"In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt."

"In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largess in the next election. It's the perfect cozy setup... Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic Party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. The Democrats' strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion."

Charles Krauthammer.

Professor Donald Downs says Gov. Walker "by being radical... has exposed the contradictions in the political economy."

"It's creedal!"



This is the last 2 1/2 minutes of Downs's talk at last night's teach-in, which is also discussed in the previous post, and which should soon be on-line in its entirety here.

The Badger Herald writes about last night's teach-in on the Wisconsin budget bill and completely misrepresents what Prof. Donald Downs said.

Here's the Badger Herald.  Here's Professor Downs's response — which was cc'd to me:

I write in response to Grant Hermes reporting on my comments at the Law School Forum Wednesday evening. Hermes wrote that I "alluded to the idea that the governor’s proposed bill may have long-term negative effects on political areas outside of labor disputes, such as taxes and the rising cost in higher education." This is a complete misrepresentation of what I said and meant. I was talking about the crisis of debt, and how higher education is part of this crisis because we cost so much. Walker has had nothing to do [with] having caused this problem; indeed, his measures are designed to at least address the crisis of public debt in a forceful way. At no point in my discussion of this aspect of the problem did I implicate Walker's plan as a source of the problem. The cost of higher education has skyrocketed at twice the skyrocketing rate of medical care costs over the course of the last twenty years, and we are the source of this problem, not Walker.

Donald Downs
Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism

Maybe the reporter had trouble hearing a professor imply that Scott Walker might be doing something good.

ADDED: The boldface is mine. Here's the last 2 1/2 minutes of Downs's talk.

Did Scott Walker create Wisconsin's budget crisis as a means to the end of cutting the public unions' collective bargaining rights?

That's what the NYT thinks:

Just last month, [Gov. Walker] and the [Wisconsin] Legislature gave away $117 million in tax breaks, mostly for businesses that expand and for private health savings accounts. That was a choice lawmakers made, and had it not been for those decisions and a few others, according to the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the state would have had a surplus.

Wisconsin is certainly not as bad off as California, Illinois, and several northeastern states that are making tough budgetary decisions without trying to eliminate union rights. Nonetheless, the union-busting movement is picking up steam, with lawmakers in Ohio, Indiana, and several other states. 

It really is odd that Wisconsin became ground zero, because we didn't have the budget disaster that was going on conspicuously in some of the other states. I'm really trying to understand this. Why Wisconsin? A distinctive thing about us is how good our public employees' benefits are. The cut we — I'm one of them — are being asked to take is severe. (I'm looking at a loss of more than $10,000 a year, myself.) But it's hard to complain and appear sympathetic, because we're only being asked to go from paying 0.2% of the payments our salary into our pension fund to 5.8%, which probably looks astoundingly low to outsiders. We're being asked to pay more for our health insurance, but the coverage is extremely good, and the annual hit will be about $2,500.

So maybe we public employees in Wisconsin are a great target — a great starting place for what is a national movement by the Republicans. I'm trying to understand the party politics. Tell me if this is correct: There are vast numbers of public employees, who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Once elected, the Democrats create more and more public jobs with greater and greater benefits, and, consequently, more voters who are even more locked into voting for Democrats. This is a cycle that approaches political graft, and the Republicans, to win, must overcome all those passionate, self-interested Democratic voters. Why wouldn't the Republicans embrace a strategy hostile to the public employees? Why wouldn't they drive a wedge between the public employees and all the other citizens in the state?

So I see 3 questions: 1. Is this what the Republicans are really doing? 2. How good a political strategy is it? and 3. Is it a good idea to reduce the political and economic power of public employees?

The 3 questions are interrelated, but they should contemplated separately... but who is capable of doing that? I'm trying to be fair, and it's possible that I'm in as good a position as anybody. I voted for Walker and support many of the things the Republicans are trying to do, but this budget plan — as I said — will cost me more than $10,000 a year.

Madison schools close for the day to allow teachers to protest Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting budget plan.

Kids have the day off because the district knew that the teachers would be calling in sick in order to participate in a political demonstration.

District Superintendent Dan Nerad made the announcement at 11 p.m. Tuesday after 40 percent of the 2,600 members of the teacher's union had called in sick and more were expected to do so through Wednesday morning.

"At this ratio we have serious concerns about our ability to maintain safe and secure school environments," Nerad said in the announcement....

Earlier Tuesday, Nerad said teachers who take a sick day will be asked to show proof of a medical reason. Those who don't could face sanctions such as docked pay. Teachers aren't able to take a personal day with less than three days' notice.

Okay, now, everybody go to the demonstration! The kids won't have school, but you can learn a lot of things outside of school. Some of these things are even taught by the teachers who are not there. For example, it's okay to call in sick when you're not actually sick, but you just have something that you think is really important.

Nerad's decision came after Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews said the union was contacting members and urging them to call in sick and instead attend a rally scheduled for Wednesday at the Capitol in opposition to Walker's collective bargaining proposal.

The campaign is the first coordinated absence by Madison school employees in 16 years, Matthews said.

I remember that. My sons were in the public schools here then. There was a lot of talk about whether it counted as significant dishonesty to claim to be sick when you were not and what kind of example that set for the youngsters. Many local people took the position that "sickouts" are a known and understood labor strategy and therefore not to be understood as actual lying lying. The obvious follow-up question on that argument is: What about the children — do they understand that? You will be considered very annoying around here if you advance to the confrontation level of asking that question.

It's unclear whether school will be held Thursday or Friday.

Also Tuesday, nearly 800 Madison East High School students — half the school — walked out to participate in a demonstration at the state Capitol. Students at West, Memorial and at other schools around the state — from Shullsburg to Sheboygan — also participated in demonstrations during school hours.

Well, the entire week is shot, isn't it? Oh, but the students are learning about political engagement and activism. I kind of agree. In fact, I've toyed with the idea that there should be no organized schooling at all. Why gather and trap the kids in buildings all day long? (Think of the carbon emissions if the imprisonment alone doesn't trouble you.) All the lessons and more could be put on the internet. Let all the students creatively or bumblingly pursue their own education according to the path they find for themselves, the way life itself works outside of school.

Other demonstrations and protests at schools in Wisconsin are scheduled for Wednesday.

East High senior Ona Powell, whose mother is a Madison teacher and father is a professor, coordinated the walkout through Facebook and word-of-mouth at school on Monday.

"I felt outraged that unions are being attacked and didn't want my mom hurt by this," Powell said.

As teachers beamed and offered thanks, student organizers in the hallways handed out signs identifying each as a "future worker, future voter," proclaiming this was a "Walk out for Walker out," and calling on the Legislature to "kill this bill."

Kill the bill? Remember when the Tea Party gathered at the US Capitol and chanted "kill the bill" the day the health care bill was passed? That was considered terribly violent.


(Photo by Meade.)

Anyway, isn't it interesting how well the students used the internet to organize their political activity? Why not close all the schools altogether and let the students romp and play and be political and speak and learn via the internet and internet-organized activities... forever?

School's out for the day? School's out for the week? School's out forever!



Think outside the box! Think of the savings!

"We are broke in this state. We have been broke for years. People have ignored that for years, and it's about time somebody stood up and told the truth."

Wisconsin's new GOP governor delivers the harsh news.

Gov. Scott Walker said Friday thousands of state workers would be laid off if the Legislature does not adopt his plan to repair the budget that includes cutting benefits and taking away almost all union bargaining rights from public workers.

Walker also signaled that in a larger budget plan coming later this month he would cut aid to local governments and let local officials deal with those cuts at least in part through savings on their employee costs. Walker wants the Legislature - which is controlled by his fellow Republicans - to act quickly on the plan, approving it by Feb. 25. It could move even faster than that, likely going before lawmakers next week.

The governor also said the National Guard is at the ready to take control of state prisons if correctional officers strike or take job actions. No union official has endorsed such a job action, but Walker said he was prepared for any contingency.

Mitch Daniels in the WSJ: "Unless you're in favor of a fully nationalized health-care system, the president's health-care reform law is a massive mistake.."

The Indiana Governor (and potential GOP presidential candidate) ponders what the states can do if the law is not repealed or judicially voided. The states cannot be commandeered to run the program, so there is leverage to bargain. These are the conditions that 21 governors have proposed to the Secretary of Health and Services:

• We are given the flexibility to decide which insurers are permitted to offer their products.

• All the law's expensive benefit mandates are waived, so that our citizens aren't forced to buy benefits they don't need and have a range of choice that includes more affordable plans.

• The law's provisions discriminating against consumer-driven plans, such as health savings accounts, are waived.

• We are given the freedom to move Medicaid beneficiaries into the exchange, or to utilize new approaches to the traditional program, instead of herding hundreds of thousands more people into today's broken Medicaid system.

• Our state is reimbursed the true, full cost of the administrative burden to be imposed upon us, based on the estimate of an auditor independent of HHS.

• A trustworthy projection is commissioned, by a research organization independent of the department, of how many people are likely to wind up in the exchange, given the large incentives for employers to save money by off-loading their workers.

Obviously, this is a very different system than the one the legislation intends....

That's a GOP proposal on how to tweak health care reform, which is what Obama and others have said they need. With the prospect of 21 states dropping out of the enforcement regime, there should be real pressure to work with them and try to draw them back in.

On the other hand, you really are in favor of a fully nationalized health-care system, then you might celebrate the states failure to go along with the attempt to include them. And if what happens is, as Daniels predicts, "first-rate operational catastrophe," then that sets up the collapse into the only workable fix a fully nationalized health-care system.

Is it possible to declare a "Sputnik moment"?

The President tried last night:

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs. This is our generation's Sputnik moment.

But how do you have Sputnik without Sputnik? The Soviets launching their satellite shocked Americans into a period of intense activity and achievement. It's nice to want to do that again, but there's not an equivalent incentivizing advance by an imposing and feared foreign competitor.

This is our generation's Sputnik moment. What is? Are we playing let's pretend? Nothing is scaring us and lighting a fire under us. In fact, it's hard for us now, with our long perspective, even to understand why Sputnik was such a huge motivation. Ask some under-50 Americans today: Why was it so important to beat the Soviets in sending men to the moon? Ask them when/if the Soviets got a man to the moon. I'll bet they can't even give plausible answers. I'll bet even the over-50s are hit-or-miss when it comes to answering the question whether the Soviets got a man to the moon.

So what on earth — or on the moon — does Obama think he will get out of the mere verbal tag "Sputnik"? If you remember how Sputnik felt — and I do — you'll probably say, but there is  no equivalent of Sputnik. There are just a lot of countries, full of human beings, trying to get ahead economically, like us — not against us. There's no race with dramatic consequences for the winners and losers, and there's no impressive physical object that signifies that bad guys are winning the race. If you don't remember Sputnik, you're like: Sputnik?

***

Bonus Bob Dylan lyric:

Well, I don’t know, but I’ve been told
The streets in heaven are lined with gold
I ask you how things could get much worse
If the Russians happen to get up there first
Wowee! pretty scary!

Now, I’m liberal, but to a degree
I want ev’rybody to be free
But if you think that I’ll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I’m crazy!
I wouldn’t let him do it for all the farms in Cuba

"The money would come from the contingency reserve fund, where money is mainly used for unexpected expenses."

Oh! The contingency reserve fund, where we get money when we need more money, because we hadn't expected that we were going to spend money on that.

That in this case is a bicycle-sharing program, called B-Cycle, here in Madison, so it's just another project the City Council thinks it would be nice to have. It's regular old spending on a fancy (and probably terrible) supposed improvement, that in no way seems to be an "unexpected expense."

The proposal includes the installation of 35 stations and would bring 350 bikes to Madison in May.

The tentative user fees range from $10 day passes to $65 annual passes, and there is a proposed student annual price of $45.

Users would use credit or debit cards to pay for the passes.

Chicago, Denver and some European cities are among those with bike sharing systems already installed. According to [Director of Operations for B-Cycle Danielle] Dejean, in Denver the use of the rented bikes replaced 43 percent of car trips.

According to Dejean... Sorry, I don't believe it!

"Bike sharing is synonymous with world-class cities," Dejean said.

So get a bike-sharing system and be a world-class city.

ADDED: The only way this is an "unexpected expense" is if this is an impulse purchase. Either it was carefully planned and thought-through, in which case they shouldn't tap the contingency reserve fund. Or it's a sudden flight of fancy, in which case they should calm down and figure out exactly what they're doing and whether it's a good idea.

By the way, what happens if the bike gets stolen en route from one station to the next? What keeps annual pass holders from stowing the bikes at home between rides? What happens when kids don't use helmets? Etc. etc.

"We're getting very close to the point where we could have states default on their debts for the first time."

"What should happen then?" Right Wing News asks Thomas Sowell, who answers: "They should go bankrupt. I'm looking forward to it."

2 things about the impending government takeover of medicine.

These items are side-by-side at Memeorandum:

1. In the Boston Globe, a Harvard nanophysics researcher named Mike Stopa says the term "death panels" "persists... because it denotes, in a pithy way, the economic realities of scarcity inherent in nationalizing a rapidly developing, high-technology industry on which people’s lives depend in a rather immediate way."

2. The NYT reports that "The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines."

Life and death — it's economics, and the government is here to help.

"House Republicans plan to vote tomorrow to repeal last year’s health care overhaul."

"One of the key defenses of the law is that it will reduce the deficit over the next decade and the decades to come. But the projections employed to make this argument just aren’t believable. Democrats gamed the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring process, producing a score that distorted the long-term numbers and was believable only under a set of fantastic and improbable assumptions."

Should you go to law school?

As you may have noticed, the NYT put up a long article about whether it's worth it to go to law school — whether it's a good investment. The article begins with an anecdote about a young man with $250,000 in student loans and compares his situation to that of a person who bought an expensive house and has a big mortgage loan to pay off. Of course, education is different from a house. You can sell the house, but you keep your education in your head.

Both the house and the education may turn out to be worth less than you paid, but the present-day value of a house has to do with what someone else is willing to pay to take it off your hands. You don't sell your education to someone else. You try to get a job. When you buy a house, you have some expectations about how the market price will change over time. When you get an education you have expectations about what kinds of jobs you may be able to get with it. But so much depends on you. You have to have absorb and process the material the school teaches, you need to present yourself appropriately in interviews, and, once you get the job, you have to perform well. Your services are the product. The education was part of making your services worth buying in the job market. But no one ever purchases your education from you.

Now, why focus on law schools? People buy all sorts of education. It's expensive. And students major in plenty of subjects that are far less likely to result in jobs. Here's where we get to the real meat of the article: Do the law schools trick students into thinking they are buying a bigger boost in the job market than they're really going to get? And it's the old U.S. News and World Report problem. As schools vie for higher ranking, they do what they can to produce statistics that factor into the calculation, and one thing is the percentage of "graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation." Law schools today report an average of 93%, which is 9% more than back in 1997, even though everyone knows the job market for law grads has gotten much worse.

Another statistic that counts in the rankings is median starting salary:

Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure....

That is to say, the U.S. News rankings are, on their face, unbelievable.

So the glut of diplomas, the dearth of jobs and those candy-coated employment statistics have now yielded a crop of furious young lawyers who say they mortgaged their future under false pretenses. You can sample their rage, and their admonitions, on what are known as law school scam blogs, with names like Shilling Me Softly, Subprime JD and Rose Colored Glasses.

“Avoid this overpriced sewer pit as if your life depended on it,” writes the anonymous author of the blog Third Tier Reality — a reference to the second-to-bottom tier of the U.S. News rankings — in a typically scatological review. “Unless, of course, you think that you will be better off with $110k-$190k in NON-DISCHARGEABLE debt for a degree that qualifies you to wait tables at the Battery Park Bar and Lounge.”

But so far, the warnings have been unheeded. Job openings for lawyers have plunged, but law schools are not dialing back enrollment.... Apparently, there is no shortage of 22-year-olds who think that law school is the perfect place to wait out a lousy economy and the gasoline that fuels this system — federally backed student loans — is still widely available. 

It's important for prospective students to know what they're getting into. But are they being tricked into thinking it will be easy to become a lawyer, make a lot of money, and love your job too? I don't think so. The bad economy has made the odds worse, but students aren't fools. The NYT focuses on one particular individual, who seems to have been especially unrealistic. (You can go to the article to see the details on this one guy. I don't know why he was chosen as the star of the article.) I think most students do think hard about taking on loans and training for the legal profession. You've got to search for the truth and think hard about where your decisions will lead you and if you want to go there.

Quite aside from the economic issues, many people go to law school only to figure out they don't like being a lawyer. But you have to do something in life. What will it be? What else are you going to do? For far too many young people, law school seems like a specific, sensible choice. Three years of education, and you will be highly qualified for a wide array of respectable jobs. If you're reasonably smart and hard working, you will get through it. But it's not a magic ticket to affluence and prestige.

My advice: Know what you're doing! Think!

Hans Rosling's "200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes."

"What is failing us is not our people or our places. What is failing us is the expanse of government."

"But we can do something about it right here, right now, today."

The biggest applause line in Scott Walker's inaugural address.

[Wisconsin's new Governor has called a] special legislative session and told lawmakers he wanted them to approve a string of bills by the end of February....

The bills would: give tax breaks to business owners and income tax credits for contributions to health savings accounts; reduce business regulations; provide protections from lawsuits; give the governor more say in state rule making; turn the state Department of Commerce into a partly private entity to focus on job creation; and require a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of the Legislature to approve any increases to the state sales, income and franchise taxes....

"My top three priorities are simple: jobs, jobs and more jobs," Walker said.

He also promised to improve education, protect natural resources, honor the role of family and "right-size state government by ensuring government is providing only the essential services our citizens need and our taxpayers can afford."

I'm sorry I didn't walk down the street to witness the inaugural ceremony, which included "a choral rendition of 'Aquarius' and 'Let the Sunshine In' from the musical 'Hair.'" Caught in the same 1960's time warp: "Outside, dozens of protesters walked around the Capitol waving placards and shouting, 'Hey, hey, ho, ho, Scott Walker has got to go.'" Damn. I missed some photo ops!

And, by the way, Milwaukee State Journal, it's not "Let the Sunshine In." Straighten out your "Hair." Here's my favorite version of "Let the Sun Shine In." Are you familiar with this album, "Streetnoise"? (Not "Street Noise.") Julie Driscoll. This is good too. That one has a version of "Season of the Witch," which has nothing to do with Scott Walker. He is not a witch.