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March 24, 2010

The Wednesday Update

March 24, 2010   Volume 4, Number 12   IN THIS ISSUE:  A Big Win?, Lemonade: $3 Billion

March 24, 2010 Vol 4, Number 12	Wednesday Update
In This Issue: 1. A Big Win? 2. Lemonade: $3 Billion 3. Shut-up He Explained	“A big win for Wisconsin” A win for Wisconsin…that’s how Senator Russ Feingold described Sunday’s lurch toward Soviet-style health care. In an e-mail soliciting campaign contributions Feingold advised that “Without your sustained efforts, the insurance companies would have won.” Bet you didn’t know you’d been toiling away to defeat the insurance companies. He added that President Obama will now sign the bill “that gives people more control over their own health care.” Is it even remotely possible he actually believes that? For the record, here are some numbers provided by Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers. The health care takeover will: Cost $1.4 trillion by 2020; Raise taxes $569 billion; Violate the Obama pledge of no new taxes for any family earning less than $250,000 annually—12 separate times; Drain $53 billion from Social Security to create the illusion of deficit reduction; Cut the popular Medicare Advantage program $202 billion; Subsidize insurance companies to the tune of $436 billion. [Note to Sen. Feingold—you might want to check on whose “sustained efforts” made this possible.] On the other hand, it will create 16,500 jobs—in the Internal Revenue Service. If ever there was a time for thinking outside the box, this is it. If people think hard enough, maybe Sunday’s disgusting episode can be “a big win for Wisconsin” after all—by energizing the movement to turn people like Russ Feingold out of office. Lemonade $3 billion In just 276 days, political appointees of the Doyle administration who haven’t already bailed out will be looking for work. It would be poetic justice if they emerge from their warm government cocoon into a chilly private sector economy that has no use for them.    Last week the Department of Workforce Development reported that unemployment has worsened in every one of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. In 44 of the 72, January unemployment percentages were in double digits. A year ago, unemployment was below eight percent in ten of the state’s twelve metro areas; now it’s nine percent or worse in ten of the twelve. As usual Madison and Dane County fares best, but even there the situation has deteriorated. In the Madison metro area, 6.8 percent are out of work, compared with 5.4 percent a year ago. There’s one way to revive the economy and get people back to work: Make big chunks of government go away. Don’t manage it better; don’t make it more “efficient.” Hack it down to size. The state is constantly $2-3 billion in the red going from one budget cycle to the next and the economy can’t sustain more tax increases to prop up the status quo. See this not as hardship but as opportunity. Make lemonade. Shut-up, he explained. Last week we told you how dozens of business associations petitioned the Legislature not to adopt the job-killing “Clean Energy Jobs Act.” This week we report the reaction from Wisconsin’s allegedly independent utility regulatory commission. It wasn’t pretty. Public Service Commission chairman Eric Callisto fired a letter to the legislative committees charged with putting the bill together, and denounced the business groups as “clean energy naysayers” who “once again…have it wrong.” They had it “wrong,” we guess, by saying the bill’s energy efficiency programs “would cost at least $700 million a year,”—a “wrong” statement Callisto tellingly didn’t refute. Instead he argued that “If we invest roughly $700 million in energy efficiency, Wisconsin consumers will save $2 billion per year in energy costs.” What really ought to get people’s attention is the spectacle of an agency that exists to ensure the best possible utility service at the lowest possible price trying to mandate more expensive, less reliable service, and attacking skeptics while holding regulatory power over private businesses. Every day brings more proof that we are governed by people for whom the right Ideology can excuse anything.