They'll Screw It Up Yet!

help!

The Republican party has a masterful strategist in Scott Walker the governor of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin governor has masterfully kept the American public focused on the rights of state employees to practice collective bargaining, and away from an underlying reality.

Wisconsin state employees did not suddenly come to have the tremendous health-care and pension benefits that are said to be cause of their state’s massive budget shortfall. No these benefits were accrued over years, and in the past didn’t seemed excessive.

Traditionally, government employees are paid less than private sector employees. The trade-off they make for this has been in job stability, employment protection and (well yes) some of the benefits they received. In the past we never thought of these benefits as excessive though.

That today America can think of these benefits as deserving to be reduced speaks of a change in the socio-economic landscape of this great country. Pay-scales and benefit packages have been reduced for the vast majority of American workers over the past thirty years. Suddenly, today, too many Americans feel that Wisconsin teachers are over-paid.

So when was it that teachers were suddenly being paid too much. Which contract did they hoodwink us with?

Rather the issue Scott Walker is obscuring from the American worker is that over the past thirty years our wages have fallen. As the rich have gotten richer, the American worker has gotten poorer.

Scott Walker has convinced numbers of people that the evil villain in this is the overpaid teacher and not the industrialist that moved jobs out of the country, nor the investment banker who played Russian roulette with the housing market.