Monday, January 31, 2011

Preview Of The State Of The State Address

On Tuesday, Scott Walker is scheduled to give his first State of the State address.  Please do not confuse the snow job that Walker will be trying to pull on us with the real snow job that Mother Nature is dumping on us.

But so that you may enjoy your peppermint schnapps-laced hot cocoa after a grueling day fighting the elements, I will provide you with a preview of Walker's speech.

He will start out by telling us what a mess Governor Doyle left him to clean up.  He will use artificially inflated numbers, or even numbers pulled from a hat to make his point.  In other words, just look at his first State of the County speech, but substitute Doyle's name for Tom Ament's.

He will quickly follow this up by telling us how lucky we are for electing him, since he is the Chosen One, and that he will be able to single-handedly save us all from ruin.  He will tout the bills that he managed to ramrod through without sufficient public hearings or public input.  Things like paving over wetlands for an empty stores, giving tax breaks to all of his campaign contributors from WMC, and making sure that gays, minorities and poor people are kept under his boot heel where they belong.  Never mind that not one of his bills will create even one job nor save most Wisconsinites even one dime.

He will start out with the phony numbers for a couple of reasons.  One is to give him plausible doubt when his bills go haywire and we end up much worse than anyone could have imagined.  He is building the case to blame others for his own failure, a trait he is well-known for.

The other reason will be giving rise to his real agenda.

One of his goals is to bust up the unions.  He will present a plan to make the unions pay up to 20% of their salaries for health care and pension costs.  Walker will present it as "evening the playing field" with private sector workers, which is, of course, utter rubbish.  Walker won't ever dare offer any of his proposals at the negotiating table.  That way, he has cause, in his mind anyway, to lay off thousands of state workers and privatize the services.  In said privatizations, he will give handsome contracts to his campaign contributors which will end up costing more than if the services has remained in the public sector.

Another one of Walker's agenda items is to start dismantling public health care.  He will cite some unverifiable numbers indicating that Badger Care is under water and decided to through off hundreds of thousands of people from the system.  His dwindling faithful will be rejoicing thinking that this will save them some money on taxes.  The joke is on them though.  Their taxes will not go down, but their health care premiums will continue to climb at double digit rates.  The increase in premiums will be directly due to the higher number of people unable to afford basic medical care and will be waiting until they are so sick that they need emergency and costlier care than before.  The hospitals and insurance companies will pass these costs onto the rest of us through the premiums and charging $10 for an aspirin.

Just think, like his buddy Governor Jan Brewer, Walker can have his own death panels!

The remainder of the speech will consist of doublespeak for trying to convince us why we need to pay even more so that his rich business owners can have cuts to their already low taxes.  He'll drag out the same old tired dog and pony act claiming that it will create jobs, even though the same tax cuts on a national level only produced the Great Recession with higher unemployment.

Now that I've saved you the grief of having to listen to Walker's lies and false promises, go and enjoy the evening.  Maybe join your kids in monitoring the closing announcements to see if Wednesday is a snow day.  And don't forget the hot cocoa, liberally laced with schnapps.  We'll be needing a lot of that to get us through the next four years.

1 comment:

  1. I'm looking for the stats to see how the Walker Comedy Hour played, up against a re-run of GLEE the, Time Warp, episode.

    The Green Bay Fox network affiliate did not even cover his shtick.

    -nonquixote

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