Balancing Budgets: Italy vs. Wisconsin

In what could be dubbed a tale of two states, Scott Walker of Wisconsin bragged about bringing the budget into balance without raising taxes while Silvio Berlusconi broke his pledge not to raise taxes in order to balance his budget for 2013. Walker relied on spending cuts and constricting the collective bargaining of government employees, while Berlusconi agreed to a package of tax increases, spending cuts and fewer labor protections to make up for $76 billion (54 billion euros) by 2013. The tax increases include raising the value-added tax from 20 to 21 percent and imposing a “solidarity tax” of 3 percent on state residents who earn more than $420,000 (300,000 euros). The latter tax would run through 2013. At a news conference in August, 2011, “Berlusconi acknowledged that he had pledged never to raise taxes, but that the attention of world markets had forced him to do so.” Was breaking his pledge a vice or a virtue?

Scott Walker would undoubtedly say “A VICE!” To be sure, there is merit in Walker’s feat in balancing a government’s budget without asking more from residents in terms of taxes. However, there is also merit in Berlusconi’s decision to “spread the pain” fairly even to the rich. Solidarity is a value that implies that we are all in it together so everyone sacrifices—not just those least able to do so. Choosing a spending-cuts-only approach wherein sustenance of the poor is compromised while the rich are not asked to contribute evinces not only a certain set of priorities, but also a certain value-set, which is antipodal to the principle of solidarity. From this standpoint, Berlusconi’s breaking of his pledge can be pardoned.

However, if excess government spending (i.e., not affecting the sustenance level) exists, it may be unnecessary to raise anyone’s taxes to balance a budget. To be sure, legislatures can pad lobbyists’ pockets by inflating budget items, and it is virtuous to cut such spending particularly to balance a budget. Also, labor unions can gain excessive power and demand too much from governments as well as workers. For example, in Wisconsin even part-time temporary instructors at public junior colleges must pay union dues amounting to a significant part of their pay per class. Someone teaching one class for one term only has different interests than a career instructor who teaches full-time at a college, yet the teachers’ union does not discern this difference. The problem comes in when a supermajority in government goes beyond correcting for such excess power in seeking to balance the budget on one segment of the population while another segment is allowed to go unaffected. The basic principle of fairness is violated in such a case.

The core principle not to be violated by any government may be put as follows: Instead of affecting the safety net on the sustenance level, taxes should be raised on those residents able to afford the additional tax. Being able to afford a tax justifies not depriving the poor of basic living requirements such as food, shelter and medical services. Contributing where one is able without undue hardship and a human right to sustenance can be said to be the two pillars of the principle of solidarity. Without this principle, a society is merely the sum of parts—a mere aggregate wherein selfishness rules rather than bows to a higher good. That is to say, solidarity thwarts misordered concupiscence while being necessary for genuine society.

Source:

Rachel Donadio, “Italian Senate Approves Austerity Plan,” New York Times, September 8, 2011.

The Wisconsin Recall Election: A Predictor of the U.S. Presidential Election?

According to Paul Abowd of the Center for Public Integrity in 2012, the election to fill the governor’s office in the wake of Scott Walker’s recall “has become a referendum on the future of public sector unions.”[1] That the union of teaching-assistant students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison refused to endorse Barrett precisely because he was not making collective bargaining rights a salient part of his campaign would suggest that Abowd had it wrong. Moreover, it is a mistake to read the election results in Wisconsin as a harbinger of things to come in the U.S. presidential election five months later in November 2012.

During his campaign, Barrett downplayed the public-sector union issue because he figured he already had his base, which had detested Walker for more than a year. Barrett was going for the independents who saw the recall petition as sour-grapes by a vocal interest group (the student union validating this judgment). Most tellingly, the teaching-assistant student-union had even refused to endorse the unions’ own favorite for Democratic nominee, Kathleen Falk, who had lost to Barrett in the primary by twenty points. Falk had promised not to sign any legislation until a bill restoring the public-sector unions' collective-bargaining rights is presented. You cannot get much more pro-union than that, and yet even THAT was not good enough for the graduate students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. At the very least, it would appear that the graduate school's admissions committees at the university in Madison could have been doing better in their decisions, at least in regard to assessing maturity and judgment. 

I count it as a good thing that Barrett’s position on restoring the Wisconsin government workers’ bargaining right was less “my way or the highway” than was Falk’s position because Barrett was evincing a more mature or seasoned approach to governance. In contrast, the teaching-assistants’ union can be read as evincing the self-defeating and immature rigidity of “my way or the highway.” The contending camps in Wisconsin’s Democratic Party reflected this difference of political culture between Milwaukee and Madison. Hence, the dynamic cannot be assumed to operate at the U.S. level.

Furthermore, Mitchell, a young fireman whose involvement in his union probably won him the Democratic nomination for Vice (or lieutenant) Governor (as an after-thought by most voters), was at the time both too young and inexperienced in terms of public office to occupy the second-highest office in the land, not to mention the highest. At an outdoor rally in a street-alcove after a motley march that took place in downtown Madison the day after the primary, Mitchell easily stood out in video of the event because he was the only person in the warm weather wearing a grey suit. His political inexperience really stood out as he could be seen walking through the crowd, insisting on shaking hands with people even as they were trying to listen to the speakers. Perhaps most tellingly, he bumped into at least one person who preferred to keep listening to the speaker rather than turn around to shake hands. I suspect that Mitchell was trying to be a "professional" politician in a very atypical (and thus inappropriate) context (i.e., the recall). This itself essentially disqualified him from the office he was seeking, especially because it was possible that had he won along with Walker, the young fireman could have found himself assuming the office of governor.

The quality of the Democrats’ choice for vice governor mattered particularly because Walker was being investigated at the time by U.S. and Wisconsin law-enforcement agencies for corruption while he had been chief executive of the County of Milwaukee. In Illinois, Quinn had become the head of state and chief executive of the government when "Blago" was impeached and removed from office for trying to sell Barak Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat. Were Mitchell to have won even as Bartlett lost, the novice could have found himself eventually taking over for Walker. It is not at all advisable to have a political novice in the highest office in the land. I suspect that this factor weighed on independent voters.

It would be perfectly understandable, therefore, for Wisconsinites in favor of Barrett to have skipped the lieutenant governor race based on principle (i.e., putting the interest of the public good over partisanship), even if that could have resulted in the governor and lieutenant governor being of different parties. Because the lieutenant governor office has some important powers when the governor is not in Wisconsin, such a scenario would certainly not be optimal for Barrett supporters. Therefore, I believe the Democrats in Wisconsin dropped the ball in voting in the primary for a nominee for lieutenant governor. To be sure, they made a good choice in picking Barrett’s mature approach to restoring union rights over Falk’s “my way of the highway” mentality on the "single issue" of a union's bargaining rights. The refusal of at least one union in Madison to back Barrett further compromised the Democrats’ strength in defeating Walker.  These are idiosyncratic elements in the Wisconsin “recall election” that don’t project onto the U.S. as a whole. 

Most obviously, going into the recall election, the sitting governor of Wisconsin was a Republican whereas the sitting U.S. president was a Democrat. Also, whereas Mitchell was a political novice at the time (being plucked out of a fire department union), Obama’s VP was an experienced former U.S. Senator and VP. In terms of the parties, Barrett was not associated with Obama's weaknesses (e.g., Obamacare), and Walker did not have Romney's problems with conservatives. Indeed, some Obama supporters crossed over to vote for Walker--a fact that Obama no doubt had foreseen as he was staying away from campaigning for Barrett.

Moreover, the United States is not a state with a very large back yard. Given the heterogeneous political, economic, religious and social cultures of the republics in the U.S., it is not a good idea to simply project the results in Wisconsin on the U.S. as a whole. Furthermore, there are issues that are only relevant at the U.S. level, such as foreign policy. I must conclude that the U.S.-based media was being much too simplistic in regarding the Wisconsin race as an indicator of the “upcoming” U.S. elections. Lest all politics is local, the results of a U.S.-wide election can be viewed as a quilt of various majorities rather than as one huge aggregate. Yet reductionism to U.S.-level politics seems a preoccupation or obsession, at least for the major American media companies, as if the American republics existed only in so far as they contribute to U.S. races. I suspect that the culprit is American business more generally, as large corporations have found it cheaper to have one set rather than fifty sets of government regulations. Reducing American politics to the U.S. stage serves this purpose.

1. Amanda Terkel, “Wisconsin Recall: Election Law Quirk Could Throw Governance Into Disarray,” The Huffington Post, June 3, 2012. See Paul Abowd, “CPI: Wisconsin Recall Battle Is State’s Most Expensive Election,”MSNBC.com, June 3, 2012. 

Scott Walker’s Recall in Wisconsin: Mob Rule?

In early March, 2012, unions and conservative groups had already “turned Wisconsin’s battle over labor rights into a national, multimillion-dollar war.”[1] In 2011, the two sides had spent $44 million in it. The unions began an effort in that year to recall Scott Walker, the government’s figurehead and chief executive, and several senators in Wisconsin’s Senate “after they pushed through legislation restricting the collective-bargaining and organizing powers of workers belonging to government-employee unions.”[2] While this depiction is cogent—a battle over labor rights involving legislation restricting collective-bargaining rights for government employees—I contend that the assumed linkage between the battle and the recall is deeply flawed.

It is one thing to contend politically over labor rights, and it is quite another to recall a sitting head of state (and senators). To cut short the term of an elected official simply because he or she favored legislation that one opposes is to violate one of the main pillars of representative democracy. Specifically, terms of office exist to enable representatives to act or vote for what they believe is in the best interest of the people even if it is not favored by popular passions of the moment. In other words, removing an elected representative from office because he or she supported or voted for legislation that one opposes is to reduce representative democracy to whatever passion happens to be felt strongest by the mob.

There is a reason why Plato and Aristotle depict two kinds of democracy in their respective typologies of government. The good form of democracy is “rule by the many” while the bad is “mob rule.” Electing representatives and giving them a fixed term of office is a principal way in which “rule by the many” (as opposed to the one or the few) is protected from sliding into the decadent “mob rule.” Seized by an ideological and partisan fever, the pro-recall Wisconsinites have been blind to their own culpability in violating a basic tenet of representative democracy.

In other words, there is a reason why the U.S. constitution requires “high crimes and misdemeanors” rather than mere legislative or ideological disagreement for the impeachment and removal of office of a U.S. President. Were disagreement itself over a piece of legislation sufficient to remove a representative from office—even if as in Scott Walker’s case the office-holder had campaigned on the issue by taking the position in question—then elections themselves are relegated. “Elections have consequences” only holds if it is agreed that the winner is not justifiably removed from office as soon as he or she starts to act (lawfully) on the campaign promises. Even if the proposal or vote had not been something mentioned in the campaign, it is not sufficient to remove a representative simply out of disagreement with his or her proposal or vote. Besides eviscerating representative democracy itself, such a recall is utterly unfair to the particular officeholders.

Were I a Wisconsinite in 2011, I would have opposed the proposal to balance the budget by restricting collective bargaining rights. Besides there being other ways, the proposal seemed like a subterfuge for union-busting to me. Not being a citizen or even resident of Wisconsin, I was merely a bystander as the recall effort, or “battle over labor rights,” unfolded given the nature of federalism and the fact that Wisconsin, like France, is a semi-sovereign republic. Generally speaking, it is inappropriate that people and organizations outside of Wisconsin contributed so much money to intervene on a political matter that was properly for the citizens and residents of Wisconsin to decide. The over-reaching by outside vested interests only added to the conflation of the issue of a recall with that of union bargaining rights.

The question for Wisconsinites was whether Scott Walker and the senators abused their respective offices by signing and voting for a piece of legislation. As their respective offices include signing and voting on legislation, doing so cannot constitute abuse of office or criminal behavior. Otherwise, it would be penalize someone for doing what they are supposed to do. It is like shooting a bird for flying. “What the hell else should I have been doing?” such a bird might wonder in loud chirps while falling to earth. It is obvious that to shoot a bird simply for flying is not fair to the bird because it is designed to fly, and yet it was difficult for many Wisconsinites to grasp that sheer disagreement with the choices made by elected officials as per the design of their respective offices does not justify removing the officials as if they had acted improperly.

Looking in from the outside, I do not think much of the strategy Scott Walker and the Republican legislators used to balance Wisconsin’s budget (though I give them credit for balancing it). Even so, it would have been highly unfair to them, were I—assuming I were a Wisconsinite—to have urged Walker’s ouster simply because he signed a law he had campaigned on (the same holds even if he had not done so). I believe in representative democracy as against mob rule more than I cherish my own ideology.

It is a pity that there were not more adults in Madison and Milwaukee in 2011. As John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrote in their letters to each other, an educated and virtuous citizenry is vital to a viable republic; otherwise, it is apt to slide into mob rule where simply being disliked is enough to mean the end of a person. There is a reason why the delegates to the U.S. constitutional convention in 1787 distrusted partisanship. I do not believe that ideological disagreement ought to have so much sway over representative democracy itself as it has in Wisconsin.

“Elections have consequences” and “rule of law” may seem like strong pillars in Western civilization, but under the weight of vice they can quickly become woefully pliable, given the self-serving denial that is possible in human nature. Perhaps the struggle here boils down to the necessity that is in law as against the vicissitude that is in human nature. Do we respect law more than our own likes and dislikes? That is to say: as moderns, are we as civilized as we presume we are? Can presumptuous children self-govern as a people simply because they claim to be mature? These are questions for all of us who live in republics to ponder and reflect on, for they are being played out in our own day and not necessarily on some distant galaxy.

1. Alicia Mundy, “Wisconsin Recall Realigns Campaign Spending,” The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2012.
2. Ibid.