Progressive Thinking

MADISON - If you want to keep Social Security and Medicare safe and sound, work for college affordability.

If you want urban mass transit, work to bring cell phone signals and Internet connections to every rural doorstep.

If you want public workers to be respected and valued, work to make the minimum wage a living wage and create new protections for nonunion workers in the private sector.

Focusing only on what you want won’t get you what you want. Your wish will be society’s command only if those you need standing with you and voting with you get what they want too.

The political landscape is littered with single-issue groups with enormous clout. Each is on an island, not concerning itself in the least with what’s happening on the next island over. Even the very strongest of them – like the once-mighty teachers unions – can find themselves suddenly isolated and vulnerable. We need each other. City dwellers need rural folks. Seniors need teens and twenty-somethings. White collar professionals need blue collar laborers. Otherwise the billionaires will keep on winning.

Organizations or institutions devoted to the common good are hard to find. Political parties should be so oriented, but in this era of legal bribery they are preoccupied with accommodating each individual interest group. They seem to think if you add up enough special interests the sum total will equal the public interest. It never works out that way.

We live in an age when the dominant political philosophy is me-firstism. The idea that greed is good and selfishness begets productivity has been pounded into us daily. We’re taught the illusion that each of us is self-made and that we can make it through life without ever needing another’s help, thereby freeing us from any sense of responsibility for the well being of others. In reality, this philosophy only makes us a nation of cats, totally dependent on others but fully convinced of our own independence.

The answer to me-firstism is to think we first. If you want to save Social Security, work for college affordability. We’re all in this together.

MILWAUKEE - Boy, the Milwaukee Bucks must really be feeling the love.

Bucks owners Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens think of their club and their dream of a gleaming new palace for the franchise as a “transformative economic and cultural asset” for Milwaukee and all of Wisconsin. But when Governor Scott Walker and top legislative leaders announced yesterday that they intend to put taxpayers on the hook for half of the cost of a new arena, they stood behind a sign reading “Cheaper To Keep Them.”

Now there’s a marketing slogan. The Milwaukee Bucks: Less of a burden if they stay.

Walker and his allies insist that taxpayers will be better off footing the bill for $250 million of the cost of building a new arena because they claim the Bucks pulling up stakes and moving to another city would cost Wisconsin even more in lost tax revenue. They pluck a number – $419 million over 20 years – out of thin air to justify their claim.

Of course, the very same kind of argument could be made against other budget decisions the governor and legislative Republicans are making. Applying the logic used to defend a taxpayer subsidy for billionaire owners and millionaire basketball players, it would undeniably be cheaper over the long haul to keep the University of Wisconsin System fully funded. The UW System is a proven economic engine that not only employs large numbers of taxpaying faculty and support staff but also spawns countless start-up companies that end up being big revenue producers as well. But the UW is in line for a $250 million budget cut, exactly the same amount the Bucks are in line to receive.

It also would be cheaper in the end to keep state parks as they are instead of eliminating all state funding for them as the governor and legislative budget writers aim to do. The parks are fuel for the tourism industry, another proven economic engine.

There is a virtually endless list of things in the state budget that are being cut sharply or eliminated altogether but would be cheaper to keep. Funny how this calculus is only used to justify feeding billionaires.

MADISON - I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how young people want nothing to do with politics and are running away from civic life.

So Millennials don’t want to be politicians. Has anyone stopped to think maybe they want to be leaders instead?

By force of habit, we refer to elected officials as our nation’s leaders, our state’s leaders and our community’s leaders. But based on what I’ve seen over the course of my life, I can’t think of a class of people generally less involved with leadership than politicians.

True leaders give credit and take blame. Politicians almost always do the exact opposite.

Leaders don’t need handlers. Politicians rarely move a muscle without consulting their consultants. They have pollsters who tell them what to think, and speech writers who tell them what to say, and donors and lobbyists who tell them what to do. That is a lot of things, but it is not leadership.

Politicians are exceptionally practiced at knowing which way a parade is heading and running to the front and grabbing a drum. Leaders don’t look for parades.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, more important to your average elected official than winning the next election. Doing the right thing doesn’t even come in a distant second. I am not sure what you call that, but it is not leading.

My observation over the years and especially in recent days is that there is indeed something more important than winning elections to those who call themselves party “leaders.” When forced to choose between losing elections and losing control, party bosses will sacrifice electoral success every time. They can live with losing members, they can explain away defeats at the polls. They cannot bear surrendering control. I don’t know exactly what kind of ship that is, but it is not leadership.

Millennials get badmouthed a lot by older folks. Teens and twenty-somethings are too dependent on technology. They don’t know the true meaning of hard work. They don’t this and they don’t that. There are a great many explanations for the bad rap, I suppose. But I think a big one is that those with more gray on the roof are much more likely to confuse behaviors commonly observed in the political arena with leadership.

I may be in a small minority, but I am bullish on the Millennials. I think they will turn out to be a transformational generation. One reason I have for this faith in them is their profound distaste for all those common political behaviors, which means they have a fighting chance to maximize their capacity for genuine leadership.

There are at least four different deficits in the state budget that is working its way through Wisconsin's legislature. Wisconsin is lagging the nation in so many respects. All these deficits certainly aren’t going to help matters any.

MADISON - Wisconsin lawmakers started the process of building a new state budget in a substantial hole. They insisted their predecessors dug it, but in truth the hole was of their own making. When they are done, the books will be made to appear balanced on the surface for the time being, even though a sizeable underlying “structural deficit” will remain.

The ongoing inability or unwillingness of budget writers to truly put our state government in the position of taking in as much as it spends is a significant problem, but it represents only one of the budget deficits we will have in Wisconsin.

In addition to leaving a financial deficit, the proposed budget as it stands now suffers from a common sense deficit as well. It not only continues to fund state programs that are not working, it throws good money after bad by expanding those failing programs. The private school voucher program has been around for a quarter-century now, and has never delivered on its promises. After more than two decades the program has not boosted student achievement as its supporters said it would. Voucher students do no better than public school students, and by some measures they do worse. Yet this budget takes more money away from public schools to fund further expansion of the voucher program.

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation established back in 2011 has been a train wreck since its inception. But despite fresh evidence that WEDC is playing fast and loose with taxpayer money but is unable to document that its actions produce much of any actual economic development, the budget includes a $55 million increase in state funding for the agency.

There also is a pronounced common good deficit in this budget. It seeks to privatize pretty much everything, from human services and state parks to local schools and the state university system. It does this despite the fact that human services experts in other states and local communities across the country “are finding that turning over these programs to private contractors not only fails to achieve projected cost savings but also decreases access to these important services,” according to the watchdog group In the Public Interest. If approved as written, the budget will make parks more expensive to the public and will likely discourage tourism. Top business leaders warn the planned cuts to the university system will hurt Wisconsin’s economy.

Among the many deficits in this budget is a distinct vision deficit. Instead of working to make higher education as affordable for future generations as past generations made it for us, lawmakers have confined themselves to debating only whether college spending should be cut by a little or a lot and whether student tuition should be kept at its stratospherically high current levels or allowed to go up even more. No thought is being given to closing the digital divide, which is critical especially to rural development and a key to dealing with growing inequality. Lawmakers aren’t even showing any interest in thinking creatively about how to avoid deep cuts without raising taxes.

Wisconsin is lagging the nation in so many respects, as our neighbors to the west never hesitate to remind us. All these deficits certainly aren’t going to help matters any.

Distrust of government is in our country’s DNA. The GOP has successfully passed themselves off as the party of less government, but the truth is that both major parties want big government to work for a privileged few at the expense of the many.

MADISON - Suspicion and distrust of government is a core American value. It is in our country’s DNA.

Republicans have proven far more capable than Democrats at both recognizing and capitalizing on this fact, taking great pains to pass themselves off as the party favoring less government while their opponents are for more government.

The GOP has successfully created a perception.

Then there is reality. The truth is that both major parties want big government. Both have worked persistently to expand government’s size and reach.

The truth is that the biggest expansion of the federal government in the last half-century was the doing of a Republican administration with near-universal support of Republicans in Congress. That would be the creation of a vast new federal bureaucracy devoted to domestic surveillance and a radically enlarged police presence.

Today’s Republican Party also favors a very activist and intrusive government with respect to our personal lives, morality and sexuality. Republicans talk a good game about trusting in individuals to make their own life choices and in families to serve as the moral backbone of our society. But there is a big gap between word and deed. Modern-day Republicans have repeatedly supported interventions that effectively put government everywhere from the bedroom to the doctor’s office. They have repeatedly sought to dictate who can love and marry whom, and have not hesitated to meddle in doctor-patient relationships and medical decision making.

Democrats are known as the architects of the welfare state. Republicans are devoted to the public dole, too. In fact, the kind of welfare Republicans favor dwarfs the Democrats’ welfare programs. The truth is both parties like to fill the public trough. They just have very different ideas about who should be allowed to feed from it. The debate we should be having is how to create an economy where both kinds of welfare are unnecessary and can be eliminated. Neither major party has shown much interest in that conversation.

Blue Jean Nation believes government is necessary to a civil and just society and prosperous economy. But we insist on a limited government – one that is as small as possible and only as big as required to do what society needs done collectively. Government programs that work should be supported and ones that do not should be reformed or ended. Most importantly, what government does must serve the broad public interest and promote the common good, not just benefit those who lavishly fund election campaigns or have high-priced lobbyists advocating on their behalf.

So much time and energy is wasted fruitlessly arguing over which party wants more government and which one wants less, when the plain evidence shows that both are equally skilled at making government bigger. If we spent half as much time zeroing in on government’s purpose – what it does and for whom – as we spend assigning blame for its size, then we would really get somewhere.

Both major parties have proven they are for big government. And both have shown a distressing tendency to put government to work for a privileged few at the expense of the many. That’s what needs to change. We need a repurposed government, one that is serving the whole of society both consistently and well.