Walker reinstates bonuses despite budget shortfall

Walker reinstates bonuses despite budget shortfall:

'via Blog this'

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker established a program that has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in merit raises and bonuses to some state workers even as he preached cost-cutting and pushed through a law reducing most public workers' pay and eliminating their union rights.

An analysis of data The Associated Press obtained through an open records request showed Wisconsin agencies have handed out more than $765,000 in bonuses and merit raises this year to nearly 220 employees.

The awards are meant to reward stellar performance. But they come as the state faces a $143 million shortfall and after thousands of state workers took pay cuts through provisions in the collective bargaining law requiring them to contribute more to their pensions and health care.

Walker, who faces a June 5 recall election prompted by anger over the collective bargaining law, prides himself on fiscal restraint.

The Republican governor wasn't available for comment Friday. His spokesman, Cullen Werwie, referred questions to Walker's top aide, Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch, who said the governor established the program because he felt it was important to mirror the private sector and provide rewards for outstanding work.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/walker-reinstates-bonuses-despite-budget-shortfall/article_3d9e5de4-8b0f-11e1-affa-001a4bcf887a.html#ixzz1sgsOqIfc

LP - State Worker, governor Scott Walker, seems to realize not all state workers are equal. The high end ones, who also hate state workers too, need more money to continue to effectively keep hating them.

Pink Slime Economics - NYTimes.com. Krugman announces Republican fraudulant budget

Pink Slime Economics - NYTimes.com

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

¶And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

¶And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

¶None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

¶So what are we to make of this proposal? Mr. Gleckman calls it a “mystery meat budget,” but he’s being unfair to mystery meat. The truth is that the filler modern food manufacturers add to their products may be disgusting — think pink slime — but it nonetheless has nutritional value. Mr. Ryan’s empty promises don’t. You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid.

¶Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.

¶So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.