Suddenly new Republican governors in Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan are joining Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels in getting their state budgets under control before their states become Illinois and California.
In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, has proposed severe changes in public employee unions. A vote was to be heard this week. The response was teachers vacating classrooms for public protests. Fourteen Democratic legislators went into hiding to prevent a quorum. The governors from these three states have one thing in common, they came from the world of business, not politics. The severe cuts in Wisconsin were: union employees were to pay 5.8% of their pension contributions and 12.6% of their health care, from an average of 6%. This is far below the average paid by the private sector and would avoid the loss of 5,500 state jobs and 5,000 local jobs. He, Walker, would promise no layoffs or furloughs for the 170,000 public employees.
Similar bills are pending in Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New Mexico. with another 16 states debating such changes. Wisconsin is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit in the next budget year. Many of the governors in these states were put in office to do just that.
President Obama’s response in a speech in Wisconsin, “this is an attack on the unions.”
There you have it folks, a President who will destroy state budgets, force state bankruptcies, destroy the futures for coming generations, let teachers flee the classroom, and promote deficits to protect his union vote. It’s his entire outlook on the economic outlook for this country in a nutshell. Protect the unions and push the problem down the road for future generations of politicians to solve.
It’s time for the Obama economic policy to go away. It’s time to put businessmen with courage into office across the country.
