Glenn Grothman: agent of the Chinese Communists.

Hi everyone,

I'm only half kidding about Glenn being an agent for the Chinese.

I'm just back from another excursion to the People's Republic of China where they happily spend the money to insure their kids learn English and Calculus by the time they leave high school and where, using this educational infrastructure, they're looking forward to a future in which the US will become the new France -- or maybe Belgium.

In the meantime, Glenn keeps frantically slashing away at our educational system as if this were a good thing.

What do you call a business that stops investing in R&D?

Easy pickin's.

Maybe Glenn hopes to turn over the US for a profit. I wonder if we'll be able to buy stock options before the sale...

Anyway, in the meantime, I note he's conducting mock interviews with himself again pretending to be outraged on behalf of the "tax payers" -- the very people whose economic throat he's slitting.

Maybe irony will be enough to sustain us, even after China gets the rest of our jobs. With Glenn's help, they won't even have to try. We're doing it for them.

More on this as the jetlag settles.

hiho
Mp

Glenn Grothman attacks Wisconsin values.

Hi everyone,

Glenn Grothman finally shows his hand. I wrote him last week but, so far, no explanation. I think he must be embarrassed.


Last week in his "From the Hill" editorial in the West Bend Express News Glenn said two things that floored me.

He said the university was the enemy of middle class values and, then


he claimed that the UW Board of Regents is raising tuition in order to squeeze out middle class Wisconsinites.

The technical term for the style of argument in Glenn's claim is called "Three Card Monty" or, more popularly, the Shell Game [btw, if you click on the Shell Game link there's a picture of Glenn with his hair done up in corn rows taking money away from some kid.]

Okay, by the numbers:

1. Is the university an enemy of middle-class values? Uh, no.

For most people, (me and Glenn included!) the university is how Americans get into the middle class in the first place. If the university were opposed to middle class values, it wouldn't produce middle class people.

From Glenn's point of view, then, I must be an enemy of middle class values -- but if that were true, then how come I spend every day helping people acquire the skills they need to move into salaried, professional, and traditionally middle class positions? (These people are mostly from farm and blue collar families -- and refugees from once good jobs now sent overseas by the same economic system to which Glenn pledges his allegiance.)

Glenn even ignores the hard facts -- the dollars involved. Economically speaking, the university is a major engine for development in the state of Wisconsin and thus, one of the major contributors to the economics that make our middle class lives possible. The UW trains the people who run our economy. Remove the university and everyone in Wisconsin would end up working for people from other states -- or, these days, other countries.

Want to know what makes this worse? Glenn knows all of this.


Which leads us to the heart stopper --


2. Do the UW Regents keep raising tuition because they too hate middle class values?


No. Senator Grothman himself is the reason the Regents are forced to raise tuition.

The vaporous sloganeering in Glenn's article is hypocritical in ways I can barely describe.


Here's how it works. Keep your eye on the ball.

The Regents raise tuition because the Legislature cuts the UW budget and the money has to come from some place. It isn't going to our salaries (we're among the lowest paid faculty in the country) and it isn't going into slick new offices (the computer in my office is 5 years old, and it works just fine). There isn't enough waste in the system to make up the difference (the UW administration is famously -- and I hate saying anything nice about administrations -- one of the most efficient and least wasteful university administrations in the entire US).

So the money has to come from increases in tuition.

And again, Glenn knows all of this, too.

Oh, but wait... there's more.

The hypocrisy goes even deeper (I've dealt with this before): when Glenn was in college the taxpayers subsidized nearly 75% of his tuition. This was a good deal for the students, but also for the state's economic profile. But Glenn has undone this economic dynamo. After the last 10 years of budget cuts, compliments of Mr. Grothman, the taxpayer now subsidizes only 25% of our students' tuition and now Wisconsin produces fewer Bachelor's degrees than Mississippi.

I guess Glenn didn't mind having the taxpayer subsidize his education, but the kids in school today?... or the adults who have had to go back to college in order to compete in the new, globalized, economy?

Nope. Glenn's votes say "screw 'em."

Glenn's votes demonstrate he doesn't believe todays taxpayers should have the same level of access to the university he did.

Were you able to follow the ball on that one?

Let's review: 1) Glenn claimed the major route to a middle class life (the university) is opposed to the middle class.

[the theme from Dragnet plays]

Dumb da dumb dumb.

And 2) he blames the university for raising tuition when it's really his fault, and the fault of his fellow travelers in the legislature who continually vote to limit access to the university system and, thus, to the middle class life every American deserves.

Dumb da dumb dumb dummmmmmb.

Glenn himself, through his voting record, has limited the ability of hard working, economically threatened Wisconsinites to attend the University of Wisconsin. First he votes to cut the UW budget, which tightens access to moving into the middle class and then, in order to duck the blame himself, he blames the university.


This isn't rocket science: the real enemy of the middle class in Wisconsin is a state senator who votes, every single time, to keep Wisconsin residents out of the middle class.

Did Glenn think his tax cuts would be free? Didn't his dad tell him TANSTAAFL !

Glenn is taking away more than a free lunch, however. He's taking away the economic future of this state. He's taking away your children's future.

...in Wisconsin, at any rate. They can always move to Chicago or Minneapolis.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong for cutting off cops from arbitration?

Hi folks,


It's always interesting to me to see stories about Glenn's latest antics picked up by strangely distant, out of town newspapers -- almost more often than he's mentioned here at home.

Why is that?

Anyway, the latest from Winona, Minnesota, carrying an AP story:


Winona Daily News - 6.0

Police chiefs: Arbitration in new budget could foster rogue cops

TODD RICHMOND | Associated Press Writer

.

MADISON — Wisconsin’s police chiefs want lawmakers to block a provision in the new state budget that allows arbitration for fired officers.

The change could allow bad officers to bypass local police and fire commissions’ discipline and win back their jobs as well as drive up the proceedings’ cost, said Doug Pettit, police chief in Oregon and the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association’s legislative chairman. The association wants legislators to put a moratorium on the provision pending more study.

Police union officials called the complaints a smoke screen. The change gives police officers the same rights as other municipal workers, said James Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association.

State Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, called the change “an outrage.” Pounding his fists on a Capitol railing during an interview, he said arbitration will cost taxpayers more and promised to introduce legislation that would restore the status quo.

Glenn makes it sound like arbitration was made available to dismissed officers simply to spend more of our taxes. That doesn't seem likely, does it?

It seems more likely it'd be a way of evening out disparities in how certain public employees are treated. Other municipal employees have recourse to arbitration -- why not the police? Anyway, as I said, I don't know the reason. Glenn?

In fact it's be worth noting that when State Representative Garey Bies, a Republican, introduced the Assembly Bill (57) to allow for these appeals to arbitration, they had in mind only those cases in which ... well, here:

...if an accused officer is subject to the terms of a collective bargaining agreement that provides an alternative to the appeal process to a circuit court, the appeal process in the collective bargaining agreement applies to the accused officer and not the current law process that involves an appeal to a circuit court, unless the officer chooses to appeal the tribunal’s decision to a circuit court.

So I imagine some further set of shenanigans must be in play. Aren't you guys on the same page?

Regardless, this stands as yet another symptom of what John Dean and other traditional conservatives now understand to be symptoms of neo-con psychosis -- the belief that money is more important than fairness to people.

Glenn is perfectly correct, as always, when he asserts that spending tax-money stupidly is bad -- but he is also perfectly wrong, as always, for putting money ahead of good old fairness.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: Wronger about raises than originally thought.

Hi folks,

Whoops.

Some stray optimism overwhelmed and then suspended my usual, healthy, oracular, cynicism.

When I first heard about our whopping 5% pay increase, I assumed it would take place in the current budget year.

I was wrong.

That 5% is actually spread out over 3 years: 2% this year, 2% next year, and 1% in the third year.

This goes some distance to explain the flight of faculty from the UW-System to states that pay university faculty more than tech school instructors.

I guess the real question is the one I keep asking Senator Grothman and Rep Strachota: where is the money going?


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong for worrying about the trees

In order to avoid thinking about the forest.

Hi folks,

The Senate Committee on Education held hearings this week on Senate Joint Resolution 27, an effort to start thinking about ways to fund education that would be more efficient than the property tax burden we're currently carrying.

John Smart, writing in the Capital Times, notes:

The purpose of the hearing was to examine Senate Joint Resolution 27, co-sponsored by Assembly Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts, D-Verona, Sen. Roger Breske, D-Eland, 14 other senators and 43 other Assembly representatives. All but one of the people testifying supported the resolution.

The resolution calls for the Legislature to recognize that the system we're using to pay for our schools is not fair and equitable and simply does not work -- that it underfunds our schools while throwing too much of the burden on the backs of property taxpayers, who are understandably rebelling. The resolution refers to a number of new funding formulas that all deserve consideration, and it sets a deadline for the Legislature to examine these, and any others, and pass a new compromise plan for school funding by July 1, 2009.

Several members of the committee, notably Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, and Sen. Mary Lazich, R-New Berlin, insisted on attempting to debate the merits of one or another of the plans, asking how much they would cost and where the money was going to come from. They had to be reminded repeatedly that this resolution only sets a deadline and doesn't endorse any specific plan.

I'm not surprised that Glenn wanted to debate the merits of plans that don't exist yet and which weren't included in the resolution. When you don't want to think about a serious problem -- especially when you're in the political minority -- you pick away at the edges, like sparrows picking around under a bird feeder. Arguing about irrelevant details, while the main issue -- finding a better way to fund education -- gets pushed out of sight, is an often-used and well understood strategy to make sure those main issues are never dealt with.

Based on Glenn's past performance, it's pretty clear he's opposed to funding education effectively, and this still mystifies me. I keep imagining that Glenn is, at least, ideologically driven to be efficient, like anyone suffering from business-paradigm paralysis. -- but he isn't.

For all his puffery about cutting taxes, Glenn has never offered us a more efficient way to address the things we actually need to spend money on. What's conservative about cutting taxes while leaving unfairness and inefficiency in place? You need to address both ends of the spreadsheet.

Simply saying "no" to everything is not the same thing as creating a better Wisconsin.


hiho
Mp

Glenn Grothman: taxes okay when you don't notice them??

Hi folks,

Not a lot on Sen. Grothman in the news these days, apart from his minority vote on the budget and making sure illegal immigrants will never find sanctuary in the United States.


Just a few thoughts:

1) Both Sen. Grothman and Rep Strachota voted against the current budget primarily, as Rep Strachota noted to the West Bend ExpressNews, because spending will increase by 6.6 percent over the next two years. Nice, nice, very nice.

What I'd like to know is why our representatives are worried about this now, but not when property tax spending on the tech schools increased by 6.6 percent per year in each of the last 9 years? Why was that okay, but spending on our health and college education, isn't? I'm still troubled by the fact that our tax-avoidance crusaders could have missed billions of dollars in tax increases so completely.

2) Why is Glenn making such hay about illegal immigrants? I suspect it's because immigration is a perfectly safe issue for him. He should be worried about the millions of non-immigrants now working happily away at jobs in China, 1000's of which used to be in Washington County. You don't level the global playing field by making a good education even tougher for the next generation of American entrepreneurs to get -- even though that's pretty much what he does during every session in the Senate.


And so it goes.
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: no real budget priorities -- again.

Hi folks,

This from our own Zak Masur reporting from West Bend.

Republicans ready to budge a bit on budget:

Surprisingly, Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend) agrees, but with a caveat. 'It can be wrapped up immediately if the Republicans agreed to one and a half billion dollars of new taxes - but why would they do that?'

What if he and his pals simply agreed to budget enough to pay for the things we need "to live well in Wisconsin?"

We don't hear much from Glenn about what it means to "live well in Wisconsin" -- only the endless list of things he thinks we don't need to live well in Wisconsin.

If he told us what he believes we need to live well in Wisconsin, we'd be able to figure out how much it'd cost and budget accordingly.

Sounds good but, unfortunately, if he did that, he wouldn't have anything to talk about. 90% of his press time is spent criticizing everybody else. He'd vanish from the news, and from government, and then we could elect Pat Strachota to his Senate seat.

Hmmm.

I'm just thinking out loud.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: lights up while Madison burns.

Hi folks,

There's a lot going on in Madison lately... budget budget budget.

Instead of attending to the serious business of why America should be the only industrialized country in the world without responsible health care, Glenn lights up a doobie with the money we're spending to keep kids from smoking. This piece of opinion showed up in our local advertising rag a week or so ago as well.

This time, in the Tomah Journal's - Opinion section. One comment grabbed my attention:

Cigarette smoking in this country has been declining for the last 40 years. Oddly, smoking among high school kids went up until dropping the last few years. There’s no mystery as to the reasons for the decline -- studies in the 1960s confirmed smoking was bad for your health, the military stopped handing out free cigarettes, and cigarette taxes went up.

In reality, almost no one starts smoking after about age 18. Almost no one. And no 12 year old who starts smoking pays a damn bit of attention to the warning labels, scientific studies, or receives free cigarettes from the military. Well, not yet anyway.

Couldn't the legislature start thinking about net, instead of gross? If we spend the money when they're young, we save a ton of money (in our taxes and insurance premiums) fixing their heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer later. We might also remember that in a billion dollar budget, 10 million is 1% of the budget.

Personally, I'm sick and tired of seeing the words "conservative" or "Republican" being used to camouflage a philosophy of "penny wise and pound foolish."


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: Taxcutter as Deadbeat Dad.

Hi folks,

In an opinion piece for the Journal-Sentinel last week, Glenn complains that funding 4 year old kindergartens is a bad way to improve educational performance.

From the Journal-Sentinel: "Be leery of government 'helping' your children"
Glenn begins this way,

The most important function of a society is raising its children. And with American high school students doing poorly on international tests, it's tempting to accept any new suggestion to improve our educational system.

I'm startled, frankly, that Glenn believes society should have any hand at all in raising children, but, now that he's said it in print, I'm more hopeful.

American high school kids are performing horribly on international tests. Glenn finally looked at the reports showing -- ready? -- that by the 12th grade, US students only outscore "Cyprus, Lithuania and South Africa in math."

This scares the hell out of me, but Glenn doesn't seem too worried about it. He's repeatedly slashed away at the kind of responsible funding for education that would have invested in our economic future by keeping our kids competitive with the rest of the industrially developed world.

Even more glaring is this comment at the end about working mothers:

It is easy to forget that, while most mothers with preschool children now work, only a minority of them work full time and leave their children with strangers. For the rest of our lifetimes, the left will continually say that the more the government cares for the children, the better off the children will be. I doubt that the founders of this country would have believed that.

Funny he should mention The Founders of this county. My particular favorite had a comment about this:

“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.” Thomas Jefferson, 9/28/1820

We do that by making sure each child gets a great education. We have to educate each child as if they might become President -- or a State Senator. Because, they might.

Otherwise we'll get the leaders we deserve.

Period.

While it's obvious that throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it, cutting off most of its funding doesn't fix it either. Glenn's entire life, etched boldly on his vanity license plates, is about cutting off funding to 'wasteful' programs like -- apparently -- education.

That's why this "opinion" piece was soaked through with enough hypocrisy to give me a migraine.

Look:

• You can't slash the number of employees in your business to save money and then complain that service isn't as good as it should be.
• You can't cut the number of doctors in a hospital to save money and then complain that the care isn't as good as it should be.
• And you cannot cut school system funding and then complain that they are doing a bad job.

But here's what else I know:

1) Slashing funding to the high schools, whether in MPS or elsewhere, punishes children who don't deserve to be punished. You don't make students smarter by stuffing more students into a classroom. Trying to punish the teachers who refuse to vote for him, only hurts the children.

And

2) Slashing funding to students you are obligated to help, is equivalent to abandoning your family.

Thinking like this makes Glenn the deadbeat dad of tax cutter, refusing to keep up child support.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong on clubbing his alma mater to death?

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" says Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Green Bay ...

-- whoops, I mean William Shakespeare in Henry VI Act IV, Scene II.


Or, since they won't let him do that, how about this?

The Janesville Gazette reports

Tired of lawyers, lawmaker wants to cut law school's funding

MADISON, Wis. - A lawmaker who persuaded the Assembly to eliminate all state funding for the University of Wisconsin law school says his reasoning is simple: There's too many lawyers in Wisconsin.

That and soon to be ex-Rep. Lassee might have thought to consider that the UW law school is the only state university law school in Wisconsin. Well, here:

More than 14,000 Wisconsin residents are practicing lawyers, according to the American Bar Association, which puts the state in the middle of the pack nationally for its overall number of attorneys.

Davis said the law school has educated many political and business leaders and was proud of its record.

Its alumni include former Gov. Tommy Thompson, six out of seven state Supreme Court justices and several of Lasee's colleagues. Two of them - Rep. Mark Gundrum, R-New Berlin, and Rep. Sheryl Albers, R-Reedsburg - voted for the budget that slashed their alma mater's funding.

And, I put this up in here because Sen. Grothman is also a product of tax-payer subsidized education at the UW Law school.

Does Glenn believe that future students should have to pay a massively larger share of their education than he did? That it was okay for us to subsidize his education, but not future students?

Just checking. I guess we'll find out.

hiho
Mp

Glenn Grothman: can't win.

Hi folks,

I nearly fell over when I read March 24th's West Bend Express News. The "From the Hill" column -- where our local politicos say what's on their minds -- included an article from Glenn Grothman with the headline: Reviewing the tech schools.

Apparently the recent Legislative Audit Bureau report showed that:

[During] the past nine years, their (sic) property tax levy for technical schools has gone up an average of 6.6 percent per year -- well above the rest of your property tax bill.

And, therefore, Glenn concludes:

It's no wonder your tech school property tax bill is going through the roof.

The Technical colleges provide Wisconsin citizens with the kind of instruction that improves their lives, and provides Wisconsin manufacturers with the skilled labor force that helped us hold on to jobs here decades after the rust belt swallowed Detroit and Gary and Ohio.

We may need to "review" funding levels as the state undergoes a conversion to a knowledge-based economy. We'll have to figure that one out.... but ...

But what I'm really wondering is how someone with the word "tax cutter" abbreviated on his license plate missed roughly $783,000,000 (783 million dollars) a year in state income tax, sales tax, and property taxes?? Did $783 million just fly under his taxcutting radar?

During all the years of his Taxpayer's Bill of Rights shenanigans, how did he manage to miss it??


Inquiring minds want to know.

hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman: wrong on educational budgeting.

Okay, so I'm really harping on this wage thing.... but we've all been really really good sports about this for some years while Sen Grothman -- allegedly our representative -- has had a field day ragging on us.


From Milwaukee Magazine:

The study found the average base salaries of technical college teachers in Wisconsin are “among the highest reported nationally.” It also found average annual earnings of the technical college teachers exceeded those of full-time faculty at two-year University of Wisconsin Colleges by a jaw-dropping $22,000.

[...]

But Milwaukee has turned things completely upside down: Average faculty earn more ($89,850) than administrators ($86,556) at MATC.

I've been working here for the UW Colleges for 15 years, I have a PhD from one of the better universities on the planet, I love my job, get good student evaluations and, most importantly, provide a great deal in higher ed for the taxpayers, my real bosses.... and these tech school faculty earn on average $39,000 more a year than I do?

Doesn't that seem like a lot?

I note it in passing.

Okay, I think I'm done now.

hiho
Mp

Glenn Grothman: out of touch on TABOR?!

Hi folks,

Glenn had The Big Mo of service-cutting momentum after slaughtering off Mary Panzer (accused venomously by our local TV mullahs of Republican purity as being a R.I.N.O -- Republican In Name Only) in the primary a few years back.

The sword of fire he swung to protect his economic Eden from us sinners?

TPA nee TABOR nee Let's Cut State Services to Give My Friends a Tax Break.

And now this:

Senate rejects
spending limits

By Kurt Krueger
News-Review Editor

MADISON — Last Thursday’s defeat of a proposed constitutional amendment to limit government spending was a disappointment to some legislators, but called a victory by school officials.

The state Senate voted 32-0 to send the Assembly’s version of the bill to committee, saying it didn’t go far enough.

Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend), one of the amendment’s chief architects, offered a new version that would have limited only state spending. It failed on a 20-12 vote, with seven Republicans joining Democrats in opposition.

Golly. Even Jesus only had one Judas kiss him.


hiho
Mpeterson

Glenn Grothman suggests business is an un-necessary evil.

Hi folks,

An article in GM Today reported that James A. Buchen, vice president of government relations for Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, endorsed a bunch of GOP candidates, including J.B. Van Hollen and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Green in West Bend last Thursday morning.

Glenn was present at the speech, along with other local notaries including Rep. Strachota and Serigraph CEO John Torinus.

Grothman thanked Buchen for raising awareness of the state’s legislative policies toward business.

"It’d be nice to have people in Madison who don’t view business as a necessary evil," Grothman said.

It wasn't immediately obvious to me whether he thinks it'd be nice to have people in Madison who don't think business is evil, or who do think it's evil but just not necessary.

He suggests -- and he can't be doing this on purpose -- that either 1) those currently in state government think of business as a necessary evil [which would be crazy since his party is in control of the Legislature] or 2) that he'd like to see people in state government who believe that business is not a necessary, but perhaps an unnecessary, evil.


Anyway, you get the idea. The truth is, you know, I'm only able to warp his statements at all because they're nothing but sticky rhetoric wrapped around an incoherent worldview.

You can't twist what won't bend.

Look, (with considerably less twisting) he's simply humming his favorite old tune: that businesses (and people?) should never have to pay any taxes and should be allowed to do anything they want to without governmental interference.

Unfortunately for Glenn, even businesses have responsibilities and an allegiance to the Republic (and our state!), just like people do.

We cannot shirk our responsibilities to Wisconsin either by ducking reasonable taxes -- which pay for the things we all need -- or by failing to behave in a civic and civil way -- which is something we all need from and owe to each other.

So, sorry Glenn: people and businesses both need to behave properly and accept their civic responsibilities. To do otherwise is both irresponsible and -- not anti-business, but anti-American.


And see? Logic can be used for good instead of evil.


hiho
Mpeterson