In This Issue:
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1. Who Benefits?
2. Lifetime Liberalism
3. Dueling Polls
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Who Benefits?
 Last week we noted that Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker anticipated “fierce” opposition to his 2010 budget proposal. It certainly has drawn some fire, but show us a government budget that doesn’t.
And if you can find a budget plan that fits that description, then try something really challenging: Show us a budget plan that draws overflow crowds demonstrating public support!
This past weekend the Walker budget achieved that very distinction. More than 800 people turned out at Milwaukee’s Serb Hall to rally in favor of Walker’s eighth no-property-tax-increase budget plan. We believe the number because we’re told Serb Hall’s capacity is 800 and the crowd stretched out through the door and into the street. A few un-pleasantries were exchanged between rally participants and public employee union protesters—the expected source of the “fierce” opposition.
Regular readers already know what had union members upset. Walker’s budget plan asks public employees for what can legitimately be argued are significant concessions. They have a perfect right to ask why.
In his budget address, Walker said it’s necessary “to create a balance between the wages and benefits received by public and private sector employees,” an objective he called, “probably the most critical part of this budget.” Walker went on to explain that more than 48 percent of Milwaukee County’s budget goes to fund wages and benefits for county employees, and the cost is growing “at an alarming rate.”
A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that the cost for a private sector employer to provide health care benefits for a family now averages more than $13,000 annually, with employees paying a little more than $3,500.
It’s a little different in the public sector, where the lowest-priced option for family coverage at the county level costs more than $17,000, with county employees paying just $840, the Kaiser Foundation determined.
So the average citizen contributes $3,500 to the cost of family coverage, and then pays taxes to finance the more than $16,000 needed to cover each county government employee's health care costs.
Milwaukee County has been working with its employees to trim these expenses during recent years, Walker says, but without further action, the outcome is predictable: The county “will become insolvent.”
There is an alternative, Walker says, but it’s off the table. Raising taxes on families and private-sector employers coping with a tattered economy, he says, “is simply not an option I am willing to consider.”
Lifetime Liberalism
 The one good thing about activist liberal justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is that every ten years you have a chance to show up at your polling place and make them eligible for unemployment compensation. Not so with federal judges. Once they’re confirmed by the U.S. Senate, they never have another election to worry about—ever.
So once again the joke is on us: In April 2008, Wisconsin voters ended Loophole Louis Butler’s career as a member of the state’s highest court. But seven months later, they joined in the nation’s rapturous embrace of Barack Obama, and last week the President repaid the favor by promoting Loophole Louis to a federal judgeship for the Western District of Wisconsin, from which, as far as we hapless voters are concerned, he can never be fired. The lesson could not be more pointed: We fire Louis; President Obama exacts retribution by making him more powerful and less accountable. Forever.
It may safely be assumed that entrepreneurial litigators have been furiously stocking their wine cellars with first-growth Bordeaux since the moment the Butler Restoration was announced. His presence on the bench was, after all, crucial to a pair of notorious decisions earlier this decade. He helped blow up the cap on awards for non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases, undoing a reform hard-won in the Wisconsin Legislature during the 1990s. And he helped adopt the astonishing standard that held any former manufacturer of lead-based paint liable for damages, even without evidence showing which manufacturer’s product a plaintiff might have ingested; even without proof that lead-based paint had harmed a plaintiff at all!
That the table is being set for a trial-bar feeding frenzy in the Western District seems assured, something that should in no way be permitted to obscure the larger message.
Louis Butler was soundly defeated, roughly 2-1, by Wisconsin voters when he ran for the Supreme Court in 2000. Four years later, left-liberal Governor James Doyle seized his opportunity to disregard the voters’ will by appointing Butler to the then vacant seat for which he had been rejected.
Butler proceeded to validate voters’ instincts by helping erect an Alice-in-Wonderland school of civil liability where evidence is optional. So when given a second chance last year, Wisconsinites voted to send Butler packing, an exercise of democratic choice Doyle labeled “a tragedy.” Now President Obama is seizing his opportunity to contravene the voters’ will and—barring a miracle in the Senate—Mr. Butler can stay on the federal bench for as long as he lives.
Dueling Polls
 Monday brought two new opinion surveys that found Wisconsin residents have markedly different views on global warming legislation. It appears everything depends on who’s asking.
The surveys dealt with the consequences or opportunities likely to arise from the Wisconsin Legislature acting as a single state to halt climate change.
The Forest County Potawatomi Community found that 70 percent of likely voters favor the State of Wisconsin “taking action to reduce emissions of gases like carbon dioxide in Wisconsin that cause global warming.”
That quote comes straight from the survey question, so the response isn’t surprising. Neither is the response from the 62 percent of likely voters who said they’d be more likely to choose a candidate who “supports the bill to require utilities to generate 25% of their electricity from renewable energy sources by the year 2025 because moving the state to clean energy will create whole new industries and thousands of good jobs here in Wisconsin while reducing…” Well, you get the idea.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce found 62 percent of likely voters believe it’s not up to Wisconsin to address global warming on its own. “When told of increased costs on their electric bill," 68 percent oppose increased renewable energy mandates and 73 percent oppose higher fees on utility bills to pay for energy efficiency programs for low-income families and businesses.
Nationwide polls taken months earlier can’t resolve this conflict, but they can provide some perspective and they have shown a rise in skepticism about the magnitude of the climate crisis. A Gallup poll in March found 41 percent of Americans believed the media exaggerate the seriousness of global warming.
Respondents to a January Pew Research survey ranked global warming dead last—20th out of 20—when asked to rate their priorities from a list of policy issues. One week later a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found 44 percent believed global warming was caused by nature, not man, a noteworthy finding because the percentage had climbed by ten points in nine months.
Then in March, another Gallup poll probing eight separate environmental concerns found global warming running last once again, with more respondents saying they hardly worried about it at all (40%) than saying they worried about it a lot (34%).
Gallup said it was the only issue in the survey that left more people unworried than worried.
Maybe Democrats in the U.S. Senate are right to be worried.
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