Shark on Lake Effect

My with Stephanie Lecci on WUWM's Lake Effect cand be found here. We talked about the Governor's initiatives on collective bargaining and the budget along with the aftermath. I closed by hoping that we can learn to disagree robustly - even sharply - but civilly.

A critique of my appearance can be found here - written by someone called Man MKE at Uppity Wisconsin.  The one thing I would point out to our friends at Uppity Wisconsin that the fact that, in economic terms, a union is a cartel is not controversial. A union is a combination of a suppliers of labor who agree to act in concert. The idea is that this will shift the supply curve for labor resulting in some combination of higher wages, lower employment, higher prices and (perhaps) lower profits. Cartelization is the theory behind labor unions and laws authorizing collective bargaining exempts it from law prohibiting agreements in restraint of trade that would otherwise apply.

What I supposedly got wrong is that Scott Walker did not raise taxes because of two small adjustments in the calculation of the homestead earned income credit that, considered alone, raised revenue. But the net impact of Walker's budget was to reduce and not increase taxes. I'll stand by what I said. It is rare that a budget bill will not include things that, standing alone, both increase and decrease revenue. We usually look at the big picture.

I am also apparently wrong in saying that Walker's collective bargaining reform did not save the state money. But here's the thing. You can't argue that there have been 1) devastating cuts that 2) didn't save the state money. We have - by the same measure that the state has used in the past - largely closed a huge budget gap without (as I said) an overall tax increase. Looks like someone saved money somewhere.

I did not say, as Uppity claims, that there were absolutely no reductions in state services. One could hardly expect to close a budget gap of that size without some staffing reductions. But I stand by my statement that those reductions have not been significant. I used the recent DPI survey as an illustration.

Finally, Uppity is upset because it's show skewed right. Really? Three of the five panelist in the opening segment are clearly to the left of center. I am not sure about Mr. Kass and Dave Haynes, who may or may not be more conservative than the average editor on State Street, is known as a fairly straight forward journalist. John Gurda has increasingly given over his column in the Journal Sentinel to paeans to socialism. I'm thinking they did OK.

What I find most interesting in Uppity's response is the reaction to my call for civility. Uppity rejects that call because Republicans "rac[ed] through complex legislation and voting on bills at midnight with constitutionally questionable and very minimal prior notice ...."

Well, no, they didn't. Even if you think that Republicans tried to pass the collective bargaining bill too soon, it wound up being perhaps the most debated bill in the history of the state. (In fact, much of what becomes law in this state is passed "at midnight" and with "very minimal prior notice" as part of the biennial budget.  Act 10 was a bit of an exception.) The venom we see has nothing to do with procedure.