In This Issue:
|
|
1. System Failure
2. Very Stimulating
3. The Tipping Point
4. Judicial Review
|
|
System Failure
 Whether too big, too small, or just right, when government fails to live up to its most basic and important responsibilities, the consequences are often tragic.
Take the case of Brittany Zimmerman, the 21 year-old UW-Madison co-ed who was brutally murdered in her home in broad daylight.
Zimmerman called 911 during the attack only to be dismissed by the operator who claimed she could not hear Zimmerman screaming in the background. After the call was disconnected, the operator failed to follow proper protocol by dispatching police to the location where the call was placed, or calling the number back to confirm that there was no emergency in progress.
Zimmerman’s murder was the fifth unsolved homicide in Madison in ten months, and the second murder to take place in that neighborhood during the day. Needless to say, Madison residents were beginning to worry about their safety and the ability of their government to respond in a time of crisis.
In the days and weeks following the murder, local law enforcement and county officials turned Zimmerman’s tragic death into a national spectacle. Rather than rallying together to solve the murder and ensure the public that their concerns were being addressed, 911 officials and local police publicly sparred over procedure and gave conflicting reports to the media.
Meanwhile, County Executive Kathleen Falk declared her confidence in her call center Director, Joseph Norwick, even as Norwick was misleading the media and the public. Further, Falk and key law enforcement officials refused an invitation from County Board members to address a group of citizens regarding problems with the 911 call center.
Brittany Zimmerman’s murder remains unsolved and her parents recently filed a fifty million dollar lawsuit claiming Falk was negligent in her failure to properly staff and equip the call center. The Zimmerman’s suit was validated in November after the call center failed to properly respond to a fight in a Madison park(resulting in a man’s death), and by revelations that Falk has not conducted a legally required evaluation of the center’s director in five years.
So as the national and local debate about stimulus spending and the government take-over of health care ensue, ask not what your government can do for you, but rather what your government should do for you. If government is failing to fulfill its most critical and basic responsibilities with the resources it currently has, why on earth should we entrust it with more?
|
Iris Scanner, Video Conferencing: Very Stimulating
Earlier this month, Governor Jim Doyle joined four other Governors in calling for a trillion dollars in federal aid to state governments. The aid would be used to both fill budget holes created by years of deficit spending (and poor budget management), and to fuel new infrastructure spending already rejected by taxpayers.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
One of Doyle's most controversial proposals would use $754 million to help pay for public school building, remodeling and expansion projects - including $474 million to pay for improvements that local voters turned down. The remaining $280 million would help pay for school-building referendums voters had approved.
Republican legislators criticized Doyle's wish list.
"Considering that Governor Doyle will (propose) eliminating the teacher salary caps and requirements that voters approve building projects, it should not surprise anyone that he would propose spending hundreds of millions of dollars on projects that were rejected by taxpayers," said Republican Rep. Jeff Fitzgerald of Horicon.
"These (building) projects could have been rejected for operating costs or poor design, but it is clear that the view of the property-tax payer means very little to Governor Doyle," Fitzgerald added.
While some of these projects may be worthy of consideration, many have not been fully vetted, and none are likely to stimulate the state or local economy in any meaningful or long term way. What's more, the billions he's seeking in construction and transportation projects will increase costs to state and local goverment well into the future.
In Milwaukee County, Executive Scott Walker has rejected the federal Trojan horse by refusing to submit a wishlist. Meanwhile, other county officials are jumping on the pork wagon with some puzzling economic stimulus requests of their own. The most curious items include new video conferencing equipment for Milwaukee Circuit Court and an iris scanner which was requested by Sheriff David Clarke.
Over the last seven years, Walker has consistently tried to reduce the county infrastructure in order to relieve the long and short term burden on local property taxpayers, a burden that was made worse by a pension scandal that devastated the county’s finances and resulted in the resignation of Walker’s successor and recall of several county board members.
Although Walker has not been able to garner enough votes to sell off county facilities like the airport, or to outsource park maintenance services, he has managed to hold the line on taxes and keep county government from growing. Walker even managed to get wage and benefit concessions from the county transit union.
Yet, if the stimulus happy politicians and interest groups have their way, state and local government will grow, adding costs for infrastructure maintenance and employee wages and benefits long after the federal stimulus funds are gone.
|
Beware of the Big-Government Tipping Point
By PETER WEHNER and PAUL RYAN
For most of our nation's history, our approach to economics has favored enterprise, self-reliance and the free market. While the American economy has never been entirely laissez-faire, we have historically cared more about equality of opportunity than equality of results. And while Americans have embraced elements of the New Deal, the Great Society and progressive taxation, we have traditionally viewed welfare as a way to help those in dire need, not as a way of life for the middle class. We have grasped, perhaps more than any other nation, that there is a long-run cost to dependency on the state, including an aversion to risk that eventually enervates the entrepreneurial spirit necessary for innovation and prosperity.
This outlook, once assumed, is now under attack due to a recent series of political and economic events.
The first is the unprecedented intervention by the federal government, in the form of a $700 billion relief package intended for our financial institutions after the credit crisis last September. This was followed by extending billions of dollars of federal assistance to America's auto makers in order to prevent their imminent bankruptcy -- the first emergency bailout that went to companies outside the financial sector. We understand why the federal government did this, and even supported legislation that, while hardly perfect, prevented an economic meltdown.
Nonetheless, the consequences of this undertaking are enormous. Not only has the size of the expenditures been staggering -- there is talk of another stimulus package worth an estimated $825 billion -- but we are witnessing a fundamental transformation of government's relationship with the polity and the economy.
The last several months are a foreshadowing of a new era of government activism, rather than an unfortunate but necessary (and anomalous) emergency action. We will soon shift from a market-based economy to a political one in which the government picks winners and losers and extends its reach and power in unprecedented ways.
This shift is exemplified by the desire of President-elect Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress to push us toward government-run health care.
For all his talk of allowing consumers to select their own health-care coverage, Mr. Obama's proposal, as he laid it out in his campaign, will provide strong financial incentives for employers and individuals to sign up with a new, Medicare-style government plan for working-age people and their families. This plan will almost certainly use a price-control system similar to the one in place for Medicare, allowing it to charge artificially low premiums by paying fees well below private rates. These low premiums will serve as a magnet for enrollment and will devastate the private companies trying to compete in the health-insurance market. The result will be the nationalization of the health-care sector, which today accounts for 16% of U.S. gross domestic product.
Nationalizing health care will be profoundly detrimental to the quality of American medicine. In the name of cost control, the government would make private investment in medical innovation far riskier, and thus delay the development of potentially lifesaving treatments.
It will also put America on a glide path toward European-style socialism. We need only look to Great Britain and elsewhere to see the effects of socialized health care on the broader economy. Once a large number of citizens get their health care from the state, it dramatically alters their attachment to government. Every time a tax cut is proposed, the guardians of the new medical-welfare state will argue that tax cuts would come at the expense of health care -- an argument that would resonate with middle-class families entirely dependent on the government for access to doctors and hospitals.
Of course, this health-care plan is occurring against our particular fiscal backdrop: Without major reform, our federal entitlement programs will soon double the size of government. The result will be a crushing burden of debt and taxes.
In short, we may be approaching a tipping point for democratic capitalism.
While the scope of the challenge should not be underestimated, those of us worried about this fundamental reorientation of politics and economics have several things working in our favor. Among them is that a public accustomed to iTunes, Facebook, Google, eBay, Amazon and WebMD is not clamoring for centralized, bureaucratic government. The strong American instinct for individual initiative and entrepreneurship remains intact.
In addition, confidence in government -- from Congress to those responsible for oversight of the financial system -- is quite low.
Our sense is that at the moment, the public is not thinking in terms of "big government" or "small government." Instead, Americans want efficient government -- one that is modern, responsive and adaptive. People want government to act as a fair referee, providing guardrails that allow individuals to rise without intrusively dictating individual decisions.
If conservatives hope to win converts to our cause, we need to understand this new moment and put forward an agenda that reforms key institutions in a way that advances individual freedom, without creating an unacceptable level of insecurity.
This is no easy task, and it must begin with providing a compelling alternative to what contemporary liberalism and Mr. Obama are about to offer. This especially includes health care, where we must start by recalling that our current health-insurance system was designed to meet the needs of a 20th century economy and World War II-era employment laws. It is hopelessly outdated, yet the Obama plan would make the system even more sclerotic.
The core of our message needs to be a commitment to creating a health-care plan that meets the demands of the modern economy. We need to convince concerned citizens that we can help the uninsured find coverage in the private sector and use market incentives to contain costs. The result will be a system that makes it possible for everyone to afford health insurance, including those with pre-existing conditions.
Tax credits, high-risk pools, insurance choice and regulatory reform can form the basis of a transformation from today's enormously costly and inefficient third-party system into one driven by ownership, choice and competition. And at the nucleus of this redesigned system will be the patient-doctor relationship.
If we hope to succeed in making our case, it will require a concerted education campaign that relies on hard data and facts, rigorous and accessible public arguments, and persuasive public advocates.
This is quite a tall order. But if we do not succeed in resisting greater state involvement in the economy -- and health care is meant to be the beachhead of this effort -- we will move from a limited welfare state into a full-blown one. This will reshape, in deep and enduring ways, our nation's historic sensibilities. It will lead here, as it has elsewhere, to passivity and dependence on the state. Such habits, once acquired, are hard to shake.
Between now and the end of this decade may be one of those rare moments in which among other things will turn decisively one way or the other. The stakes could hardly be higher for our way of life.
Mr. Wehner, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is a member of the Budget Committee and the Ways and Means Committee.
Judicial Commission to Investigate Judge in Prior Restraint Case
 The Wisconsin Judicial Commission has agreed to investigate the conduct of Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Thomas E. Lister. The Coalition for America’s Families filed a complaint against Lister in December, claiming the Judge had improper contact with the plaintiffs seeking a restraining order to stop a CFAF radio ad. Lister also made public to the media regarding the merits of the case prior to having any contact with the coalition.
Lister granted the restraining order the weekend before the Nov. 4 elections, but an appeals court overturned the decision. The ad run by the Coalition for America’s Families, criticized candidate Mark Radcliffe’s support for the $15.2 billion tax increase known as “Healthy Wisconsin.”
In November, Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner called Lister actions, "the most heinous violation of civil liberties in Wisconsin’s history."
Lister was appointed by Governor Jim Doyle in August 2008 and is unopposed for election in April.
|
| |
|
| |
|
