Forward

Well Wisconsin, we've had a good run.

I don't actually know if all good things must come to an end, but it is true that this particular good thing is coming to an end. A job opportunity has come up that will take me away from my adopted hometown of De Pere, WI and back to my actual hometown of Mesa, AZ. Since the opportunity involves a promotion, it's a bit much to ask anyone to feel to sorry for me, but over the last eleven years I really have come to think of Wisconsin as my home and I will be sad to leave.

The sun shines 350 days a year in Arizona, but not one of them will compare with those mid-summer Wisconsin days that seem to last forever. The days when the sun seems to linger just a bit longer than it should, everything is green, and the air is thick and warm. On these days the frozen landscapes of winter hardly seem real.

They are real of course, and in due time summer's green is replaced by the bold reds and golds of fall, and then eventually by the gray and white of winter. Winter has its own special beauty that too many Wisconsin natives are quick to dismiss. Perhaps that is understandable given the harshness of winter temperatures.

Absence of winter will certainly be noticeable after this move, but I fear that something even more important will be lacking.  The people of the upper Midwest, to my mind, are some of the most genuine you will find anywhere in the country.  I don't mean they represent the only real Americans, I mean they are just real.  They let their yea be a yea and their no, a no.  This straightforward nature is in too short of supply in too much of the rest of this country, and we are the worse for it.

When I tell people in Arizona I spent the last eleven years in Green Bay its certain that I will be asked either about the winters or about the Packers.  My answer will be that I miss both.  Many people outside of Green Bay know the Packer name, and that is a good thing.  What they don't understand though, is that the team reflects the city just as much as the city reflects the team.  It is true too much of Green Bay's identity is wrapped up in the Packers, it is also the case that much of the Packer's identity is drawn from the city.

I could go on and on about my adopted state, about how they give directions and their curious use of prepositions.  I won't, except to say that I'm already looking forward to some strange looks when I use the expression "horse a piece."

When I'm back in Arizona it will be tempting to introduce myself as being from Green Bay.  Since I didn't grow up here it's not true.  Pretending that it is would be thoroughly un-Midwestern.  Instead, I'll just say that I was born in Mesa, but spent the last eleven years in the great state of Wisconsin.

Talking through Governor Walker's budget repair bill

As expected today, I got a lot of questions/comments about the passage of the modified version of Governor Walker's budget repair bill.  At times like these no one remembers the fact that I am often critical of the Governor, I guess that just goes with the territory.  Here are some of the items that I found myself repeating during conversations today, and a few that didn't come up, but I wish they would have.

1.  The Senate was able to pass the bill without any Democrats because they took out the fiscal items.  Yes, asking public workers to take a pay cut is in a sense "fiscal," but in this case fiscal is referring primarily to times when the state takes on new spending obligations (so there is a higher bar for consideration, that 20 Senators be present).

2.  Yes, Walker has been telling us this is a fiscal item.  That is a political argument, and not likely to bear on any pending legal case.  This is a problem that should be solved at the ballot box (either in 2014 or before if there is a recall).

3.  What you are hearing about the 24 hour notice has to do with a requirement in Wisconsin law on opening meetings.  The State Senate Clerk (not a partisan official) notes an exception to the 24 hour rule, so it is possible that no violation occurred.  This argument may still have some legal legs, but it is far from the slam dunk that some have portrayed it as.

4.  With passage in the assembly, the fight moves to legal challenges and the recall efforts.  Unfortunately, many people can't even name their state senator, so a successful recall effort will most likely be rooted in fear and anger.  These will be directed at the Governor, and channeled into the recall by those with interests in the outcome (including out of state interests).

5.  Recall of the missing Democrats will go on, but without the galvanizing figure of an unpopular Governor, may be at a disadvantage.  (See item #4.)

6.  There is a State Supreme Court election in April.  It could easily become (likely will be?) a referendum on Walker.  If you thought there was too much outside money in the court race before, I suspect you ain't seen nothing yet.  Oh, and if most people don't know their state senator, how many will know the court candidates?

7.   I don't think you can overstate the impact of the public perception of teachers and public schools on this debate.  You may show me studies that they are underpaid relative to the private sector, but I wonder if the differential shouldn't be greater given the desirable schedule and more secure employment (relative to the private sector) that teachers enjoy. (By the way, I think the opinion of teachers is much like people's opinion of congressmen - "my kid's teacher (congressman) is great, but it's all the others that are the problem.")

8.  No, I don't believe public sector wages collected as union dues amount to taxpayer funding of the Democratic party.  I do believe that having the state collect dues amounts to a taxpayer funded Accounts Receivable department for big labor.  Is it so bad that we put a stop to that?

9.  I'm sure the union will still accept dues checks every month.  Whether members are willing to send them or not is another question.  Perhaps we will get some real world data on just how much public sector workers value union membership.

10.  An end to public sector collective bargaining may end a 50 year tradition on Wisconsin, but federal employees and several states don't have collective bargaining for public sector workers, including states like Virginia and North Carolina.  Are they much worse off than Wisconsin?

11.  I don't believe this new law, or the proposed budget will "gut education" or "hurt kids".  His proposal will reduce per pupil spending from a little more than $10,000 to a little less than $10,000 (pdf).  If we cannot educate children at the K-12 level for a little less than $10,000 per child, I'd say we have a problem.

There is still much more to be said, and I don't see this as the end of the process by any means.

Be sure to let me know what you think.

Tale of two recalls: WI Senators Hansen & Cowles

One of the consequences of Governor Walker's budget repair bill has been efforts to recall both Democratic and Republican state senators.  The Green Bay area happens to be represented by one of each, Republican Robert Cowles and Democrat Dave Hansen.  There is one crucial difference in these recall efforts, however, Cowles is being targeted for doing the job he was elected to do.  Hansen, on the other hand, is being targeted for leaving the state to avoid that very same job.

The Journal Sentinel recently offered a glimpse into which state senators are particularly vulnerable to a recall by taking a look at the vote for Obama in 2008 and Walker in 2010 in each senate district.  You can read the article here.  They remark that Cowles represents a district where Obama got more than 50% of the vote in 2008 and then end on this note, which they included in an update:

Update:  Related to the point above about personal popularity, some of the lawmakers on this list had very narrow victories last time, while others won unopposed or by large margins. It's important to factor that in as well. Republicans

In 2008 Hansen won re-election with 66% of the vote, a healthy margin to be sure, but the margin for Cowles was even bigger.  In 2008 there were just under 61,000 votes cast in the 2nd Senate District that Cowles represents, he got 99% of them.

So in Cowles, we have a state senator subjected to a recall drive who just two years ago was able to command 99% of the vote in his district.  Add to that the fact that he is the subject of a recall primarily because some Democratic leaning interest groups don't like the efforts of the Governor to curtail collective bargaining for public employees, and Cowles has publicly been supportive of the Governor's bill.

Hansen, by contrast, didn't command that much of the vote in the last election.  More importantly from my perspective is the fact that Hansen has fled the state with the express intent of shutting down  legislative activity in the state of Wisconsin, at least with respect to fiscal matters.

As I've said before, I'm dubious with respect to the value of recall efforts.  Elections have consequences, and we shouldn't seek to undo them without cause.  Perhaps some see the end of collective bargaining for public employees as such a cause  For my money, leaving the state just to avoid losing a vote in the legislature  seems like a much more compelling reason to undo election results.

Governor Walker's Budget

There will be much more to say in the days ahead, but for now let me highlight these numbers as reported by WisPolitics:

All funds spending:
Actual FY 2010 and adjusted base FY 2011: $62.32 billion
Agency requested spending 2012-13: $67.44 billion
Walker proposal 2012-13: $59.2 billion...

When the guv touted his budget yesterday for reducing all funds spending by $4.2 billion, he was comparing his proposal ($59.2 billion) to the fiscal year 2011 doubled ($63.5 billion), which is how guvs have traditionally built their budgets. 

You can read the budget bills here:  Senate Bill 27 & Assembly Bill 40 (they are both pdf's).

Don't be frightened by their length of these bills (about 1300 pages).  Only the first 45 pages or so are written in plain English describing the bill.  The remaining pages are the legal language changes that will be to the law.  I think we can all afford to read 45 pages when it comes to how we are going to spend our money in this state over the next two years, can't we?

WI Public Sector Compensation: Examining the EPI Data

In my previous post on why the unions aren't winning the Wisconsin protests, Dean brought up a recent study showing that public sector workers in Wisconsin are undercompensated by 4.8%. The study was produced by EPI (Economic Policy Institute), which the New York Times describes as,"a nonprofit research organization supported by labor unions."  Predictably, some on the right, less sympathetic to organized labor, have denounced the study as flawed.

 

That both sides of this issue can look at the facts and draw opposing conclusions says more about statistics than anything else, but does this mean we should just throw up our hands and not even consider the question?  If I thought that was the right response, I wouldn't bother writing this blog.  So by giving EPI the benefit of the doubt and looking at the data, here is what I came away with regarding public sector worker compensation in Wisconsin.

1.  The 4.8% differential is not the same for all levels of education.  Workers with the least amount of education actually do better in the public sector than the private sector.  As education level increases, the wage discrepancy becomes greater.  I have seen this result reported elsewhere, and I believe it is relatively non-controversial.

2.  On average, public sector workers have more education than those in the private sector.

3.  This means that, on some level, the protesters in Madison are fighting for the wages of a workforce that is more highly educated on average.  Admittedly, calling the budget repair bill an, "assault on the middle class," is rhetorically more effective than, "these college graduates can't afford wage cuts."

4.  The percentage of teachers in the public sector work force have a dramatic impact on the results.  When you don't account for hours worked, EPI found that Wisconsin workers were, "undercompensated by 8.2%," but when they controlled for hours worked that number decreased to 4.8%.  EPI reports:

Full-time public employees work fewer annual hours, particularly employees with bachelor’s, master’s, and professional degrees (because many are teachers or university professors).

5.  To say that teachers work fewer hours than private sector workers is not a slight.  Having holidays and time off in the summer go with the job, the same way that working swing shift goes with some mill jobs.  Common sense would indicate that there is a value to having time off and that this value would show up as a discrepancy in compensation between public and private sector workers.  EPI downplays this with their control for hours worked.  My question on this, then, is whether all hours are treated equally.  Couldn't part of the compensation differential, even after adjusting for total hours worked, reflect the fact that teachers spend some of the most valuable hours away from work (i.e. at the holidays and in the summer)?

Finally, we should try to grapple with why it is that the compensation differential gets worse as education increases.  This reflects the fact that the rate of wage growth due to education is much higher in the private sector, but why should that be.  I see two possible reasons:

7.  First, for some jobs requiring high levels of education cultural and political norms are a barrier to paying compensation equal to the private sector.  As a society we may simply believe that these folks should be motivated, in part, by a desire to do public service.  For example, do you think we are ever going to pay SEC employees salaries comparable to what they could get on Wall Street?  I don't.  At the same time I suspect this is a relatively small factor in the compensation differential story.

8.  The other reason may, once again, come back to the presence of a large number of teachers in the public sector work force.  According to the EPI data 22% of state and local government workers had a master's degree, compared with only 5% of the private work force.  According to the US Department of Education, in 2007-2008 there were over 175,000 master's degrees conferred where the field of study was education.  Education has been the most popular field of study for master's degrees at least since 1970-1971.  The only other field that comes close is business.  Given that so many public sector workers work in the education field, the relative abundance of master's degrees in education could be contributing to the public sector wage differential.  It is true that EPI controls for level of education, but do they treat all master's degrees the same?  This would seem to be a mistake given education's popularity as a field for graduate level study.

While the discussion continues here in Wisconsin and beyond, you will no doubt continue to hear that public sector workers are undercompensated by 4.8%.  I hope that this discussion has shown you can be skeptical of that number, even without resorting to partisan attacks on the study's authors.  For me, the telling sing of the day when most public sector workers are undercompensated will come when we are no longer able to hire and retain workers.  In a timely bit of blogging from Eggster, we see that we are nowhere near that point yet. 

Clearing the Capitol won't get legislature back to work

Reports are that the Wisconsin Capitol will be cleared of protesters starting later this afternoon.  If this is in fact the case, I hope that it happens peacefully.  A violent or disruptive process at this point could overshadow a protest that has been remarkably civil. 

More importantly though, what does clearing the Capitol building accomplish at this point?  The short answer has to be nothing.

As long as the fourteen Senate Democrats remain in hiding, all fiscal legislation remains on hold.  Since we are in the midst of trying to address our current budget shortfall and have to put in place the next budget before July, 1, the flight of the fourteen amounts to shutting down the important work of Wisconsin's government.

Whatever happens this afternoon, it's important to remember that the missing Senate Democrats have silenced the voice of many voters who went to the polls last November and elected Governor Walker and GOP majorities in the legislature.

Why the unions aren't winning in one graphic

What you are looking at is the pay and benefits for a teacher in the village of Denmark, WI.  A small community in NE Wisconsin, where 46% of the tax levy goes to the school district.  As you can see, the total compensation for this teacher is over $77,000 per year.  You can also see that this person is able to command this level of compensation with just a bachelor's degree.  When you think about the number of hours of work required for this compensation, the difference between this teacher and a typical private sector worker becomes even more stark.

This information is available in a searchable database from the Post Crescent, you can check it out for yourself and see how teachers in your area compare.

When many private sector workers, including some with bachelor's degrees, look at this level of compensation, the benefits of collective bargaining for the public sector start to come into focus.  For many folks, the Governor's proposal to cut public sector employee pay by around 8% and end collective bargaining suddenly doesn't sound so scary after all.

Prank call shows we need to separate Walker from his policies

Fresh off what I thought was a well executed fireside chat in defense of his position on the Wisconsin budget repair bill, Governor Scott Walker spent most of Wednesday trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. His method self-inflicted damage was falling for a prank phone call by someone pretending to be one of the Koch brothers.

I doubt the call will change many minds about the issue. Walker comes off badly, but not terribly so. His critics have been telling us he is a puppet of the Koch brothers for more than a week now and it hasn't moved opinion much. The call is unlikely to change this dynamic.

From my perspective, the most damning portion of the call came when the caller suggested planting troublemakers in the protest crowd. Walker stammers and pauses, which makes me think his conscience is pricked, but he doesn't bring himself to do the right thing and denounce such a suggestion.

I do believe character counts in politicians. Walker chose to curry favor with a wealthy donor rather than stand up for what he knows is right and perhaps this lapse disqualifies Walker for high office. If you think this is the case, you will get your chance to make your voice heard in four years. In the mean time this call may tip off Senate Democrats to his legislative strategy, but does little else to change the current situation.

Here is liberal pundit Ezra Klein:

But if the transcript of the conversation is unexceptional, the fact of it is lethal. The state's Democratic senators can't get Walker on the phone, but someone can call the governor's front desk, identify themselves as David Koch, and then speak with both the governor and his chief of staff? That's where you see the access and power that major corporations and wealthy contributors will have in a Walker administration, and why so many in Wisconsin are reluctant to see the only major interest group representing workers taken out of the game.

In Walker, Klein sees a GOP politician in thrall to wealthy business interests and his response, spoken like a true Washington insider, is that we need Democratic politicians in thrall to big labor to offset this. Talk about the cure being as bad as the disease.

Crushed between big business and big labor, what is a conservative, or any right-thinking average citizen to do?

First, recognize that politicians do a lot of unsavory things in pursuit of campaign cash. Part of the reason is relatively few people give money to candidates, and in some sense we get what we pay for. This goes for both sides. One blogger referred to our previous executive as "Governor Jim Doyle -- a wholly owned subsidiary of WEAC--" and I don't think he got much argument about the characterization.

Second, the fact that this goes on, does not give Scott Walker, the man, a free pass on bad behavior. I, for one, expect more out of our leaders and I hope that he will reflect hard on this episode and make better decisions the next time the opportunity presents itself.

Finally, we need to recognize that sometimes the interests of average citizens are aligned with the interests of billionaire GOP donors. In those cases, we should act on these interests not because they help the billionaires, but because those actions help the citizens of the state. By the same token, there will be times when the interests of citizens and the interests of WEAC are in harmony. Again, we should act in the interests of citizens and if the teacher's union also benefits, so be it.

So the question is, in the case of public sector collective bargaining, do the interests of the citizens align more with WEAC or with the Koch brothers?

The thousands who have rallied at the Capitol would seem to demonstrate the unpopularity of Walker's proposal, but outside of the protesters and union members themselves, I see little evidence that popular sentiment is in favor of keeping collective bargaining for public sector workers.

With no ground swell of opposition to the Walker plan despite the protests and the national media spotlight, I can only conclude that people may not be enthusiastic about this bill, but they see it as a necessary step to putting our fiscal house in order. This attitude may stem, at least in part, from the fact that we can now look back over the good years and see just how little we did to prepare ourselves for the lean years. Did we really think they would never come?

Even if the prank call revealed a seedier side of Governor Walker, it really doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not the voters and the taxpayers of Wisconsin think the budget repair bill takes the steps that are needed to address the issues facing us. Many people think it does. Nothing in this headline grabbing phone call is likely to change that.

The outrage double standard of Representatives Barca and Hintz

Wisconsin State Representative Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) has gotten some attention for his impassioned speech in the Assembly on Friday evening. Ostensibly, he was alarmed by Speaker Fitzgerald and his GOP colleagues holding a vote on Governor Walker's budget repair bill before the 5:00 time that Fitzgerald had previously indicated. The vote was taken without any Democrats in the Assembly chamber. Hintz's outrage, and that expressed by Representative Peter Barca (D-Kenosha), seems forced on at least two counts.

Hintz claims that he was surprised because the first place he heard of the budget repair bill was on a radio ad while in his car. The ad was run by an outside group supporting the bill. If Hintz really was surprised by the introduction of a budget repair bill, then he is simply not paying attention to anything going on in Madison. I don't really think that is the case. The alternative is that this claim was nothing more than a way to make the bill seem sinister. The people of Wisconsin should be alert for such rhetorical tricks and be wary of anyone who employs them.

After the initial GOP vote passed, Speaker Fitzgerald eventually relented and struck the vote from the record. Implicitly at least, agreeing with Hintz and Barca that the GOP vote took place prior to the announced time and was not done in good faith. For this the Speaker deserves some criticism. If nothing else, it was a tactical mistake. A good bit of voter sentiment still remains with Walker, the GOP, and this bill. Why diminish that by playing games with the vote? A vote he could win on the numbers alone no less. Poor leadership by the Speaker in this case created an opening for Hintz & Barca to shout that they were shocked (shocked!) to find voting going on in the Assembly chamber.

Perhaps they should be shocked to find voting taking place in the Capitol. With their Democratic colleagues in the Senate currently in hiding outside of the state, voting in that chamber has been seriously curtailed. If Hintz is going to denounce the Assembly Speaker for taking away his vote (and the voice of his constituents) why isn't he just as outraged at the actions of Senate Democrats. By fleeing, they have essentially silenced the voice of every Wisconsin voter on the issue of the budget repair bill, since a vote cannot happen with fewer than twenty Senators present.

Even if we take these two gentlemen at their word, and assume they really were upset last week, I would advise Barca and Hintz to remember there are many Wisconsin voters who feel similarly about the flight of all fourteen Democrats from the Senate.

Paul Krugman Should Take a Look at Wisconsin

While making a point about Governor Scott Walker being beholden to the Koch brothers, Capper highlights the following (my bold):

This from Think Progress:

Koch owns a coal company subsidiary with facilities in Green Bay, Manitowoc, Ashland and Sheboygan.... At a time when Koch Industries owners David and Charles Koch awarded themselves an extra $11 billion of income from the company, Koch slashed jobs at their Green Bay plant:

Officials at Georgia-Pacific said the company is laying off 158 workers its Day Street plant because out-of-date equipment at the facility is being replaced with newer, more-efficient equipment. The company said much of the new, papermaking equipment will be automated. [...] Malach tells FOX 11 that the layoffs are not because of a drop in demand. In fact, Malach said demand is high for the bath tissue and napkins manufactured at the plant.

I realize this doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between Walker and the Kochs. I also happen to believe that untangling the drop in demand from the structural factors of unemployment is crucial to reducing unemployment and probably more important than whether or not Walker is doing the Kochs' bidding.

Here's Matthew Yglesias, also of Think Progress, arguing against the structural story.

The company we keep.

Some governments can be trusted to run mixed-economy social democracies: those of Western Europe, of the British Dominions, of the islands and peninsulas off the coast of East Asia, and of California, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, and New England come to mind.

That's economist and blogger Brad DeLong.

One measure of racial equality in Wisconsin

Unfortunately it's a sad one. In a post on obesity, race, and region I came across this sentence:

Note that in Wisconsin the black and white overweight rates are almost matched.

At 62.1% and 61.3% respectively.

Via MR