traptunderice wrote:
cry of the banshee wrote:
but the reality is, the state is broke; how are they supposed to pay for these (public sector) demands?
Article I just read, snippets only:
Quote:
Part of Scott Walker's approach in Wisconsin has been to claim that everyone needs to sacrifice, and all he's asking is for public-sector workers to contribute more toward their benefits and pensions. In effect, he claims that public-sector workers are getting something for nothing.
But in fact, public-sector unions have negotiated for a part of workers' compensation to go toward better benefits and pensions. They accepted lower wages in the present in exchange for having some compensation put toward health care and retirement costs. So asking them to "contribute more" is, in reality, asking them to accept a pay cut.
Quote:
Pension contributions in their entirety amount to less than 4 percent of state spending currently. The National Association of State Retirement Administrators puts the figure at 2.9 percent, while the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College puts the figure at 3.8 percent.
Overall, Robert Reich reports that taxpayers are directly responsible for only about 14 percent of public retirement benefits. The lion's share of benefits comes from contributions made by workers themselves.
And in Scott Walker's Wisconsin, the state isn't even facing the kind of fiscal crisis that plagues some other states. Walker is claiming that the state is facing a $137 million deficit this fiscal year--far smaller than many states. And a number of analysts believe Walker is inflating the shortfall--based on a Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau report that estimated the state would have ended the fiscal year with a positive balance, if not for corporate tax breaks that Walker pushed through as his first act in office.
So turning around and attacking public-sector workers is a pure bait-and-switch. Walker chose to make the deficit worse, and then use it as an excuse to go after public workers.
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A new International Monetary Fund study concluded that half of the increases in budget deficits around the world are due to collapsing tax revenues--and a further large share is due to interest payments on old debt. Less than 10 percent is due to discretionary public spending.
As is always the case in an economic slump, the recession--which brought with it wealth destruction, high rates of unemployment and increased reliance on social programs--caused a decline in revenues and increased spending on some services.
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Conservative economic commentators and politicians alike hammer relentlessly at the idea that the country is "broke," and it's only fair that public workers should chip in.
But apparently, shared sacrifice doesn't apply to Wall Street executives. Back in 2008, when George Bush's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was trying to sell Congress on approving the the $700 billion Wall Street bailout program, he argued vociferously that limiting executive compensation would be "impractical."
Quote:
It’s not true that Gov. Scott Walker’s tax cuts are the cause of Wisconsin’s current budget deficit — a false claim widely spread by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and repeated in numerous e-mails to us since we wrote about the state’s budget problems earlier this week. In fact, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates the tax cuts won’t add a penny to the current year’s $137 million deficit
Quote:
The short answer is that the tax breaks — which total in the millions, not billions — don’t take effect until fiscal year 2012 and beyond, so they do not contribute to this year’s budget deficit, according to Fiscal Bureau Director Bob Lang
Quote:
On his first day in office Jan. 3, Walker called for a special session of the Legislature to deal with job creation. Four bills came from that session that provided tax breaks. On Jan. 31, the fiscal bureau issued a memo that explains the impact of three of those bills on the current fiscal year and the next two-year budget cycle. We will get to the impact in a minute. First, as wrote previously, the fiscal bureau’s memo showed a $121 million gross balance in the state’s general accounting fund for fiscal year 2011 — but that did not include outstanding debts, including more than $170 million for Medicaid services, $21 million for corrections programs and more than $58 million owed to Minnesota for a tax reciprocity deal. The net deficit: $137 million
Yeah, ok.
Now give it up already.
