In the firestorm that has surrounded government budget debates on the state and federal level, folks from all sides are chiming in. Tea Party-supported "fiscal conservatives" have entered the scene on a mission. I am a firm believer in fiscal discipline, but much of the controversy has been over what amounts to politics as usual. As I've discussed in recent posts, states everywhere are slashing programs that are social investments - research, public media, education and healthcare. Scott Walker is using the budget crisis in Wisconsin to strip state employees of collective bargaining rights, describing their benefits as luxurious and their salaries as disproportionate to the private sector (by the way, 60% of public employees have college degrees versus 20% of non-government workers). The problem with his argument is that stripping collective bargaining has nothing to do with the current budget. It is nothing more than manipulating a current crisis to change the rules of the game.
The federal government is following suit, as new Republicans are vying to make good on pledges of cutting $100 billion from the 2010 budget. Refusing to touch the sacred cows of defense and Medicare (which along with Social Security account for 88% of the federal budget), they take aim at "discretionary spending," namely things that people who vote for Democrats use. All of this is done in the name of "fiscal conservatism," but as blogger Jim Wallis of God's Politics points out, what is being sold as fiscal conservatism is simply politics as usual:
This is not fiscal conservatism. It's just politics.
