Wisconsin State of Mind...

Recently there has been quite the hubbub over the last week or so. Politifact does a nice job of clarifying one of the claims at the center of dispute here. Wisconsin is facing a budget shortfall this year, but the methods being discussed will not address that shortfall. Also, the tax breaks the Gov. Walker signed into law in the first month will add to further deficit woes in future budgets. So Gov. Walker, did not create the budget shortfall, but neither did the public union employees.

I am going to seriously pimp Ezra Klein (if you are not reading him you need to) here, he and TPM have been doing yeoman's work on this topic.

But here we go. Mr. Klein, goes to bat on what the causes are for the Wisconsin shortfall are here. From there Klein does some corrections on his initial statement, but really gets into the nuts and bolts of of the issue (here, here, here and here).

The basic gist of Ezra comments being that, this has very little to do with balancing the budget and has more to do with legally dismantling a organized constituency that tends to be hostile to Republicans. From reading the bill itself and listening to the Union's willingness to accept the compensation cuts, but not the massive changes to collective bargaining in the state, I tend to agree with the commentators that cast this as union-busting.

Again, I feel like we need to talk about what the wealth distribution is like in this country, and how whenever someone says, "shared sacrifice" and "hard choices", they seem to always be directing that sacrifice at the middle class and the poor, exactly at the time when they are most set upon (h/t Balloon Juice).

As E.D Kain points out:

Alex notes that, “As you can see, this is why the wealthy in this country pay most of the taxes — they have most of the money, by a staggering amount.”

More charts and graphs here.

And Dr. Krugman talks some serious sense about entitlements.

-Cheers