Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Thanks To Public Employees

This letter to the editor appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel yesterday:

Thanks to public employees 
I paid my property taxes the other day. I "saved" $150, or about 3% over 2010. I could get on the bandwagon and thank Gov. Scott Walker, but I won't. All he did was ram a bill through a friendly majority. 
I will, however, thank my local teachers, educators and public workers. They are the ones who sacrificed about 10% of their middle-class incomes so I could save a few bucks. My local educators are the ones who dedicated their lives to helping me raise and educate my successful children. Sorry, but I can't think of a single legislator who has had any impact on that effort. 
The sad part is that outstanding leaders would have accomplished the same budget savings without the bullying, rancor, cost of a recall or negative publicity for Wisconsin. Most union members I know knew the state was having fiscal problems due to the recession and were willing to pay their fair share. The governor and legislators could have amended the "3.8%" law to "0%" for a year or two until things were back to normal, for example, and most would have understood. 
Instead, Walker destroyed 50 years of bargaining rights legislation, gave the rich a megamillion-dollar tax break and denigrated educators and other public service workers. Now I see him on TV taking credit for saving me $150 instead of thanking our public workers for their financial sacrifice. He has no one to blame but himself for the recall effort.
We deserve better leadership. 
Thomas Balliet
Mequon

8 comments:

  1. We "saved" $1 on our state taxes. All together on county, school district and township taxes, we "saved" a grand total of $25. To hear the governor talk, I would have expected that our property taxes would be zeroed out this year. I'm going to be spending far more than $26 this year to support my local food pantry to help those folks who are still unemployed or who lost their earned income tax credits. But the Republicans in this state wouldn't know anything about that sort of thing -- they have no conscience and don't worry about the unemployed or the working poor. We DO deserve better leadership.

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  2. Wauwatosa neighbor, Jan 19th, 2012, 7:35 AM

    I live two blocks from Walker in Wauwatosa, ---our taxes went up $800.

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  3. The letter gets at the heart of the matter. This is what the national media doesn't seem to get.

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  4. The other part of the balancing the budget that doesn't make any sense is the lifting of the income level cap for people who want vouchers.

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  5. But the budget is not balanced. Walker's asking the UW System to cough up millions more in a "budget lapse" and Mike Huebsch has written a letter to Kathleen Sebelius at Health and Human Services claiming that their will be a deficit in the Wisconsin budget through 2013.

    And the public employees were paying 100% of their pension costs BEFORE Act 10 was passed.

    Walker is all smoke and mirrors.

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  6. Walker just filed with the Federal government that he did NOT have a balanced budget and could therefore avoid providing health insurance for some 53,000 people. Smoke and mirrors doesn't cover it; lies and bullshit is more like it. God how I hate this man. There's a new website I'll start: SweetjesushowIhatescottfuckingwalker.com

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  7. If you start up that site, it might crash immediately due to so many viewers. This is getting old.

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