In Defense of Public Spending

Every year at this time when budgets are being passed, conservative groups succeed in convincing a great many citizens that the primary purpose of government is to cut our taxes by doing less.

These groups have been so successful in recent years that few people even bother to examine their simple-minded economic theories any more. It is accepted as fact that everyone benefits from paying less in taxes because all that is eliminated is waste in government and a lot of overpaid government employees.

That’s why this year’s city and county budgets are chock full of manpower and service cuts in every department and additional furloughs and unpaid days off for those public employees who manage to hang on to their jobs.

Politicians, who receive very nice public salaries and generous fringe benefits themselves, seem to benefit personally by advocating throwing as many other employees off the public payroll as possible.

There are several major problems with such shallow economic thinking.

You may have heard we are just starting to emerge from the major economic disaster left behind by the Bush administration. We have now pulled back from the brink of another Great Depression and the economy is growing again.

The biggest drag on recovery, however, continues to be employment. The government just announced an October unemployment rate of 10.2%, the highest since 1983. We can only imagine how much worse it would have been if President Barack Obama had not succeeded in passing $787 billion in economic stimulus spending over two years despite angry opposition from the Republican Party.

Still, obviously it wasn’t enough. That is why the next order of business for Obama after health care reform will be even more government action to increase employment to put more of us back on the road to economic recovery.

So at the same time the federal government is spending our tax dollars to create more employment, what are our county and city governments doing in the name of saving tax dollars? Creating more unemployment.

Milwaukee’s only hope is that President Obama succeeds in creating jobs faster than County Executive Scott Walker and Mayor Tom Barrett can eliminate them. Walker, in particular, because he is running for the Republican nomination for governor as a no-tax-increase candidate, appears to be on a mission to eviscerate county employment.

The budget Walker submitted to the County Board not only would have eliminated nearly 400 county jobs next year, but it would have slashed pay and benefits for the remaining employees by 15%.

Of course, with Walker, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s for political show.

The way to eliminate jobs and cut pay and benefits for unionized county employees is to negotiate such reductions at the bargaining table with the county’s unions. Walker’s proposals were never submitted to the unions. Instead, in September, the county’s largest union reached tentative agreement with county negotiators on a two-year contract freezing (not cutting) pay in exchange for no layoffs and no privatization of county services.

That agreement fell apart after Walker unilaterally lobbed his proposal to fire hundreds of employees and slash the pay for everyone else into the 2010 county budget.

Those extreme proposals cannot take effect without agreement from the unions, which can be expected shortly after Hell County freezes over.

Assuming the county and the unions can’t agree—which certainly appears to be the case right now—the union contracts ultimately could be settled by an outside arbitrator whose decision will be final.

When union and management go to binding arbitration, both sides try to submit their most reasonable proposal to the arbitrator. Walker’s proposal is so extreme and unreasonable there is little chance an arbitrator would accept it.

Employees Needed

Reducing unemployment would never be a reason to keep public employees on the city or county payrolls if those employees were not needed. But the other fact ignored by anti-public-employee conservatives is that during hard economic times we usually need more public employees, not fewer.

With more people out of work, the need for food stamps, health services and other forms of public assistance goes up. So do public safety concerns.

Long lines of people desperately in need of human services get even longer. The situation becomes a crisis when public employees who provided those necessary services lose their jobs and have to get in line themselves.

The real purpose of government actually isn’t to cut our taxes. We pay taxes to government to provide services we need that we cannot provide for ourselves.

In a burst of irony, one of the few areas of new spending in Walker’s proposed budget was $400,000 for a new county office of economic development.

After slashing hundreds of full-time county jobs in his budget, Walker believes county government must start spending more—you guessed it—to create jobs.

REPLY TO THIS COMMENT

anonymous

Joel, once again, you provide platitudes with no facts to back them up. For instance: "We can only imagine how much worse it would have been if President Barack Obama had not succeeded in passing $787 billion in economic stimulus spending..." What numbers can you use to justify this statement? Even the mainstream press does not believe the government's numbers on the stimulus, and we are all left wondering where the money went. No one, however, denies that a good chunk of it went to the public sector. Even there, though, the stimulus money did not, apparently, create many jobs- if any, in some cases. A raise for a public employee does not constitute a "saved or created" job. I'll turn your last argument around on you- when people are unemployed, forming "Long lines of people desperately in need of human services...", does it make sense to raise their property taxes? If you are a dedicated socialist, looking to get everyone on the dole, it surely makes sense. But most of us are not dedicated socialists- and THAT is the lesson of the tea parties and why the "simple-minded economic theories" make sense to most people. See you in November of 2010!

Its really wasteful to maintain 400 "make-work" unneeded employees. If they were county employees they have been making big bucks for a long time and should have banked a lot of money to live off of. I think many of these employees will have the opportunity to apply for the privatized jobs. If these people are so valuable, they should have no trouble taking their skills someplace else. If they are not valuable, then they were a waste of tax payer dollars.

"Make Work" employees. Where does that come from. The courthouse needs to be cleaned, the only "make work" is that it gets dirty and needs daily cleaning. A custodian pulls in a $31,000.00 a year. One does not get rich on that. Kicking dirt one someone who cleans the toilet you use when you visit the courthouse by claiming their services are unneeded is shameful and mean. As long as you live in Milwaukee County nothing is keeping you from applying for that position. Mind you that it will take 9 years of service before you top out at that massive salary. Front line employees have been the ones getting hit for the last 8 years. You ought to move you target to the 8 bosses it takes to manage the shell of a workforce that is left. Oddly enough while the frontline worker numbers continue to drop the number of management remains the same. Streamlining management would do a alot of good. Those folks are making 3 times what the dude with his head in the toilet makes. Some county departments have a 5 to 1 worker to management ratio. That is where the waste is.

Joel, how can you say this near depression is because of the Bush Administration? This is a result of loose regulation that was passed by both sides, not just the bush administration. As a result we have let companies like Bear Sterns become banking entities and able to get cheap loans from "US TAXPAYERS". However, I have not seen a Bear Sterns checking account that I can get, have you? Also, where is the proof that the stimulus bill is creating jobs, the ugly truth is actually coming out about "New Jobs" being created....they are a farce. Simple point is, with people taking pay cuts in their jobs (just to keep their job) they are not able to take a tax increase as well. If the people who are paying the taxes are taking a hit, there is only one thing you can do, adjust your budget. Noone said it was an easy decision, but then again, that is why we ELECT these people! You should try something new, present both sides of the facts. You are no better then the people you hate the most Fox News with your one sided arguments!

Let me point your readers to some advanced knowledge. For starters, you'll need a radical blackfoot to teach you about economics (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-345721242223597335#). Then you'll need Marilyn Waring to answer the question about GDP.PART 1 (http://www.tucradio.org/090318Waring_ONE.mp3) PART 2 (http://www.tucradio.org/090325Waring_TWO.mp3) Having pointed this out, the state is merging more and more each day with corporations. Mussolini was the founder of fascism, he called it estato corporativo; the corporate state or corporatism. So the capitalist mask and velvet gloves of both democrats and republicans is off. It's political fundamentalist bases have been fooled by pathetic beuracrats that serve as a mere pawns. Neo- liberalism has come home to roost. Domestic capitalists have lost the battle against the trilateral banksters and corporations. GAME OVER. If you want the real figures with source for bank bailouts, refer to my earlier comment on the article titled "Tarp on steroids". America and Britain COMBINED have thrown $50 trillion at this blackhole. The 10.2% unemployment rate is a U3 number, the real figure is reflected in the U6 at 17.5%. I commend you for revealing Walker's short-term objectives of squeezing more of the workers to benefit his parasitic ilk, but I must correct you on the function of the state. I could articulate this more in depth following Lenin's writings on the subject but I'd rather point Obama's so called health care reform's you may know nothing about. What it does in fact is it issues the license to print money to the drug and insurance industry. Deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid are on the horizon. Never mind Jim Lerher's 20k or Amy Goodman's 45k uninsured that will die. This bill will punish the poor with penalties that will force them to get health insurance and guarantee billions will be siphoned to these corporations in the form of new cash paying customers. Once the population is delivered under penalty to the insurance companies, there is no limit to the premiums they can then charge. In this crisis of late capitalism, the American ruling class can not tolerate under the prevailing conditions of ravid economic decline, a principle that all elderly people regardless of economic status are entitled to health care equivalent to that of the rich. On the contrary, they are now demanding that health care, like education in schooling and all aspects of social life, will be placed on a direct class basis to bring it in line with the vast growth of social inequality and an effective dictatorship of the financial aristocracy. These policies are part of a restructuring of American capitalism and of class relations in the United States under the pretext of addressing an economic crisis, in this case that of health care. What we are looking at is a vast campaign to lower permanently, the living standards of working people.

My bad, the term trilateral is an outdated term. Please substitute multi-national.

Yeah. Lenin and Marx. Things worked out really well for them. Given the choice, I'll take corporatism over socialism any day. At least corporations need to MAKE A PROFIT to succeed. By the way, what are corporations? There are three parts to a corporation- the owners (shareholders in a public corp), the workers (those are paid a wage by the corporation, given benefits, etc) and the consumers who purchase the product or service that the corporation produces or provides. I bet you fall into all three of those categories (unless you are a union-hypnotized "public employee"). Government NEVER does anything correctly or efficiently.

Allow me to use an analogy. If you got a phone call from the government, asking for more taxes so that the plumber down the street can make more money and have a pension, you'd wonder why that should be your responsibility. But for the plumber at the UW physical plant, that is exactly what we are asked to do. Public employees are NOT public servants. They are people with jobs- whose salaries are paid for by other people with private sector jobs. In the case of the plumber down the street, you could at least hope that he or she would do good work on your home. In the case of the guy at the UW physical plant, most of us will never see, use, or benefit from his or her work. That is why we rail against giving a janitor a pension just because he or she works in the courthouse. I'm not saying the UW physical plant doesn't need plumbers, or that the courthouse's toilets don't need cleaning. We just don't need to give pensions to janitors. That day and age is over.

I'm with Joel McNally.

We actually ARE public servants. Well technically my title is civil servant but it is the same difference. I work for you. You are welcome.

Why can't janitors have a pension? Are you saying janitors never get to retire? Why do you hate janitors? A civil servant has as much right to a pension as anyone in the private sector.

Wow. Here is the sense of entitlement. Do you really expect thanks from me, a private sector worker with no pension? In addition to your salary, your benefits, and your pension, I am supposed to thank you for your work? You are insane, and your attitude will be your undoing. Granted, if you are a cop or a firefighter, you are a civil servant, you are putting your life on the line, and for that I do thank you, and I agree that there is a reason that you should get higher levels of benefits and a pension. Anything else, no way. Just look at your last sentences- "I work for you. You are welcome." Wrong- you work for the government. Your job should be outsourced." I am no longer in need of your services. Don't let the door hit your entitled ass on the way out. You are also exactly right to say that a government employee has as much right to a pension as anyone in the private sector. Private sector employees have absolutely no right to a pension- you should not have that right either, since private sector employees pay for your pension- which you do not "deserve".

Wow, there are some angry cats out there. Well jealous is more like it. Why do people piss and moan about the workers who have a good benefit rather than attempt to get those benefits themselves? I trade lower pay for the opprotinity to serve my comminity.. Why am I vilified for for my service. Milwaukee has been my home for 38 years. As a kid I wanted nothing more than to be a Zookeeper. Now I am and my greatest joy is educating the the public. You pay my wage and I look at you, the public as my employer. It is a shame that such venom is directed my direction by those I serve every day. Despite the fact people out there find my service to be a waste of their money and blast me in the media daily I still serve them as I would like to be served. It would be easy to get down and let my job suffer but I have pride and spend my day doing the best I can to make those tax dollars go as far as possible. Taking a kid behind the scenes to see the hand raised fruit bats or feed the Pacu may not be seen as a valuable service but for that kid and their folks it is pretty special. I always hear thanks a lot that was cool not you lazy bum why do you get paid a living wage and have a pension. In fact there seem to be a lot of children out there who want to be zookeepers at the MCZ. I guess their minds have not yet been poisoned by their angry ignorant parents. By the way, I also pay taxes ding dong.

Entitltment. Listen cry baby when one applies for a government job that happens to come with a pension there is no entitlement there. That is a condition of your employement along with your salary and insurance. When the private sector was booming in the 90's public employees were told Milwaukee County was broke and we took 0% wage increases while private sector employees were getting big raises and bonuses. The only thing we had to look forward to was a pension and health insurance premiums that were lower than the private sector. Most folks don't know but anyone hired after 1994 in the county does not have the generous benefit packages anymore. Walker does not share that information with the public because it is harder to hate someone who makes a fair wage with modest benefits. Then we almost seem like private sector employees who work for a municipality. If the 40 Park Maintenance Workers today are doing what 700 Park Maintenance workers were doing in the 1980's shouldn't they be getting a pat on the back rather than layoff notices?

Hah! what you knuckleheads do not get into those knucklehead skulls is this: the UW, the cities, states and feds are contracting out more and more jobs like plumbers and everything else to the tune of higher costs to the tapayers. It's a fact jack, check it out, next time you drive over a safe bridge, thank a government engineer, not the privately contracted ones.

Hmm...this is a tough one. Conservative spending habbits vs Liberal spending habbits. The yin-yang of economics? Socialism vs Capitalism. Public vs Private... Over time these 2 words have evolved into a more modern Captialism and Socialism. We have heard many experts blog about these terms from both sides. It all depends on which side you stand on. Conservatives want to "cut" or stay "flat" on taxes. Liberals raise taxes because the services that govt. provided once had gotten no attention because, in our case, the now "eager to look really good to wisconsin, scott walker" has neglected the services that the govt provides by not doing anything about taxes. (Which should be lower the property tax and raise sales tax) So lets look at how the private sector, or at least give a glimps of how it might pan out. They are called in after Walker lets go hundreds of people.(Might not get paid all that well but have a good pension. After years of service to the people and needs of the county i think that's ok.) Services come in to pick up the slack and take care of the things that laborers have been doing for all of these years. Well, the govt. and contracts a shady at best. They will opt for the lowest bid on contracts in order to save money (they don't want to go to high because the quality might be too good, and the concerned tax payers just might get wind of it and complain, "why did you pay so much when you can get it for CHEAPER here"). When does the county say, ok that's enough we can't afford private work because it's too expensive. So where does that leave the people of this county that have relied on a once public laborer, then a private laborer-does the county reinstitute workers again? Are ya kidding? No...that couldn't happen because the people that wanted them out in the first place, couldn't possibly agree there is a place for the county laborer. So what will happen? County buildings and services and the people that rely on those services suffer. Don't we see that in the private sector already? you see it. I see it. How did the banking fiasco start? No one was watching the private sector!!! and what they were doing with my investment.!!! If you want that to continue, which i surely don't, don't look when the private sector comes in to support your once county responsibility they are out for profit and on occasion you might get good customer support. And why are all of the people clamoring about laborers in the county when they should start taking a look at the way upper management handle operations. But no one wants to touch that, it's easier to pick on the players that are visible and can be seen working. Easy pickings, are the laborers, for those people who don't want to look any farther than the surface. There's got to be an answer to the conservative fears of bigger govt. let's look at management... a bit. And for you conservatives who think this county doesn't do anything for the citizens of the county? Come to the next finance hearing when there is one, because if you have a spine, you come and face the people that are fighting for their reason to make this county better for the people that live in it. If you don't care you're just living for yourself and not the people you live around. We laborers are providing services to the people to the people of this county. And even if you don't care about us we'll keep fixing your roads, taking care of the parks, feeding the hungry and providing shelter for the poor and disenfranchised, oh and to the people who have just recently lost jobs. God forbid we raise sales tax and lower our property tax...our neighbors to the south in Chicago? Sales tax: 10.25%..what are we 5.6? we got some wiggle room. But lets look at administration the next go around please. We already can't repair the service trucks on time like we used to because of cuts to CAMD maintenance help when Walker came into town 6 years ago.

WELL SAID!!!!!

When you refer to "taking a look at the upper management handles operations" would you include ex-Executive Tom Ament in that group? We did start looking at upper management and found them to be CORRUPT!

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