employees.
In 2010, state employees worked nearly 1.9 million hours of overtime for which they were typically paid at 1.5 times their regular hourly rates, according to a report released in May by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau.
The LAB found that premium overtime hours increased from 2009 to 2010, when they were approximately equivalent to 900 full-time staff positions.
Walker Administration officials stress that required staffing at the Department of Corrections and other departments will still be met, but that by not requiring department heads to assign overtime by seniority will save the DOC $5 million.
The LAB noted that until recently, protocols for assigning overtime hours were negotiated by the Office of State Employment Relations (OSER) in collective bargaining agreements with 19 bargaining units that represented approximately 38,100 state employees.
Act 10 removed the requirement that the State of Wisconsin collectively bargain changes to compensation and other work rules. Under changes contained within Act 10, pay and benefit packages are no longer governed by union contracts, with the exception of base pay increases (which are limited to the increase in the Consumer Price Index) for unions that have been certified. To date, no state union has been certified to negotiate for these pay increases.
Tuesday morning the Office of State Employee Relations submitted the Plan to the Joint Committee on Employment Relations.
Last November, representatives of the unions which at the time represented tens of thousands of state employees engaged in a hurried effort to ratify new employee contracts before a new Republican Administration and legislature were sworn into office.
The MacIver News Service obtained copies of the framework of those agreements, and the attempts to steamroll them through a lame-duck session of the legislature were scuttled when former Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker (D-Weston) joined Republican Senators in opposing the plan.
Largely unchanged by the Plan are items like base pay, vacation, holidays, sick leave and sick leave conversion credits.
Previously, if overtime assignments were misapplied contrary to the seniority provisions contained within state employee contracts, the state government could be subjected to penalties.
Taxpayers were on the hook for overtime hours never worked, due to the elaborate seniority-driven work rules regarding the assignment of overtime that remain in place until this new Compensation Plan is in effect on January 1, 2012. (See sidebar)
According to findings of the Governor’s Commission on Waste, Fraud and Abuse, the DOC reported premium overtime paid due to errors in 2010 cost $83,174.61 in penalties. DOC managers had assigned 2,623 overtime hours to less-senior employees and the many of the more senior workers who had been passed over later received pay for hours they never worked.  This practice will be eliminated under the new Compensation Plan.
Certain compensation add-ons and differential pay options were eliminated in the new Compensation Plan.
Additional reforms contained within the new Plan include:
 

• The bulletin board provided to post information about union activities can now be used for other matters
• Taxpayers will no longer finance paid time off for union activities
• Nearly 38,000 state employees will be eligible for Discretionary Merit Compensation based on Merit, Pay Equity, and Retention.  Before Governor Doyle got rid of DCA’s (similar to the new DCMs) most union contracts prohibited merit from being a consideration
• One contract allowed Police Communication Operators who work through lunch and bring a lunch a reimbursement of $4 a day for a bag lunch.  This is eliminated
• Another contract allowed certain nurses and nursing assistants an extra dollar an hour for mentoring.  Mentoring is now considered a part of anyone’s job
• Most provisions granting extra pay for carrying a beeper were eliminated

Previously, the entire legislature would vote to ratify state contracts with non-amendable up or down votes. Now the Compensation Plan merely needs to be approved by the Joint Committee on Employment Relations.
Recognizing the controversy that surrounded the last frenzied attempt to ratify state employee contracts, Governor Walker has requested that this Compensation Plan be available for employees and the general public to scrutinize for ten days prior to JCOER acts on the measure.
  Share Tags: Capitol Chaos, Government Reform, Governor Doyle, Labor Unions, Spending, State Budget
Posted in News | October 25, 2011 | | 1 Comment  Growth of High-Income Taxpayers in Wisconsin  Wisconsin has lagged behind the other 50 states in the growth of high-income taxpayers over the past decade. The state placed in the bottom ten states with a ranking of 43rd. Click here for the full article.
  Share Tags: Economic Development, Economy, Governor Doyle, taxpayers, Wisconsin Ranking
Posted in mi fast facts | August 29, 2011 | | Comments Off  Ten Ways the Budget Could Be Better 
The 2011-2013 Budget for the State of Wisconsin is the most fiscally responsible two-year Badger State spending plan in at least a generation. It pays the bills, is short on accounting gimmicks, restrains spending and includes measures that will improve government efficiency and invigorate the private marketplace in order to help individuals and businesses here create jobs.
It is a good budget.
That being said, it could be better.
The document forwarded by the legislature still contains onerous interference into the private market. Program cuts that could have been made were modified for political expediency. And, although it has a dramatic decrease in earmarks over budgets past, is not pork free.
In a perfect world, we would see vetoes on the following items:
1. Craft brewers are gaining market share because they are meeting a consumer demand. The Legislature has no business restricting the production and marketing of a good or service on the basis of the size or scope of the actors involved.
2. On SeniorCare, the governor got it right the first time. The legislature’s moves added unnecessary expense to the budget. There is no sound reason Wisconsin’s seniors enrolled in the program shouldn’t first exhaust federal remedies, such as Medicare Part D. We are the only state in the nation with a stand-alone drug entitlement program for the elderly.
3. At a time when we are empowering management in their dealings with government labor, tying the hands of the Milwaukee Police Department makes neither fiscal nor ideological sense. The proposal that mandates that suspended officers receive pay during termination appeals has no place in state law, or this budget.
4. The legislature meddled when it decided to create an individual income tax deferral for investments in Wisconsin businesses. Why do they insist on picking winners and losers? Does the Legislature really believe an investor will commit his/her retirement savings to a Wisconsin business because the government will hand out a modest break on the capital gains? Investment of capital flows to attractive projects and businesses regardless of geographic boundaries.
5. The recycling mandate and its 19 million dollar price tag should end up back on the scrap heap. If a government entity believes a service is necessary, it should pay for it.
6. State taxpayers should not subsidize high-speed broadband internet access. WiscNet should not be a government priority. Private service providers are fully capable of meeting this need without government competition.
7. We would have preferred to see zero dollars in bonding authority for the purchase of more land via the Stewardship Fund. The legislature significantly cut Walker’s request but they should have eliminated it all together. The state owns enough land.
8. And while it will not happen, you would not hear us howl if the veto pen was used to make the School Choice plan available to all families statewide. We need an education system whose sole focus is the education of the child, not artificial boundaries or the status quo.
9. This budget modifies state law to make it easier and less expensive for government to exercise eminent domain in a few specific cases. It’s a needless increase in the ability of the state to interfere with property rights. If changes to the state’s eminent domain law are truly warranted, they should be considered as a separate piece of legislation, not in the budget.
10. Finally, the pork and earmarks remain a thorn. As we said earlier, this is hardly a pork-laden document like the Doyle budgets of the last decade. Nonetheless the habit has proven hard to break. And while this list is not comprehensive, worthy or not, these projects deserve to be line-itemed out.
 

• The elimination of the state per diem limit for sewerage district officials
• The new position at Crex Meadows Wildlife Education Center
• The $10,000 for the Sheboygan Aerospace port
• $300,000 for the Bay Area Medical Center in Marinette
• $25,000 for the Copper Falls State Park in Oconto

The State Budget is a solid plan. The best this state has seen in decades. It eliminates the structural deficit that has plagued this state for the last three administrations. But why settle for good?
Governor Walker will announce his vetoes on Sunday. Clearly he could make the plan even better.
  Share Tags: Economic Development, Economy, Education, Environment, Free Market, Government Reform, Governor Doyle, Health Care, Jobs, Labor Unions, MacIver Institute, Regulations, Spending, Transportation
Posted in News, mi perspectives, mi reports | June 23, 2011 | | 5 Comments  Finally, No New Taxes  By James Wigderson
Special Guest Perspective for the MacIver Institute
In his 2003 State of the State address, then-Governor Jim Doyle said to the residents of Wisconsin, “We should not, we must not, and I will not raise taxes.”
Eight years later, we finally have a state budget that appears to be living up to those words.
When Doyle first ran for governor in 2002, he campaigned against a $3.2 billion structural deficit. When Doyle left office, he left a $3.3 billion structural deficit for his successor to solve.
For the last state budget under Doyle, the state faced an even larger structural deficit. Rather than make the necessary cuts to deal with the continuing structural deficits, Doyle and the legislature actually increased spending by $3.6 billion.
To pay for the increased spending, Doyle and the state legislature raised taxes by over $2 billion and allowed a local property tax increase of $1.5 billion. Even worse, the state budget used $3.4 billion of one-time federal “stimulus” money, including over $2 billion on existing programs.
Want debt? There was plenty of that in the last budget. Doyle and the legislature increased borrowing to  $3.58 billion. This is in addition to owing Minnesota $60 million for past due tax reciprocity payments, and owing the state medical malpractice compensation fund over $200 million because of illegal raids of that fund.
Raiding the state’s medical malpractice compensation fund was not the only budget raid under Doyle. Doyle and the legislature raided the state transportation fund for $1.3 billion during his time in office.
What a dramatic change in two years. The state budget that was sent to Governor Scott Walker Thursday night is a wholesale  reversal of the kind of budgeting under Doyle and the previous legislature.
Under the proposed budget, Wisconsin will actually have a budget surplus of $306 million. The current budget does it without a general tax increase, it freezes local municipal property taxes, and actually lowers taxes overall by $24 million.
Legislators and Walker actually tackle the state’s debt by lowering it nearly $2 billion. When the legislature was told that the state expected $636 million more in revenue than previously estimated, the legislature on a bipartisan vote paid off the more than $200 million owed to the medical malpractice compensation fund.
What the state budget does not do is raid the state transportation fund. Money for the state transportation fund was collected from the taxpayers in the form of gas taxes and registration fees with the reasonable expectation that such money would actually be used for transportation. Under the previous administration that was not the case. However, legislators and Walker again recognize not only the importance of the roads to commerce in this state, but also the importance of taxpayers trusting the state to use the money collected for the intended purpose.
On education reform, the legislature also took steps in a new direction toward restoring Wisconsin’s position as a leader in alternative educational opportunity. School choice will now be expanded to the Racine County for the first time. The enrollment caps were lifted for choice schools and for public charter schools, including the state’s online charter schools.
Already the impact of such responsible decisions is being felt. A recent survey by CEO Magazine has Wisconsin going from 41^st in the nation in to the 24^th most competitive state. A recent review of member attitudes by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce showed 88 percent of them believed the state was headed in the right direction, while just a year ago only 10% said the state was headed in the right direction.
While there are still plenty of flaws in the current state budget, including the ridiculous use of the budget process to enact policy items like the changes in the craft brewing law, the budget that is now sitting on the governor’s desk shows that Wisconsin can live within its means without raising taxes. Instead of looking for new ways to squeeze more revenue out of individuals and businesses, the legislature worked to find more ways to squeeze public services out of a bloated state government.
For many years Wisconsin lived taxpayer paycheck to taxpayer paycheck hoping that the bill collectors could be kept at bay with a promise that the check was in the mail. Now Wisconsin is paying its bills, and doing so without threatening the state’s long term economic growth. That’s a welcome change indeed.
Wigderson is a veteran participant and observer of Wisconsin politics. He and his family live in Waukesha County and his commentary can also be found at Wigderson Library & Pub