Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin says that public employee unions are to blame for that state’s fiscal woes. Of course, this assumes there was a crisis to begin with. In point of fact, prior to Walker taking the job, Wisonsin’s fiscal predicament was actually pretty rosy. Turns out Governor Walker manufactured the crisis. His sights were set on union-busting from the beginning:
The financial collapse of 2008 was caused by reckless economic elites who were well-connected enough to take risks and not suffer consequences for them. This led directly to a $900 billion dollar decrease in the value of public pension funds (not to mention the depletion of privately held 401k’s and other middle-class sources of retirement savings). Now well-connected economic elites are blaming public workers for the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in and want to cripple public labor unions and further deplete these ‘unsustainable’ public pensions in order to restore fiscal sanity, all while extending their own Bush-era tax cuts indefinitely. Money flows up, after all.
