{"id":5535,"date":"2011-03-11T22:36:56","date_gmt":"2011-03-11T22:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5535"},"modified":"2011-03-11T22:36:56","modified_gmt":"2011-03-11T22:36:56","slug":"walker-and-wisconsin-a-coming-moment-of-clarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/walker-and-wisconsin-a-coming-moment-of-clarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Walker and Wisconsin: A coming moment of clarity"},"content":{"rendered":"

To anyone who relishes empirical verification, the belated Wisconsin union votes <\/a>are particularly satisfying–not so much on their substance, however welcome that is, but because they create a very clean test: What really does the public think about government unions?\u00a0 The MSM has been furiously cranking out polls over the last three weeks claiming that the public opposes efforts to cut back on collective bargaining rights and benefits for public employee unions.\u00a0 If that is in fact the public\u2019s view, it is deeply misinformed about the risk of government employer abuse against government workers in this age of lawsuit frenzy and a victim-hungry press.\u00a0 But it would be good to find out the degree of the public\u2019s cluelessness, if it exists.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Fortunately, Walker\u2019s bill was watered down hardly at all.\u00a0 So let the recall battles\u00a0begin.\u00a0 Yes, Wisconsin has a strong left-wing union tradition, which may not make it completely representative of the country, but it also has a strong conservative streak as well\u2014a bit like California\u2019s schizophrenia.\u00a0 If Wisconsin\u2019s Republicans, including Walker, are swept out of power because of this vote, they will have gone down for a superb cause.\u00a0 And they will have illustrated how much of a bubble conservatives are in, for whom the grotesque inequities between public and private sector pensions and benefits are patent.\u00a0 They will also have shown how effective liberal propaganda on behalf of unions has been.\u00a0 (See, for example, the New York Times\u2019s hilarious pretend effort <\/a>to determine whether public sector workers are overpaid that neglected to include pensions and benefits in the calculation.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

This coming empirical test may be a harbinger of the likelihood of significant cuts to entitlements.\u00a0 I would have thought that it would have been much easier to cut public employee benefits, since they are a finite special interest group, however powerful, than it would be to cut population-wide entitlements.\u00a0 If it proves impossible even to cut back on government workers\u2019 fat benefits packages, things don\u2019t look good for broader entitlement cuts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To anyone who relishes empirical verification, the belated Wisconsin union votes are particularly satisfying–not so much on their substance, however welcome that is, but because they create a very clean test: What really does the public think about government unions?\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5535"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5538,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5535\/revisions\/5538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}