Joel McNally: Walker dreams of failing to pay whole nation's bills
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker believes if he budgets what it costs to run his county, the terrorists will have won.
Someone has to take a stand against fiscal responsibility in local government and Walker is just the guy to do it.
As a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor, Walker dreams of failing to pay his own bills at higher and higher levels.
The sky's the limit. One day a President Scott Walker could propose a $200 billion hurricane relief program and spending hundreds of billions on an endless war while continuing to cut the taxes of the richest people in America.
Walker's philosophy of government is incredibly simple: Not paying your bills is easy. It's coming up with the money to pay your bills that's hard.
In politics, coming up with the money to pay your bills is not only hard, but it also makes you very unpopular. The way government pays its bills is by raising taxes. And politicians who raise taxes are unpopular.
The last thing Walker wants to do is raise taxes and be unpopular when he's running for governor. So he submitted a county budget that doesn't raise property taxes one bit.
Walker's budget also leaves out the money to pay for a few little things. It shortchanges the amount needed to fund the county pension system by $27 million. It also leaves out money to pay 25 percent of the staff for the county's courts.
This isn't the first time deadbeat Walker has failed to pay his bills. Now those bills are coming back to him with all kinds of penalties and interest. It's a downward spiral that eventually leads to what Bruce Springsteen calls "debts no honest man can pay."
One of the more compelling reasons for Walker to run for governor is to try to beat it out of town before this entire shaky financial house of cards comes tumbling down.
You have to wonder how long deadbeats think they can avoid any consequences at all for failing to meet their financial obligations. Politicians count on fooling all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time.
It helps if you have the ability to look clear-eyed into a TV camera and exude sincerity. When you learn to fake that, you have it made.
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/index.php?ntid=57819&ntpid=0
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