[the title of this post is the sound of my head asploding]

by folkbum

My klout score is higher than James Wigderson's, so I suppose I could just let this slide and try to sleep tonight with an asploded head. But instead, let's catalogue the ways he gets wiggy with the facts instead. (A primer on this fisking can be found in this post.)

• [W]hen MPS asked the union to make concessions in the pension plan to mitigate the loss of state and federal aid, the teachers union refused.
  False. The district knew federal stimulus funds were drying up, and they predicted that a likely Republican majority in Madison would trim the expected increase in per-student funding. So they asked the union to make concessions and we did.
• Protecting the benefits of the union’s most senior members will result in the unemployment of 200 of the union’s members with less seniority.
  False. It is the near trillion-dollar gutting of public education--and shared revenue and other programs--by the GOP that is resulting in pink slips all over the state.
• Last October, at the height of the race for governor, Thornton and the teachers union reached a tentative agreement on a contract through 2013. [. . .] Due to the health care contribution and a freeze in teacher pay for the first year, the estimated savings over the next two years was $50 million.
  Again, a mangling of the facts. Base pay was frozen in that contract for two years, 2009-2010 and 2010-2011. The savings over 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 will be nearly $95 million. And in expectation that the federal money will end, a lot of positions funded by that were set to be eliminated. That's part of why there were 1000+ positions eliminated, but only about 500 announced layoffs.
• [T]he contract agreement was at a time of a great fiscal crisis at the state level.
  Additionally false. It has been pretty well documented that Wisconsin is not, in fact, broke. If we were broke, why would Scott Walker and the GOP be offering hundreds of millions billions in tax breaks?
• Now the school board and Dr. Thornton find themselves asking the teachers union to agree to the same pension contributions asked for by Walker. These contributions would be at the same level WEAC President Mary Bell said were never a problem, 5.8% of the teachers’ salaries. Of course the MTEA said no to Thorton’s request.
  First, let's dispense with the newspeak. It's not a new pension contribution--the pension contribution doesn't change, as it is set by state law at 11.6%. (The state likes to guarantee minimum income to its top-notch pension program.) It's a 5.8% salary cut, is what it is, and I won't call it anything else. It says something about what Wiggy and his ilk believe about their own position that they lack the guts to come right out and say they think teachers are paid too much. Man up, James. Just say it.
  
  But second, the union did not say no. The union said it would be happy to negotiate a salary give back once the power to negotiate was restored by the legislature.
  
  For as much as Wiggy insinuates that unions should have known collective bargaining would disappear, he forgets that, you know, we were all watching, and it wasn't that long ago. No one, not a single legislator or administration employee, said a single word about making collective bargaining between public employees and their employers illegal. Period.
  
  Further, when Mary Bell and other union leaders said unions would agree to the salary cuts, they said that's why you don't need to eliminate collective bargaining. If unions are allowed to sit down with employers and hammer out a deal, they will. Instead, the GOP ignored Bell and others making that offer--we'll agree to cuts so stop the attack on bargaining--and now they and Wiggy expect unions to still fold. There is a response to that I'd like to offer, but this is a family blog. (Though I will say, Wiggy is Gop in the puppy story.)
• In the case of the Milwaukee teachers union, this is the same union that in 2010 was willing to let 480 teachers go rather than switch health care plans.
  Switching health care plans would not have saved the kind of money the simple-minded media suggested it would. In addition, almost every single one of those teachers was recalled, after Dr. Thornton took a look at real needs and the actual budget available. He stood up for teachers when his predecessor would not.
• This is also the same teachers union still fighting to get taxpayer-funded Viagra included in their prescription drug plans.
  This is just a bald lie.
• Surely some teachers [sic] jobs could be saved if they privatized food service, painting and other services and cut down on the Administrative bloat, for example.
  False again. MPS food service runs a surplus, for example, and the budget this year makes larger cuts to administration, relatively, than to teaching.
• Or, maybe MPS will see this as a good reason to sell off a few empty buildings.
  What, does Wiggy not check the daily? Is his Bing broken? MPS is well on the way. In addition, the cost of those excess buildings is a pittance--barely ten teachers' worth.
  
  Oh, and the title of Wigderson's piece:
• Most MPS layoffs could have been avoided.
  Why yes, yes they could have. But Wiggy's looking in the wrong place for blame. The GOP misdirected voters for an entire campaign season about their intentions for schools, for unions, and for the middle class in Wisconsin. He can't bring himself to be honest about that, either.

So that's, what? nine solid bullet points of wigged out facts? I almost ran out of fingers. But I have one left for the liars and GOP willing to screw the next generation's education and this generation's public servants. Again, it's a family blog, so I won't say which one. Especially because, with my head asploded and all, it's pretty hard to talk to these liars at all.

But those mooching teachers have it way too good

by folkbum

The bottom line: It’s not exactly easy street for our $250,000-a-year family.

Seriously, that's the conflicting message of the political right these days: It's possible to be near poverty at a quarter mil a year, but that uppity mid-career teacher needs a 12% cut off her $45k salary.

Alternatively, you could put it this way: The political right weeps for a family living beyond its means in Naperville, IL (notably pleading to keep their taxes low, not suggesting they move to Aurora), but insists that we cut Medicare before the debt monster kills us all.

Seriously, MJS

by folkbum

It should not take until paragraph 34 out of 38 to reveal that the headline of a story is a lie, or at the very least, an extremely one-sided take on an ambiguous issue.

Also: The advertising skin up all day yesterday made your website utterly unreadable.

Happy Birthday, Boy

by folkbum

Apparently, we all missed capper's blogiversary the other day.

4th of JulyTunes

by folkbum



If you prefer good alt-country to local fireworks displays, head down to Shank Hall for this show. Locals Semi-Twang are opening, and they are a gem on their own.

Some stuff, we did know. It's what no one knew that is killing us.

by folkbum

Here's a comment from the thread below on MPS layoffs that encapsulates a common sentiment and that will serve as a good entree into this post, which I have been writing in my head for the last week or so:

Why not point the finger at yourself, the union, AND MPS administration? You KNEW there were going to be changes. The union KNEW there were going to be changes. MPS admin KNEW there were going to be changes. Instead of waiting to find out what they were, a contract was signed.

The background to this comment is this: My employer, the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and its teachers, represented by our union, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA), have spent much of the last decade in contract-negotiation deadlock. We had a contract that expired on June 30, 2009, and for all of the 2009-2010 school year, we worked without a contract at all. The previous superintendent and his labor negotiators were being quite putzy about the whole thing--phone calls would go unreturned, negotiations would be canceled at the last minute, mutually-agreed deadlines would fly by with nary a peep from the MPS side of Vliet St. Plus, summer 2010 brought an ugly round of teacher layoffs.

In 2010, the Board hired a new superintendent, who came in July 1 intent upon having more of a clean slate to start his tenure, and who directed his people to get down to business and settle the contract. In October, the union and the district came to an agreement, and teachers and the Board ratified it soon after. This contract included many concessions by the teachers, including a pay freeze for two years (and, therefore, no back pay), a new drug plan, and contributions to health insurance costs. The magic benefit-to-salary ratio, which is the right's favorite talking point against MTEA, fell by nearly 7.5%. The contract was to cover not just 2009-2011, the two years that would have been covered if we'd settled by June 30, 2009, but also 2011-2013, which meant neither side had to immediately turn right back around and start re-negotiating for another contract.

Those of you with a rudimentary sense of chronology will be able to figure out that all of this, except the votes to approve the contract by both sides, happened prior to the 2010 election, in which Republicans won a majority of both state houses and the governorship.

Now, what the comment above refers to is the notion that MPS and MTEA should have known that "changes" would be coming to education in Wisconsin based on the November election results. There are a number of honest responses to this, the most basic of which is that neither the union nor the district had as its top concern the politics of the election; both sides simply wanted to not have to worry about having a lack of a contract over their heads.

But it would be dishonest to say that there was no attention paid to the politics. By October, when the agreement was reached, it was pretty clear that the election was not going to be good for schools. Tom Barrett had little chance of winning, the "enthusiasm gap" was real enough to mean that Democrats were better than even to lose one or both state houses. So you know what? Both sides, MPS and MTEA, tried to protect themselves from what they knew was coming.

Because we did, in fact, know things in October 2010. Scott Walker had an education platform, and it was this:

• Establish benchmarks for students in K-3 and hold back students who can’t read by the end of third grade.
• Evaluate teachers based on five criteria: 1) Planning and preparation, 2) Classroom and environment, 3) Quality of instruction, 4) Professional responsibilities, and 5) Yearly student progress. The overall ratings will be “ineffective,” “needs improvement,” “satisfactory” or “exemplary.” Teachers with two years of ineffective ratings will lose their teaching license. Those with satisfactory and exemplary scores will be eligible for bonuses.
• Reinstate the Qualified Economic Offer and tie it to revenue caps.
• Consider local economic factors in settling contract disputes.
• Facilitate local efforts to post school expenditures online.
• Allow school districts to enroll in the state health care plan.
• Remove the enrollment and eligibility caps on Milwaukee’s School Choice program and virtual charter schools statewide.

That was it. That is a complete and accurate summary of what Scott Walker was campaigning on in the fall of 2010 (see it on his campaign site too). In addition, there was a pretty good sense that Republicans would not follow the then-current statutory annual increase of ~$250 per student in funding across the state.

So when teachers went into the final stages of negotiation, we protected ourselves against the changes that we reasonably expected were coming: The contract maintains evaluation procedures and seniority rules, even though it changes some of the salary-advancement requirements. The contract freezes salary and lowers benefit costs, so it makes a possible switch back to the QEO more doable in the future. And it included changes to the health insurance program that makes joining the state health care plan less attractive for the administration.

At the same time as we teachers protected ourselves, the district wrung concessions from teachers that meant it could spend less in 2011-2012 than the then-statutory increase would have allowed. Figuring that as long as the increase was positive, even if it weren't $250 per student, the district could start the year on a sound footing with few if any layoffs--unlike what they had just gone through in the summer of 2010.

So what drops in February 2011? Not, absolutely not what's listed above. Walker's education platform did not say word one about slashing teacher salary by mandating minimum pension and insurance contributions. Walker did not suggest at all during the campaign that such a thing was coming. And the same is true for eliminating collective bargaining over everything but salary, limiting salary increases to the rate of inflation, and dissolving the unions and the protections that they provide. Not one single word of that was breathed during Walker's campaign--something that Walker has admitted to, since he is not so stupid that he would kill his chances of getting elected.

Further, Walker and Republicans absolutely did not campaign on slashing education spending statewide by nearly a billion dollars a year. I can guarantee you that if the GOP had walked around last fall telling parents and local school boards that they would be gutting the funds provided to schools, they would have lost in a landslide.

So in October of 2010, MPS and MTEA were looking at a contract that was going on two years expired, and both sides agreed that was too long. They were looking at specific and credible campaign promises from Republicans that would mean changes to the way they did business, and both sides agreed to solutions that addressed those promises.

In short, when the comment above asks why we didn't wait another four or six months or eight months until all the changes were settled law, we all, both sides, wanted to be proactive. We negotiated and approved a contract that not only saved the taxpayers money but accounted for the changes to education law that were promised to us by the governor-elect and his GOP majority.

And, worse, had we waited, we would not have been able to negotiate a contract at all! There was no reason to believe that once we did sign the contract, it would suddenly become illegal to re-open the contract for negotiation or work on a contract for 2013-2015 and beyond that responded to any additional changes that may come along. (It remains to be seen whether the contracts signed by other municipalities and districts after the effective date written in the budget repair bill can be challenged in court. The state's Department of Administration offered guidance that implementation of the changes should not begin until July 1, but when the state Supreme Court allowed the bill to take effect it did not change the language of the bill.)

So yes, commenters, we did know that there would be changes. And we accounted for them. It's what we didn't know--what no one knew until February 2011 because Walker and his minions deliberately hid their plans--that is killing MPS and causing additional layoffs. It's what we didn't know that is causing layoffs in districts and municipalities all across the state, and severe cutbacks in services. It's what no one knew that caused an uproar heard around the globe, nearly five months of daily protests at the Capitol, and unprecedented recall elections in all corners of the state.

So why should we point fingers at ourselves? MPS and MTEA negotiated $100 million in taxpayer savings over two years, something that under normal circumstances would be huge. But in the face of the ambush Scott Walker and the GOP sprang on the state of Wisconsin, Walker supporters have no defense left except to blame the victims of that ambush. Very classy.

--

Additionally: Another commenter in that thread asks why MPS couldn't have had our own "Kaukauna Miracle," noting the story that the Kaukauna school district used Walker's "tools" to create a surplus in the face of state-funding cuts. First, read Briane Pagel's brilliant dissection of this "miracle." It turns out that it's pretty easy to claim a surplus after you layoff a big chunk of staff first. UPDATED TO ADD: Economist Jake Formerly Of The LP has a smart take, too.

Second, realize that the fix was always in for Milwaukee, and even with Walker's "tools" in full effect, there was no way to turn a surplus. When state aid figures were made final this week, MPS was down $54.6 million. (This figure does not include cuts to categorical aids and grants, such as the the very successful Milwaukee Math Partnership; MPS estimates its total loss at more than $84 million for next year.) The state's own estimate of what Walker's "tools" could save MPS was $42 million, though state Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts and others determined that the state's numbers were high. MTEA, which knows what its members make and what the pension and insurance contributions would add up to, estimated savings through Walker's tools at a mere $36 million.

Either way, you can see the numbers don't add up, and MPS was going to need to find between $40 million and $50 million in additional cuts. Milwaukee was never going to get to a surplus, period.

--

And finally, I will continue to call for MTEA and MPS to work out additional concessions before the window closes at the end of this month.

Bet They Are Not in the Minority

By Keith R. Schmitz

Liberals really have nothing against people making a lot of money. What we give a crap about is how it is used. That's why it would be a great if this impulse would start to get infectious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqIgb48iq6w

Let's face it. Unlike our junior senator, you get the impression that these people got themselves where they are pretty much on their own, with the exception perhaps of the Disney woman. But if that's her attitude, great!

Nevertheless, these people seem to be smart. Smart enough to know that this country can't keep going the way it is going.

Friday Canada Day Cat Blogging

by folkbum

It's a tough life being a cat in the folkbum household.

MPS layoffs

by folkbum

Word is out today on the number of layoffs issued by my employer, the Milwaukee Public Schools, and it is a large number indeed: More than 500 positions total, including 354 teachers. (Updated to add, there's a workshop for laid-off teachers July 21 [pdf].)

Let's be clear about something: When the MTEA, our union, settled the teacher contract with MPS last fall, we did so making nearly $50 million in concessions. That is significant sacrifice to this point already, and, as I have noted before, that $50 million in concessions was enough to mean no (or very, very few) layoffs based on a reasonable projection--even a slightly pessimistic projection--of what the 2011-2012 budget would be.*

Scott Walker laid a budget on Wisconsin's schools that was nearly a billion dollars short of what schools were expecting. All districts, all over the state. Even though MPS and its union had bargained an agreement that left MPS on sounder footing than usual, particularly given the layoffs of last summer, Walker and the Republicans in the legislature tied the hands of MPS by cutting nearly $80 million from its projected budget. After MTEA conceded $50 million--worth nearly 500 teachers--suddenly we were expected to sacrifice more.

Which is not to say that we couldn't have. As I argued on this very blog and privately with MTEA leaders, there were things we could give up that would not mean significant additional hardship but that might save some of our colleagues' jobs. The Board and MPS are not the problem here, and pretending that they are doesn't help; taking a stand to draw attention to the damage being done to the state's educational system by the Walker-Fitzgerald regime doesn't keep my class sizes down.

But the point of this post is simply this: Everyone who says MTEA didn't try to save its teachers is a bald-faced liar. A pants-on-fire liar. And vilifying the wrong people.

* The "School Zone" blog post linked above does not mention this negotiation or the fact that MPS was on relatively sound footing before the massive budget cut from the state was announced. We'll see if the full story in tomorrow's paper, or any of the sure-to-be sensational coverage on TV, addresses the previous concessions. We already know talk radio is pretending it didn't happen.

Stimulus idea

by folkbum

Two billion dollars in dollar coins in vaults around the country? Send 15 of them to each of the 130 millionish households in the US.

Is it going to turn the economy around? No. But, hey, it's as close as we'll get to an actual helicopter drop.

There's sometimes a difference between "legal" and "right"

by folkbum

Five years or so ago--I'm so old-- this blog weighed in on a controversy about Democratic candidate for Congress Bryan Kennedy. I defended Kennedy's paying himself a stipend from campaign funds, which is a practice allowed (at least, it was then) under federal campaign rules and which, for a middle-class head of household like Kennedy, kept his family fed and his babysitters paid while he did the full-time job of campaigning. (See, for example, these posts: 1 2 3.) While Kennedy was allowed to decide how much to pay himself from campaign funds, it all had to be disclosed in filings and his salary was capped at what he had earned before taking his sabbatical to run for office. In other words, he couldn't hide what he was up to and he couldn't make himself rich in the process.

At the time, a lot of people smelled something fishy; but as Kennedy himself explained, the rules allowed people who were not able to self-finance a campaign--or even self-finance the time off of work to run--a better shot at getting elected:

To support my family, I draw a salary from the campaign that is less than my university salary. I felt it was more ethical to draw a salary from voluntary contributions than to be paid by Wisconsin taxpayers. [...] It's also uncommon because most candidates for federal office don't need to do this.

Why? Because they're usually rich. They can support themselves from their personal wealth, or, if they're already elected officials, they probably enjoy an ample taxpayer salary. [...] Congress isn't made up of normal Americans like you and me. We have a system "of, by and for the rich." Middle-class people are systematically discouraged from running for office.

Teachers, carpenters and Wal-Mart employees are unlikely to socialize in wealthy circles, which makes fund raising more difficult. In addition, the major political parties favor wealthy candidates who can finance their own campaigns.

The result of these realities is that the middle class is terribly underrepresented in the halls of power. [...] Middle-class voices are stifled by millions of dollars from lobbyists and huge corporations. If we want to get anything else done, we have to remove the special interest money and corruption from our government first.

I say all this as preface, as the news this week about Senator Ron Johnson, while it may invite comparison, is really incomparable to what Kennedy did:

After dropping nearly $9 million from his own pocket to win a seat in the U.S. Senate, Ron Johnson didn't have to feel the pain for very long. Johnson's plastics company paid him $10 million in deferred compensation shortly before he was sworn in as Wisconsin's junior senator, according to his latest financial disclosure report.

The first-term Republican declined to say how his Oshkosh firm, Pacur, came up with a figure that so closely mirrored the amount he personally put into his campaign fund.

"You take a look in terms of what would be a reasonable compensation package, OK?" Johnson said this week. "It's a private business. I've complied with all the disclosure laws, and I don't have to explain it any further to someone like you." [...]

Unlike most deferred package deals, however, it appears that the company had not set aside a specified amount annually that would be paid out when he left the firm. Instead, Johnson said the $10 million payment was "an agreed-upon amount" that was determined at the end of his tenure with the company.

Agreed upon with whom? "That would be me," he said.

The story notes that the married-into-money Johnson did not draw a salary for much of his time leading the company, though he still managed to earn in most years what I, with my gold-plated union-thug public-employee compensation package, would need another 20 years to earn. He was not, how shall we say it?, poor, like the Pacur workers who are in the state's BadgerCare program. Nor even middle-class, like Kennedy.

Seriously: Even the smallest number offered in the story, a $650,000 payout for just half of 2010, puts him in the top 1.5% of all earners in the US. Johnson is the embodiment of the kind of politician Kennedy warned us about, one who governs with an eye toward maintaining not merely his own elite status, but that of the rest of his class (as opposed to, say, retiring Sen. Herb Kohl, whose votes often look out for the little guy).

That Johnson could finance his own campaign is one thing. That he then had the authority to pay himself off at the expense of Pacur employees, customers, and shareholders simply reeks. What Johnson did, like what Kennedy did, may be legal. But you'd have a hard time convincing me or any other reasonable observer that Johnson's payoff was right.

RIP, Peter Falk

by folkbum

One more thing:

Why I hate America

by folkbum

Because every independent restaurant has its online menu in pdf format and every restaurant chain has its online menu in Flash.

updated to add: also, because people are surprised that two years after a weak-sauce stimulus followed by no jobs bills and tax breaks up the wazoo for the rich and famous there's still sucky unemployment.

I will never ride the dinosaur

by folkbum

Somehow I managed to make a visit to the family in Cincinnati once again without making a stop at the Creation Museum.

Happy Fathers Day

by folkbum

To all the fathers in the audience. In the meantime, here's a story about a mother, a union, and the kind of thing that Republicans have made impossible.

RIP, Clarence Clemons

by folkbum

If I believed in Heaven, I would have a hard time reconciling two Big Men in one place.

Our long national nightmare is over

by folkbum

Weiner is resigning! I'm sure unemployment will plummet next month and consumer spending will be through the roof.

IANALBSIPOOTI*

by folkbum

I will comment, because I suppose I am expected to. Three things:

1. It continues to baffle me that the 21st century Republican Party insists that the 20th century never happened: outlawing unions, relaxing child labor laws, bringing back bail-bonding, trying to kill the internet, leaving the poor and elderly to die early and brutally without the help of modern medicine. What's next, corsets? slavery?

2. This one's a question: Do all the contracts signed in the last 90 days become presumptively void, or do we have to wait for some asshat to file suit in each case? It seems to me that any old asshat will do, as every taxpayer in the state would seem to have standing.

3. There was a time, genuinely, when I was younger and perhaps more naive, that I thought teaching was not just a good thing to do, but something that, generally, everyone else wanted to help me to do. Not in the sense that I had people lining up at the door to volunteer their services, but in the sense that it didn't feel like there was an organized effort to actively make the job shittier. This is no longer the case, and hasn't been for some time. It's not just the recent unpleasantness, of course; there's also No Child Left Behind and the Gates-Broad-Democrats for Education Reform nexus and the like. I still get a lot of pleasure from working with kids, from seeing their growth and achievement. But at this point it's pretty clear that what I do--teach students to write well--is no longer a valued skill and, in fact, something people simply don't want me to be able to do well or easily anymore.

* I am not a lawyer, but sometimes I play one on the internet.

The Great Bay View High School TP Crisis

or, wasting money by saving money

by folkbum

This is an actual email from my actual work email inbox yesterday, bold, exclamation point abuse, and all-caps in the original:

ATTENTION -- EVERYONE -- URGENT ISSUE!!

We NEED EVERYONE to bring a ROLL OF TOILET TISSUE -- starting TOMORROW -- there is NONE otherwise!!

This is not, in fact, a hoax or a last-days-of-school prank (i.e., on the eve of her retirement our principal is not planning to TP rival Bradley Tech and so needs a truckful). My school is flat out of toilet paper and flat out of money to buy any. If you want to be a good citizen and pick up a pack or two and swing them by the school today, people would love you, particularly the ladies.

You might, though, be thinking to yourself, Self, this seems ridiculous. You should try working there! And no doubt right about this point in the post someone further up the chain of command at MPS is getting irritated that I'm putting the business out there.

But here's the deal: The other day, I stated, perhaps too clearly, that my union and the district needed to sit down and work out some additional concessions, because, in the end, the district here is not the enemy in the current budget crisis. While it may doom my chances of ever being elected union president--not that I was thinking of running, mind you--it is something that I and a sizable minority of my peers feels needs saying. The board and the superintendent have been clear for months now that the gaping hole in the 2011-2012 district budget is squarely the fault of Gov. Walker and his allies in Madison, not teachers, and they have not required teachers to bear the full brunt of the deficit either. The budget for next year cuts administrative positions at a rate twice that of teaching positions. Similarly, they have made it equally clear that the long-term hole in the MPS budget is the fault of an inadequate and complicated state funding formula that doesn't serve the needs well of any district in the state.

But that doesn't mean that MPS has made wise decisions in the past or that the board and the administration can be absolved of all responsibility for the lack of TP at Bay View this morning. The sub-head for this post, I think, is a point that needs stressing, because it goes a long way toward explaining why my school is both out of TP and out of money to get any.

In last year's budget, the district made some deep and unwise cuts that looked, short-term, like a good way to save money. For example, they cut the entire department of education technology, replace the two-dozen or so represented technicians with less-expensive contractors. Which sounds good, until you realize that this has cost my school, literally, tens of thousands of dollars; like a fabled old mechanic who's the only one that can keep a machine running, the DET staffer formerly at our school had quite literally hand-coded software and jerry-rigged systems for years that were efficient and effective. We spent, for example, something in the neighborhood of $25,000 on a new student ID and tardy-tracking system. (Bizarrely, there is no district standard for this kind of thing; while the software that runs our attendance and grading systems has dead buttons and non-selectable menu items to suggest this functionality could be turned on, it is not.)

You may be doing the math in your head--$25,000 is a lot of two-ply.

MPS also rolled out a new Comprehensive Literacy Plan, with a big focus on saving money by consolidating around a single reading program. At the same time, that plan calls for a huge additional investment in paper. Not only are we hanging student work around the place, as we literacy teachers always do, but there's a new emphasis on a "print rich" environment in classrooms where every spare inch of wall and ceiling (yes, people, I was told this year to hang stuff from my classroom's ceiling) is to be covered in anchor charts and mentor texts and other buzzwordy teacher-created materials. So what did we run out of in April? Paper. Plain old copy paper. (Many props to our federal- and state-mandated "vendor" partners who moved funds around and bought us paper with federal stimulus money.)

You get the idea.

There's more: The latest word is that all "Metro Region" MPS high schools are being mandated to offer a seven-period day next year, after years of us all having been mandated to offer a four-block day. (The Metro regional executive reportedly hates block schedule and, near as we can tell, that may be the only reason why we're all switching, his capriciousness.) While many of you probably see no issue with making the change (hey, didn't we all grow up on the old system?) the four-block day is more efficient, with teachers teaching the equivalent of six units a year instead of five units, which is what a seven-period day allows. My principal estimates it will take five additional teachers--a half-million dollars we don't have in our budget for next year--to make the change work. Where will those teachers and that money come from? No one knows at this point.

(Bonus fact: the middle grades at our school--next year, we will be a 6-12 program--are mandated to teach 60-minute classes; a seven-period day for the high school means 50-minute classes. This seems like a problem, since classrooms and teachers are shared between the programs. The district's answer? "Make it work." Okay!)

So the Great Bay View TP Crisis is merely a symptom. MPS still has a lot of work to do on the administration side of the street to make some more sensible budget decisions on the small scale. A pension contribution or another year of wage freezes for teachers will go a long way toward helping MPS deal with the immediate fiscal crisis created by the draconian state budget. But on the small scale, the district needs to think about whether small short-term goosing of the budget is really going to save money, and what the ripple effects of its school micromanagement will be.

McIlheran Watch: Silence of the Beaver

by folkbum

I had presumed, from the lack of blogging and Thursday columns, that nemesis and calumnist Patrick McIlheran had been enjoying a well-deserved vacation. After all, one can only do so much chewing and regurgitating of talking points for so long without a break to recharge the ol' Evereadys.

As it turns out, though, he's apparently been scouting inside-the-beltway housery for this lateral move.

Interestingly, he now qualifies as one of those public-employee thugs we hear so much about; in addition, he'll be working as a staffer on the committee that oversees the federal workforce--all those unionized folk working for Uncle Sam.

Best of luck to him in the new digs, and better luck to the federal workforce who, I fear, needs it more than McIlheran. In the meantime, the McIlheran Watch is, pending whatever mess may appear as his final Sunday column, now retired, full pension.

Politi"Fact" does it again

by folkbum

Welcome, Inside Milwaukee readers! Click on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel label below for more--and more substantive--critiques of PolitiFact.

A voting-rights story that includes the clause "Last word goes to Hans von Spakovsky" simply cannot be taken seriously. von Spakovsky is a minority vote-suppressing machine with an awful history in the Bush Justice Department and elsewhere. This is just embarrassing.

Also, too, what digby said, for like the last seven years.

For the record 2, pension boogalloo

by folkbum

By popular demand!, I bring you an addendum to the post I wrote last March urging my union, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, to sit down with the Milwaukee Public Schools and work out something to make the cuts imposed by Governor Walker's budget a little less devastating. (I did comment on twitter Tuesday during the Board meeting, but apparently my critics hanging on my every word to learn my opinion haven't figured out how to work the tittums machine yet.)

The backbone of this conviction of mine that something else needs to be done is simply this: Neither MPS nor the children of Milwaukee are the enemy here. Under different circumstances, I would agree with former MTEA president Mike Langyel when he says, bluntly, that we did the negotiating once already, and we're done.

And Mike is right about the first part, even if he's wrong about the next step: The union stepped up last fall and made concessions that squared the district's finances based on a reasonable prediction of what MPS's money situation would look like, using, in fact, a reduced prediction for revenue limits, rather than what the statutes projected. At the time the contract was signed, the outlook for 2011-2012 was good, with few layoffs or cuts predicted in large part because of the union concessions. The concessions already made will save nearly $100 million over the next two years. This on top of a negotiated pay freeze for this year and last.

At the time we signed this contract, no one in the union or at MPS expected the size and scope of the cuts that have materialized under Walker's budget. The cuts to schools seem to have been a huge surprise to everyone, in fact.

So let me be clear: Anyone who says that MTEA hasn't been willing to make concessions to save jobs or help out the district's finances (or "share the sacrifice") is just plain lying.

But still. I do think the union needs to step up again, because hurting our kids or our colleagues is a piss-poor way to move forward, even with the excuse that Scott Walker is the real enemy. Blaming larger class sizes on the governor's intransigence may be a decent rhetorical strategy, but practically it still leaves me with larger class sizes.

So I'm going back to what I wrote in March. The union should offer concessions, starting with taking furlough days and killing the "sweetener." The 2011-12 calendar includes required professional development days in the place of the former WEAC teacher convention days. Those should be made regular school days (or optional PD days), and MPS should end the school year two days earlier, paying teachers for two fewer days of work. And the sweetener should be discontinued or, at least, made into an opt-in supplemental pension. As I noted in March, that's a solid $20 million in additional concessions.

Teachers could also give back a portion of the scheduled raise next year--as noted, the first we're getting in a while. The raise is set to be 2.5%. At the same time, teachers will be kicking in 2% of our base salary for health insurance, which is part of how MPS is getting nearly $50 million in savings next year. If we give back the other .5%, and take, in effect, no raise for the third year in a row, that alone would pay for every school nurse and then some. A more generous offer might be to give up the full 2.5% raise on top of the insurance premium share. This also keeps the base salary steady, making the raise scheduled for 2012-2013 smaller on net for the district. Combined with the furloughs, that amounts to between 1.6% and 3.6% of salary; the district is seeking up to a 5.8% cut in salary, masked as a pension contribution.

And that's part of the key here for me: giving back something more without setting the precedent of teachers' paying doubly for their own deferred compensation (i.e., pensions).

I understand MTEA's point that opening any part of the contract could subject the whole contract to legal challenge pending various court actions. However, it seems the legislature is set to provide some cover for a concession like this if it is done quickly, which is what I encourage MTEA to do.

Wisconsin Citizens Spied on by Walker Regime

Scott Walker regime is the most hostile to civil liberties of Wisconsin citizens in state history

Not content to threaten citizens in the Capitol, to take away local control of government, and even arrest journalists, the Walker Regime is now, according to Dane 101, prepared to deploy a "state emergency response team [that] has been operating out of the GEF-2 (101 S. Webster St.) building downtown specifically to monitor protest related activity on social media sites and elsewhere."

The team is allegedly coordinating with law enforcement to identify and shut down any major direct actions planned by protesters at the capitol, by watching things like the #wiunion hashtag on Twitter and related Facebook groups, etc."

This is Wisconsin under Republican Rule.

Requests For Expression

by 3rd Way



Even after taking my love for the tuning fork proposal into account I am still pleased with the stance Chris Abele is taking against the fat sculpture commission the county was contemplating. Awarding a three quarter of a million dollar commission to a small team for a single work is a terrible idea during tough times for local labor. I love a government that makes grand expenditures on artistic amenities, but such amenities should be utilitarian and targeted to employ local labor and talent.

The county should spend the sculpture money by accepting proposals from local artists and designers and awarding commissions based on proposals artistic merits, benefit to community and ability to employee local labor and talent.

A series of artfully designed benches sprinkled along the lakefront that could serve as both playthings for skateboarders and resting spots for walkers would be great. A series of inspired bus shelters aligned down one of the city's busy thoroughfares could greatly enhance a neighborhood. A multi-flight urban exercise/observation stair tower with an awesome long slide down would be a landmark worth erecting. A cleverly designed renovation project to a County Park owned structure converting it to leasable space able to house a small establishment like the Alterra by the lake or the Northpoint burger place could turn a building maintenance liability into a revenue generating asset. Carving up a parking lot sea of asphalt with imaginative ribbons of runoff absorbing plantings would be a good thing.

Giving out seven $100K projects to local teams of aspiring artists would be far more beneficial to the city than one big chunk going to a single team of established art professionals. Seven $100K creative construction projects would help keep locals employed and make our community a more desirable place to reside.

I am sure that if the county sent out a “Request For Artistic Expression” other hungry locals would come up with better ideas for projects that would improve Milwaukee while providing a little boost to local construction firms and the art/design communities. Abele could probably even find donors willing to put up matching funds. Turn the thing into a yearly competition à la the Marcus Prize and within a few years Milwaukee would be a more interesting and vibrant place.

Sen. Alberta Darling (R-Candyland) endorses union solidarity

by folkbum

Despite earlier protestations that she would try to make it on her own, she has instead decided to join with her colleagues to fight collectively for all their rights, not just hers alone. No, really, she has. She said so:

We're staying together as a group. I could have had a chance of sticking out there by myself or staying with the group. So it's as simple as that.

--Sen. Alberta "Solidarity Forever" Darling

Shorter WISGOP

by folkbum

Delaying tactics for extra time to put together a campaign, good; delaying tactics for extra time to explain what's really in the "budget repair bill," call out the state troopers!

McIlheran Watch: Vacation's over, time to start up the hypocrisy machine again

by folkbum

You know how it is: You come back from vacation, and the grass is up to here, weeds all over the place, papers piled up on the porch because you forgot to put it on hold. Patrick McIlheran, serial calumnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, finds a similar situation upon his return. See, the Republicans, the party for whom McIlheran usually shills, did something anathema over his vacation--they raised taxes!--and he needs to justify it, which he did both in print and on his blawg. (For a description of why the legislative action is a tax increase, read the news story.)

But it's okay, people, he tells us, that the GOP is cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax credit designed, as McIlheran freely admits, to encourage poor people to work more by offsetting their payroll or other taxes.

Why is it okay? Because of all the tax cuts in the budget. No, really, he says this. From the Sunday calumny column:

Walker and the Legislature, short of money, decided to cut by 15% one work-inducing incentive and to increase another they reckon will be more effective.

And what was that other tax cut work-inducing incentive? Elimination of taxes on certain capital gains for businesses. I'm actually quite surprised that McIlheran didn't go on about the other business tax breaks the GOP has included in its budget, like the one slipped in Friday night that gives businesses a dollar-for-dollar tax break ... just because. At least with the cut in reinvested capital gains, the GOP is pretending to pick breaks that sound reasonable to your average person. But so many of them are just give-aways to corporate donors.

This is your modern GOP in a nutshell: In a time of deficit, tax breaks for the poor are simply impossible to maintain. But tax breaks for business can continue, and we'll throw in new ones, too.

Congrats to whichever local conservative blogger this is

D-Day. Thank you to the Greatest Generation.

by folkbum

As Sarah Palin would say, this is the day that American soldiers stormed the beaches of Burgandy to tell that wily ol' Kaiser Permanente that he can't have our guns or our Medicare vouchers!

Tonight's DPW convention and events

by folkbum

I'll be live-tweeting (I'm @folkbum, if you don't follow me yet) the interesting parts of tonight's Democratic Party of Wisconsin convention, as well as the pre-con bloggernalia, and I will try to post something in the space later or Saturday morning to summarize. I am not sure what the accepted hash-tag will be for the event to follow other new-media reporters covering the events; some DPWers are using #20l1RecallConvention but since that's like eleventy-four characters, I won't be using that.

FriTunes: This weekend's entertainment

by folkbum

Kapitol Kaos

by folkbum

I am not watching, but the twittums machine tells me that apparently a mess of rude and disruptive dipwads are effing up the Joint Finance Committee hearing. While I disagree in the strongest possible way with the actions of JFC tonight, I also disagree strongly with the kind of crap now going on. While earlier protest efforts were wrongly catagorized as "chaos" and used to justify the current police state at the Capitol, this sounds like actual chaos and is just going to make things worse.

Shorter Kevin Binversie

by folkbum

Here's a series of affirmative claims, including some personal attacks on a guy I've never met and a bold admission that I think only gay people care about gay people, that are all wrong, but you know, I was joking.

Paragraph of the day

by folkbum

Since we’re identifying basic goals here, let me name one for the right: degrading the standard of living for the large majority of the American people. You degrade the ability of everyone to make a decent wage by destroying unions, one of the traditional models for how to improve the standard of living of broad groups of the American people. (Including, incidentally, those of non-unionized workers, whose wages were historically inflated due to the threat of unionization.) You eliminate pensions; you replace them with things like 401ks, which don’t provide enough for retirement. You oppose health care reform; in fact, you work to degrade Medicare with a voucher program that doesn’t keep up with the cost of health care. You eliminate social services and government programs everywhere. You do all of it in the name of the free market. Does that sound like a healthier alternative than the supposedly self-defeating leftist plan [the right] describes?

It's Memorial Day

by folkbum

Take some time today to honor the memories of those fallen in service to this great union.

If this blog were a child, it would be in third grade*

by folkbum

Eight years ago today I started this stupid thing and now, like an actual child, it bugs me and I want it to go away much of the time, but I would be in big trouble if I killed it.

* And, yes, I've already made all the jokes about this blog's maturity and/ or intellectual heft in my head. Don't bother.

McIlheran Watch: Is he innumerate, too, or still just being deceptive?

by folkbum

(Unrelated but kind of update: Tom Foley picks liar.)

One of the most dishonest things anti-tax folk deliberately do to fuzzify the debate over tax rates is to conflate marginal tax rates with effective tax rates. For example, when long-time rich-folk defender Patrick McIlheran retweets (or whatever it is that you call the conservative tendency to "heh indeed" someone else's hard work with a slight smug comment) the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore's complaints that Democrats in Congress may be thinking about taking 62% of people's income in taxes.

Moore's op-ed is disingenuous in a number of ways besides blurring the lines between effective and marginal rates--which I'll get to in a moment, I promise--such as blending some Democrats' proposed federal income tax changes with actual state and local taxes to inflate his number, and comparing the cumulative effect of all taxes with the income tax rate at some cherry-picked point in the past. And McIlheran adds additional disingenuity too, which I will also get to in a moment. But let's hear from Moore first:

Media reports in recent weeks say that Senate Democrats are considering a 3% surtax on income over $1 million to raise federal revenues. This would come on top of the higher income tax rates that President Obama has already proposed through the cancellation of the Bush era tax-rate reductions.

If the Democrats' millionaire surtax were to happen—and were added to other tax increases already enacted last year and other leading tax hike ideas on the table this year—this could leave the U.S. with a combined federal and state top tax rate on earnings of 62%. That's more than double the highest federal marginal rate of 28% when President Reagan left office in 1989. Welcome back to the 1970s.

Here's the math behind that depressing calculation. Today's top federal income tax rate is 35%. Almost all Democrats in Washington want to repeal the Bush tax cuts on those who make more than $250,000 and phase out certain deductions, so the effective income tax rate would rise to about 41.5%. The 3% millionaire surtax raises that rate to 44.5%.

Moore goes on to add additional numbers, sometimes falsely, to get to 62%. And you'll notice Moore actually uses the words effective income tax rate, which is a bald-faced lie. Let's pretend someone is a millionaire, earning, let's say, $2,000,000 a year. With no deductions except the personal deduction for the millionaire and her husband--no mortgage interest, no charitable donations, no contributions to an IRA or other tax shelter that millionaires tend to access--that couple under Moore's conditions would pay about $765,000 in federal income tax. This makes the effective tax rate, actually, 38.3%, not 41.5%.

This happens because not every dollar you earn is taxed at the same rate. The first $8,500 you earn ($17,000 as a couple) is taxed at just 10%. This is as true for you at whatever crappy low-paying job you tolerate as it is for our millionaire earning $2m. The rate at which additional income is taxed increases at intervals; every dollar from $8,501 to $34,500 is taxed at 15%, from $34,501 to $83,600 is taxed at 25%, and so on. In addition, letting the Bush tax cuts expire on upper-income earners only increases the taxes paid on income above $250,000, and the proposed millionaire surtax (which I bet you a dollar will never pass anyway) will only increase the rate paid on income over $1m.

You may say the difference between 38.3% and 41.5% is small, because either way you're talking about a whole lot of money. Well, yes, when you talk about millionaires, any one percent of their income is in fact going to be $10,000 or more. I would hate to have the kind of life where that were true! The thing is, we're talking about a very small number of earners here, about 1/10 of one percent; Moore and McIlheran want to give the impression, though, that this sort of thing will affect you, too, average taxpayer, and therefore you should be outraged. But less than 3% of all earners (and, I would be bet another dollar, none of either my or McIlheran's audience) make more than $250,000, the ones most affected by the proposed changes. And at those numbers, the difference between marginal and effect rates is huge. Someone earning $300,000 a year pays an effective rate of just 23.4%, even though they're in the 33% bracket. (If the Bush tax cuts expire on them, that $300,000 earner's effective rate would slip upward to barely over 24%.)

And conservatives need to lie to to spread this impression, as noted. Here's another bit of Moore's mess:

Now let's consider how our tax system today compares with the system that was in place in the late 1980s—when the deficit was only about one-quarter as large as a share of GDP as it is now. After the landmark Tax Reform Act of 1986, which closed special-interest loopholes in exchange for top marginal rates of 28%, the highest combined federal-state marginal tax rate was about 33%. Now we may be headed to 62%.

This is the sort of BS anyone with basic numeracy or reading comprehension skills--such as an opinion columnist at Wisconsin's largest daily newspaper--should be able to see through. Moore compares his pile-everything-on imaginary rate to a number that excludes much of what he contorts to include in his figure. His 33% rate doesn't include, as his 62% does, any payroll taxes, for example, making this a massive apples-to-binder clips comparison.

McIlheran himself, not content merely to let Moore's abuse of math slide, offers his own disingenuous comments. He rounds Moore's 62% up to "two-thirds," for example, and again drops his favorite stat: "[T]he top 10% of earners," he says, "pay about 45% of all federal taxes." Which is bad math, again, because McIlheran doesn't give you the context that these same top 10%-ers also earn more than 40% of the income in the US, so that 45% is hardly as shocking as it sounds.

All of this is ginned up to disguise a fact that explains more of the current deficit morass than almost anything else: Federal revenues are lower than they have been since Truman's days. Period. To bemoan the present day--or some imagined future when rates might nudge up slightly--as somehow hellish compared to the good old days of the Reagan years is utter crap. It is a fundamental and deliberate misreading and misrepresentation of the data. No single year of the Obama administration to date has seen more revenue than the lowest year of the Reagan administration.

At the same time as they try to convince us that we can't afford to fulfill the promises of Medicare or Social Security, they also insist that the tax burden is impossibly high already. Neither of those things is remotely true, and it frustrates the hell out of me because a bunch of these liars are, apparently, being paid to peddle those fictions to you.

GOP Priorities, in successive headlines

by folkbum

Gov. Walker Reads to Students

by Bert

Scott Walker is visiting the Banting Elementary School in Waukesha today to read to children. By itself there’s nothing wrong with this. Politicians of all stripes pull this empty, self-serving stunt all the time. But this particular stunt highlights what’s wrong with other stuff that the governor has done.

Walker is actively complicit in the latest effort to demonize teachers as part of the wider strategy to weaken them 1. as democratic supporters and 2. as a tax obligation of the wealthy. The specific tactic at work is good cop/bad cop.

While Walker poses above the fray, his obedient attack dogs highlight teachers who neglect their day-to-day teaching of kids. Some called in sick to protest in Madison. The dogs themselves neglect to explain that these teachers are opposing Walker’s policies that will systematically and more permanently harm the education of children than missing a day in the classroom.

And let’s face it, missing one day of school is not the end of the world. Just ask all the parents I saw on TV at the Brewers home opener explaining that they took their kid out of school to watch baseball.

Meanwhile, in Sept. 2009 the Waukesha Superintendent Todd Gray refused to allow 20 minutes of the Waukesha school day to broadcast a speech from President Obama directed at students. His reason was that it subtracted from real learning.

Now, to the governor’s visit to Banting late this morning. Just for the record, let’s acknowledge that his visit will stop many students at the school from receiving the benefit they get from the normal learning over the time this visit takes. I am only bringing this up to highlight how selective is the concern of the enemies of public education that every moment of every day be the normal classroom moment.

Walker’s visit is wrong because it is Walker paying it. The cynical use of a traditional visit by a governor to read to children is the same shameful tactic that the state GOP leaders are so relishing right now. Because their party can, they hijack government, public service agencies and “news” media to disguise a war for power on Democrats.

So this is no normal waste of Waukesha children’s time. This is a hypocritical show of support for public schools by a leader in the movement to cripple public education in Wisconsin.

It’s like Richard Nixon making the peace symbols with his hands. It’s like those big-headed Martians in the Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks that carry a translating machine along with their lazer guns that broadcasts “we come in peace”. It’s like Judas and his kiss

FriTunes: Summer, where the hell are you Edition

by folkbum

In one sense, 10 days plus exams. In another, eventually there will be temps over 60, right? For the summer:

McIlheran Watch: Lyin' for Ryan

by folkbum

So earlier this week, a heavily Republican Congressional district somewhere in New York elected a Democrat. The dynamics of any one local race* are seldom indicative of any greater theme, despite everyone's best attempt to say, see, this proves what I've been claiming all along! There are always local issues to consider, individual dynamics of the race and, in this case, an utter wingnut tea-party candidate who may have been a spoiler. But one thing is certain: The DCCC, Democrats' House election arm, did everything it could to make the election about Paul Ryan (R-Galt's Gulch) and his plan to destroy medicare, because the Republican in that race voiced her support early and often for Ryan's plan.

Right there, what I just did, saying that Ryan's plan would destroy Medicare, is what those who have always wanted to destroy Medicare (except in election years, when in a fit of black-is-whiteism the GOP asserts it's Democrats who will destroy Medicare) would call a "mediscare tactic." Funny, eh? But please, recall that since Medicare's inception, the Republican Party has stood for its end, with St. Ronald de Tampico even making a record--yes! a record!--in 1961 opposing the plan and claiming that within a generation the federal government would be telling doctors where they could live and what kind of medicine they could practice. Like Harold Camping's predictions of Armageddon, Reagan's opposition to Medicare seems laughable now.

Except not to Paul Ryan. As we have discussed before on this very blog Ryan is not afraid to invoke Reagan's rhetorical style when it suits him, and for basically the same purposes. So let's be clear: Ryan's plan does destroy Medicare. This is not an exaggeration designed to "scare," but an accurate description of Ryan's plan to institute a completely different system under the same name. (Politi"Fact" finds the semantics of the argument--Ryan still calls his plan Medicare, they say--persuasive enough to call honest opposition to the idea false, which is just mind-boggling.)

And this is where Patrick McIlheran comes in: He blogs to throw out the "mediscare" label and defend Ryan's plan. But he can't do that without lying, because, let's be honest here, a whole lot of Ryan's plan is indefensible. McIlheran:

As Ryan has endlessly pointed out, his plan leaves Medicare completely unaltered for anyone now on it or who is now 55 or older. It manages this feat [. . .] by changing the deal for people 54 or younger into a subsidized selection of insurance plans more or less identical to what Congress gives itself as coverage. This is an “end” to Medicare only if you imagine that our lawmakers have left themselves destitute and tubercular in a gutter when it comes to their own health care.

Of course Ryan's plan doesn't touch the Boomers' and the WWII generation's Medicare; those people vote and they really like Medicare, giving it just about the highest satisfaction rates of any insurance provider in the country. But the next part, about giving everyone else the same health care coverage that Congress gets? That's baloney:

In many ways, the federal plan works a lot like the run-of-the-mill employee-sponsored health insurance plan. The bulk of the costs are picked up by the employer--in this case, the government--with the employee contributing his or her share according to a set or negotiated rate. Under a 1997 law, the government pays a set rate of 75 percent of the costs of the health plans selected by federal employees and members of Congress. The employee (and members of Congress) pick up the other 25 percent. [. . .] The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan arm of Congress, analyzed Ryan’s plan and estimated that, by 2030, the government would pay just 32 percent of the health-care costs, less than half of what it currently pays. The other 68 percent of the plan would have to be shouldered by the retiree.

That just-like-Congress tale ends up a two-Pinocchio lie. But happily spread by local huckster McIlheran. Who goes on:

And since the alternative, according to Medicare’s own accountant, is leaving things alone until it all goes bankrupt in 2024 and doctors stop seeing recipients, then Ryan’s plan is “immoral” only in the way that it’s somehow wrong to disturb a drunk’s calm by telling him he’s driving onto the wrong-way off-ramp of a freeway.

This is what we call a false dichotomy (and the word false, you know, tells you McIlheran is lying again). This is the new Republican tactic, seen all over the place lately, which is to pretend that Democrats don't have a plan. They do. It's called Medicare--you may have heard of it, and it's a pretty awesome deal.

But not merely the unaltered Medicare that will, indeed, drive federal debt ever higher. Rather, Democrats have been trying to build on Medicare's signature strength, which is that it holds costs down better than private-sector insurance; over the years, Medicare inflation has been significantly lower than inflation in the health-care market as a whole. Ryan's plan, on the other hand, holds payments down, which does nothing to control costs. Indeed the CBO's analysis is devastating:

[T]he CBO conclusion is shocking: The plan would not only fail to decrease health-care costs per beneficiary, it would increase them–-by an astonishingly large amount that grows over time. By 2030, health spending on the typical beneficiary would be more than 40 percent higher under the Ryan plan than under existing Medicare, according to the CBO report.

The short version is that the end of Medicare as we know it under Ryan means an end to the government's ability to make big deals with doctors and hospitals and other providers: When you're on your own with a voucher, you do not have the negotiating power of 40 million other patients behind you. Just you. So where Ryan's plan allows actual costs to skyrocket (but not the size of your voucher), Medicare as is holds actual costs down.

But there's more: Democrats want to further bend that cost curve downward, and the Affordable Care Act starts that process. The ACA establishes an Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is all about finding the most effective and most cost-effective treatments to pay for instead of expensive stuff that doesn't work. However, there's a giant obstacle to this board, and if you guessed the House GOP you'd be right: They want to abandon the additional cost controls that the IPAB would bring in favor of, as we've seen, destroying Medicare instead.

The truth of the Ryan plan and the destruction it would bring to one of the most important entitlement plans we have today is what's really scary. And that's why Ryan and his media enablers like McIlheran have to lie to you in order to sell the plan.

* Steve Benen argues that this is not an isolated case, and that Democrats have been making significant gains, including flipping Mike Huebsch's GOP-heavy Assembly district here in Wisconsin a few weeks ago.

Shorter Aaron Rodriguez

by folkbum

Teachers* are not "people of means," so they deserve a voucher to send their kids to private school, even though they don't deserve a union and should have to pay a lot more for their pension and benefits.

* He doesn't say teachers, but a starting teacher in the Milwaukee Public Schools with two children can qualify for food stamps. If a starting teacher in MPS heads a family of four, she can qualify for food stamps through her fifth year of teaching.

Behold the death of a movement

by folkbum

In the wake of the the May 14 rally at the Wisconsin state Capitol, which was, admittedly, a fraction of the size of early rallies when the number of protestors easily topped 100,000 at least twice, the right was a-flutter with the notion that the Wisconsin pro-union movement was dying. Indeed, the righties declared on the twittums machine, the dwindling numbers proved that Wisconsin protests were a flash in the pan, while tea partiers, whose issues are true and everlasting, will have the staying power.

You probably see where this is going. Photos, please!


(click on the photos for sources)

The first photo is a small part of the crowd at the May 14 rally that was a fraction of the size of the earlier protests--a rally that clocked in between 10,000 and 20,000 people. The headliner for this rally was Jon Erpenbach. Seriously--Erpenbach. 10,000+ people, in the rain, for Erpenbach. (Also, the recalls were in full swing that day; even the failed campaigns drew more than 30,000 signatures to recall the GOP senators who supported the anti-union agenda.)

The second photo was a tea party rally last week in South Carolina. The headliner was potential presidential candidate and tea party favorite Michelle Bachmann. The photo shows SC Gov Nikki Haley. The governor--and, probably, a potential vice-presidential candidate. Don't forget that Sarah Palin, the tea party's prima donna, was outdrawn 3-1 by union protestors in Madison on freaking tax day.

So, yes, one movement is dying. It's not ours.

If you can read this, I've been raptured

by folkbum

I have pre-loaded this post on the theory that, sometime on May 21, 2011, I and my fellow believers will be raptured to heaven. If that doesn't happen, I suppose I will be around to delete the post before it publishes, disappointed, and you won't even know it was here. Enjoy your tribulations!

Never mind. Forgot to delete. Stupid internet.

FriTunes: Rapture Edition

by folkbum

I could've gone with the Johnny Cash version of this, sure, but I didn't.

Like the NBA finals, but shorter and funnier

by folkbum

The Comedy Sportz Rec League season is at an end, and the playoffs start this weekend. My team--undefeated in regular season play!--has its first-round playoff match against what may be the best team in the league this year, so we need all the audience support we can muster. (Winners of games within a match are usually determined by audience applause, so your support really does matter.) I would really love to see some of you there. The skinny:

Comedy Sportz Rec League Playoffs, Round 1
Sunday, May 22, 4 PM
at Comedy Sportz Milwaukee, 431 N. 1st St.
(facebook event page, for those of you who like that sort of thing)

If you want to come early, other teams play at 2:00 and 3:00, with one more match after mine is over at 4:45 or so.

So when is it a good time?

by folkbum

I've asked this question before, and never gotten a satisfactory answer. But since one of the MacGuyvers insisted over the weekend that a tax increase is "the last thing we need right now" (in the same edition of the paper that showed skyrocketing income among Wisconsin's wealthiest), I figure I should ask again:

When should we raise taxes?

Let's review: Per capita tax collections, here in Wisconsin and across the land, are lower than they've been in generations. But government--even things conservatives want, like roads and wars and abortion auditors--costs money. So we have to have taxes. Even Reagan's tax rates were higher than today's, and Reagan signed eight different tax increases into law.

So, when does it happen? When would it be okay to raise taxes, and on whom, and maybe even how much? I would like to know this. At the very least, promise me that Healy or Wigderson or some other McIvorati will write an op-ed when it's okay to raise taxes again, so we all see the green flag.

Testing

by folkbum

By which I mean a) I haven't tried blogging since Blogger was bloggered last week and I want to make sure things work, and b) yes, my students are doing another round of standardized testing at school this week. The ACT was three weeks ago, AP exams were the last two weeks, and Round Three of district MAPs testing started Thursday and continues through the week. Despite not including the state's test, this is actually the most testiest time of the school year.

The Joint Finance Committee could stop MPS teacher layoffs by simply fixing the funding flaw

by folkbum

Last weekend I was working on a post--the one that I put off when OBL news took over for a while--about the Milwaukee Public School's proposed budget cuts nearly 1000 positions, news that was bubbling through the grapevine at the time but that didn't hit the media until this mid-week story (and accompanying tsk-tsking editorial*).

I was writing in the context of Governor Scott Walker's absurd promise to create 250,000 jobs in his first term, and the ridiculous nature of promising that while knowing full well he'd be gutting public employment. Though MPS isn't producing 1000 new unemployed people--many of the eliminated positions will be, as the district points out, simply unfilled empty positions after retirements and resignations--hundreds of other school districts, villages, towns, cities, and counties will be cutting, too. By the time the state budget is final and fall rolls around, the ranks of the unemployed will be many thousands larger than it is.

And the kicker to that is the simple fact that the worst enemy of any unemployed person--those disgruntled voters Walker courted with his inflated promises--is another unemployed person, which Walker is about to create in spades.

(Wisconsin is not isolated in this trend. While the US economy broadly has added jobs over the last two years, more than 40,000 public employees have lost theirs, not counting temporary federal census workers. Cuts planned to education and local governments across the country will spike that number over the next six months.)

As to Walker's claim that his budget repair bill gives local governments "tools" to deal with his devastating proposed budget cuts, MPS and virtually every other municipality that has weighed in has said, simply, that cutting employee pay and screwing with their working conditions without fear of reprisal simply isn't enough. MPS would still be $40 million in the hole from where they were expecting to be before the state budget cuts were announced.

But here's a simple way for the legislature fix a long-standing wrong and save a ton of MPS jobs in the process. All the Joint Finance Committee needs to do is fix the voucher funding flaw. In short, because of the Milwaukee Parental Parental Choice Program--the voucher program--the state undercounts Milwaukee's students, making MPS seem more property rich than it is, and therefore deserving of less state aid than the state's funding formula would normally allow. The result, according to MPS,is more than $50 million less for the state's largest and poorest district. (This money is not returned to taxpayers--it's distributed out across the rest of the state to other districts, which is why non-milwaukee legislators are not terribly interested in fixing the flaw.)

If you're doing the math, that adds up to about 500 teaching positions, more than the 468 positions MPS expects to eliminate. Even if the flaw is only partially fixed--say, $30m worth--would stop every layoff. Every teacher layoff, anyway, as MPS is also making steep cuts in administration, contra some local complaints.

MPS last week released a companion document about the proposed budget, and it notes that MPS did not go into this budget year lying down. The district settled contracts** with pay freezes and significant health insurances changes (new administrator, drug plan changes, increased contributions) that will save nearly $20 million next year, in addition to pension savings with some bargaining units. The all-important benefit-to-salary ratio, despite the salary freezes, is falling 7% next year. Such savings had left MPS in a pretty good spot before budget cuts, even counting the ever-present voucher funding flaw.

JFC could spend not one additional dime of tax dollars in this upcoming budget, and simply correct--or at least lessen--that funding flaw. In the process, MPS teachers don't end up on the unemployment line competing with everyone else struggling to get by in this this still-wretched economy. And MPS's students don't bear the brunt of Walker's devastating cuts.

* The editorial falls into the growing oeuvre of complaining about the fallout from actions taken by the gubernatorial candidate they endorsed last fall--the one whose decimation of the state the editorial board, in Walker's own words, should have seen coming.

** There are calls, including in the editorial referenced above, to re-open the contract with teachers. I earlier made such a call myself. But should the budget-repair bill that bans collective bargaining be upheld in the courts, its effective date of mid-March would make any changes made after that simply illegal. It would take a single complaint to unravel all of it. Smartly, the union is having none of that.

Annual New Song Concert Tonight

by folkbum

Tonight at 8 at the Coffee House, my therapy group the songwriting collective I belong to holds its annual new song concert. Doors open and 7:30; suggested donation is $5, and they are always collecting cans for the Central City Church food pantry.

I have, I think, five whole decent songs from the past year to share, which may be a record. Of course, as a union thug discouraged public employee, I have had quite a lot to write about. Below are lyrics to the hopeful one, which will someday become the #WIUnion theme song, and I can retire a rich man and not have to worry about my pension being raided. See you tonight!

Reunion
Jay Bullock 2011

There’s a quiet snow falling on the heads of tens of thousands
Who have come to walk this mile as one
And to raise their voice in song with those around them
Reunion has begun

I have always been a hopeful believer
That the arc of history is real
Standing arm in arm with these my brothers
History is what I feel

We see the danger now in complacence
In doing what has always been done
We are coming back together as a nation
Reunion has begun

There’s something in us that seeks out something greater
As a compass seeks to point to the north
It’s been buried deep in apathy or anger
It’s time to let it free once more

There’s something in us moves us stronger
That’s different from the market or the gun
It’s the need we share to care for one another
Reunion has begun

We see the danger now in complacence
In letting them do what’s been done
We are coming back together as a nation
Reunion has begun

There’s a quiet snow falling on the heads of tens of thousands
Who have come to walk this mile with me
And to raise their voice in song with those around them
Oh say can you see

I have always been a hopeful believer
That the darkest night will see the sun
So I walk here arm in arm with these my brothers
Reunion has begun

FriTunes: See my show tonight

by folkbum

As noted earlier in the week, I am playing a food pantry benefit show tonight at the Coffee House. I'll be covering these two songs, and a few others that will just have to be surprises!

Star Wars Day links

by folkbum

Too busy to write, but May the 4th be with these:

• Arne Duncan says he appreciates teachers. Teachers disagree in comments there. Another great response is here.
• The best obit of Ben Masel I've seen so far.
• A parent's guide for making sense of the MPS massacre.
• Kudos to Steve Doyle.
• I'll be missing the Milwaukee Democracy Addicts "tweetup" tonight, but you don't have to.

Busy week, performance-wise

by folkbum

One reason things are quiet around here is that this is the annual spring crush of performances for me. I hope to see you at a few of these:

• Friday, May 6, 8pm at the Coffee House: It's a food pantry benefit show called "The Day the Music Died," with me, Gary Kitchin, Basic Joe Holland, and Rich Morgan, Jerry Danks, and the Pardee Boys. We're doing songs written or made famous by artists who've died in air disasters. I'm doing song by both John Denver and Aaliyah, among others, so whatever your preferences, I've got you covered. Here's the facebook event page.

• Saturday, May 7, 8pm, also at the Coffee House: The Portage Road Songwriters Guild's 8th(!) Annual New Song Concert. It's hard to believe that Eric Baer, me, Chris Head, Mark Plotkin, Chris Straw, and Barb Webber have been doing this show and in this songwriters group for as long as we have. But we have! I've got a handful of new material, including at least one #wiunion song, for those of you who find that sort of thing appealing. Here's the facebook event page for that one.

• Sunday, May 8, 3pm AND Sunday May 15, 3pm, at Comedy Sportz Milwaukee: My CSz Rec League team We Fly Coach (undefeated so far this season!) has matches both of the next two weekends. Matches start at 2, 3, and 4pm every Sunday at CSz, and both days my team plays the middle match. This weekend we take on a former teammate David in his new team Brangelina's Children; next Sunday we face last season's second-place team Hot Mess. All matches are free!

• Thursday, May 12, 7pm, also at Comedy Sportz: Rec League Game-o-Matic show. Every season, the Rec League teams all invent new CSz games and debut them in front of adoring, screaming fans. The bar and restaurant are open, so come early for food and drink. This one's also free, and it, too, has a facebook event page.

RIH (rest in hell), Osama bin Laden

by folkbum

I had a different post loaded to run Monday morning, but, you know, history intervenes and something else needs saying.

And that is that Osama bin Laden is dead.

This is about a decade too late. I say this not because the need to bring the plotters and planners of 9/11 to justice has waned since then--any crime, especially one of that magnitude, demands justice--but because for the last few years bin Laden has been, largely, irrelevant. As I noted on twitter last night as the news was breaking (I'm @folkbum, people; you should all be following me), history has a way of making itself happen without you while you're stuck sitting around in a cave. Consider what is going on right now across the Middle East. True, some al Qaeda affiliates are enjoying the moments of anarchy, and there is a chance secular dictatorships could become theocratic republics, but the people of countries all across the region are going ahead with their own revolutions without bin Laden's help, thankyouverymuch.

Indeed, US foreign policy, now mostly about trying to muddle up a response to the regional uprisings, has not been about anti-terrorism for a long time, and until, apparently, today, the hunt for bin Laden was not terribly hot.

Unfortunately, in the few years between 9/11 and when bin Laden lost his relevance, the damage was done. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, and more than ten thousand coalition troops, have been killed because of him.

I also tweeted about my students, who were all five, six, seven years old on 9/11/01, and for whom, it seems to me, bin Laden is not the evil bastard the rest of us remember. They see him, and honestly I can't blame them, as more like the Riddler, some cartoon villain from another time. The Riddler, of course, was never taken out by a team of Navy Seals.

Many thanks to the US troops and intelligence people who pulled this off. It is no fun to learn of any death, but some do, you have to say, come as a relief. This is one.



NOTE: After I wrote most of this, the twiiter pointed me to this piece, which covers some of the same ground, but from a guy who knows what he's talking about.