In This Issue:
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1. California Here We
Come
2. Congratulations?
3. Taking the Task
Force to Task
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California, Here We Come?
 You’d expect the Doyle administration to dismiss a wake-up call from the Republican Party of Wisconsin or Scott Walker. But it’s different when the East Wing serves up a trashing for the Pew Center on the States.
Nobody’s idea of a right-wing policy shop, the Pew Center last week rolled out a report titled “Beyond California: States in Fiscal Peril.” Any guesses who made Pew’s list of nine “states most like California?”
Regrettably, our balmy climate was not one of the six factors that landed Wisconsin among the states most resembling California. The evaluation was based on the percentage change in revenue collections, the size of the gap between budgeted spending and revenues, changes in the unemployment rate, foreclosure rates, money-management practices, and the absence of a required legislative supermajority to raise taxes.
According to the Pew Center, Wisconsin is in trouble because tax revenues lost to the recession blew a bigger hole in our budget than for most states and because of rising unemployment in the manufacturing sector [See: Governor’s Task Force on Global Warming.] The report added that “Wisconsin’s history of budget shortfalls and pattern of borrowing frequently to cover operating expenses” left it “poorly positioned” to cope with the recession.
The response from Department of Administration Secretary Michael Morgan: “The Pew Center report is factually inaccurate. From the outset, the report is fundamentally flawed.”
Among other things, Morgan said, the Pew Center overlooked “many of the good budgetary practices of Wisconsin,” taking special notice of this year’s budget bill passing on time for the first time in 32 years and featuring general fund spending cuts and a $270 million surplus by July 1, 2011.
We thought you’d enjoy knowing about those spending cuts and the state having more money than it needs when you pay your taxes.
Congratulations ...We Think
 Republicans have much to celebrate in their electoral triumphs in New Jersey and Virginia. (At this writing, absentee ballots were still being tallied in New York’s 23rd congressional district and a come-from-behind win by Conservative Doug Hoffman, though a very long shot remained mathematically possible.)
There will be even more to celebrate if the GOP takes home the right lesson.
A dangerous outcome would be Republican complacency, the disease that enabled the 2006 ascendancy of Nancy Pelosi, cast preposterously as a fiscal reformer. It would be a fatal mistake to believe the Republican label is back in favor just because voters reject Democrats’ grosser displays of the same conduct that got Republicans canned.
On the other hand, Republicans could prosper if they bring themselves to appreciate that the Whigs would have polled pretty well, had they been the alternative to a party that’s scared the bejeebers out of every American to the right of Jimmy Carter. Republicans need to understand that this month’s voters weren’t pulling the party lever; they were pulling the emergency stop cord. Finding something toward which they might eventually feel loyalty is another matter.
Whether the GOP gets this or not, Democrats most certainly do. Knowing they are playing for all the marbles, for a very long time, they may willingly sacrifice seats in pursuit of making their brand of campus-airhead socialism irrevocable.
That simplifies things, because it means only one question matters for Republican congressional candidates in 2010: Will you have the backbone to undo what the Democrats have done? Not trim it back, not fine-tune it, will you have the backbone to repeal it, in the face of shrieking liberal editorial boards?
A long-established strain of Republicanism tries very hard to believe it can make leftist governance acceptable by running it like a business, as if all those plodding Soviet-era factory managers might actually have delivered the workers’ paradise if only they’d worn better suits and had some idea how to mix a decent Manhattan.
But as the brilliant University of Wisconsin scientist Verner Suomi used to say, “If what you’re doing is wrong, doing it more efficiently makes things worse.”
Don’t fix. Don’t manage. Repeal, or don’t waste our time.
Taking the Task Force to Task
 Next month, Governor Doyle’s task force on global warming will review a bill draft based on the urgent policy recommendations it made last year.
Task force leaders and administration operatives applying pressure for unanimous endorsement of their bill will be operating under a cloud. Not a cloud of carbon dioxide, but a storm cloud brewed up by a Boston think tank and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI).
According to the analysis released last week by WPRI and the Beacon Hill Institute, the happy talk about “green jobs” to be spawned by the task force recommendations is inconsistent with the economic dislocation those recommendations would provoke.
The analysis quotes the July 2008 task force report saying, “…jobs and business opportunities will be created through substantially increased conservation and efficiency programs…through increased reliance on clean and renewable energy resources.” Such statements were possible, the analysis says, only because of the task force’s “lack of an in-depth cost/benefit analysis.”
In reality, implementing the task's force's13 major recommendations would probably trigger the loss of more than 43,000 private-sector jobs. That doesn’t include the consequences of Wisconsin adopting its own cap-and-trade program for greenhouse emissions. Add that in, and another 26,000 private-sector jobs disappear.
Amid all the hot air about countless “green jobs” to be had by transforming the energy sector of our economy, the point that’s most often missed ought to be the most obvious one: We did not become a wealthy society by mandating vast numbers of people using inefficient methods to produce unpredictable quantities of energy at a cost that cries out for subsidies. We became a wealthy society because a minimal number of people have used efficient, reliable methods to produce vast quantities of cheap energy.
This green jobs nonsense would discard the latter model, preoccupying society with a labor-intensive struggle to eke out the fundamental components of a working economy. Luckily, there’ll be no shortage of advice on how this works. Ask anybody from the Third World.
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