The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

I was having coffee with friends recently when an off-hand comment about politics triggered one of my frequent tirades about how politicians simply cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

When I stopped to catch my breath, one of my friends leaned forward and patted my hand and said “Now you know why the rest of us don’t pay attention to politics.”

Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the scene in “Men In Black” where Kay, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is explaining to Jay, played by Will Smith, why they don’t evacuate New York every time another alien disaster looms.

“There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they Do... Not... Know about it!” says Kay.

It’s the same with government: There are always special interest groups or campaign contributors or a government bureaucracy with their miserable little hands out for more tax dollars and the only way the citizens can get on with their happy lives is that they Do… Not… Know about it.

Take last year’s state budget – please. It is no secret that for the past 10 or 12 years, the governor and the state legislature have not balanced the budget – not even tried.

Instead they’ve relied on accounting tricks and questionable transfers of money from one pocket to another while going on their merry way, enacting this special-interest program or passing that bureaucratic mandate with little regard for the people they are supposed to represent: The taxpayers.

And they stuff everything – including policy items that ought to be debated on their own merits -- into the state budget bill, which starts to resemble President Obama’s health care plan: 3,000 pages of gobbledygook that no one has read and no one fully understands.

But the politicians always, always have glib answers as to why what they’ve done is really in the “public interest.” They never mention the hefty payback they expect from the special interests and the campaign contributors and the state employees whose jobs they create.

I was on a radio show recently, debating a Democratic state senator over last summer’s enactment of a law requiring all drivers to carry auto insurance. Wisconsin, he said, was one of the few states that did not previously have such a law.

Well. Without the law, about 15 percent of Wisconsin drivers had no insurance, compared to 13.8 percent nationwide. In order to close that tiny gap, the statehouse Democrats – with the help of their trial lawyer friends – crafted a law with minimum coverage levels among the highest in the nation, raising almost every driver’s insurance premiums.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that, according to Nichole Yunk, director of Milwaukee’s Center for Driver's License Recovery & Employability, the people most affected are low-income earners who need their cars to get to work but don't have enough money to buy insurance.

"They can't afford it in the first place, and the law is not going to change their financial situation," Yunk said.

So they are still going to be driving around with no insurance and the drivers who get hit by a person with no insurance won’t be one whit better off.

Well, said the senator, the insurance companies didn’t have to raise the rates to cover the cost of the new mandates. They don’t have to charge so much for insurance that some people can’t afford it. “Blame the insurance companies, not the legislature,” he said.

Arrggh! How about passing a law requiring all members of the Legislature to pass Econ 101?

Here’s another example: the “Maintenance of Effort” law stuffed into the same state budget.

This law, which brought great joy to the police and fire unions, forbids any municipality from ever spending less on police and fire services than they spent in 2009.

Even we law-and-order types ought to be able to see what’s wrong with this law: It discourages communities from exploring more cost-effective ways to provide police and fire protection; it costs municipalities money to comply with it; it costs the state money to enforce it, and it further erodes local control.

And here’s how it happened: The Democrats came up with a tax first, then they created the “Maintenance of Effort” law to justify it.

“They passed this unpopular tax,” said State Rep. Mark Gottlieb, R-Port Washington, referring to a 75-cent monthly tax on every cell phone and land line. “Then they started worrying about the political fall-out, so they claimed it was for public safety. In reality, money is fungible. The tax goes into shared revenue. Communities can spend their shared revenue anyway they want – as long as they don’t spend less on police and fire than they did in 2009.”

“Decisions about prioritizing local services ought to be made at the local level,” said Gottlieb. “If people in Port Washington aren’t happy about the response time of the police department, they’re not going to call me – they’re going to call the mayor or their city council members. We have no business telling them how to spend their money.”

Gottlieb has authored a bill that would repeal the Maintenance of Effort law but, alas, it has no chance of passage as long as the Democrats control the Legislature.
Gottlieb added, “In order to implement this, there was this whole big bureaucratic mechanism that had to be created: forms for municipalities to fill out, somebody has to compile this data, supposedly there’s someone in some cubicle at the Department of Revenue going over the forms and deciding if a community is in compliance…”

“But none of this adds value for taxpayers,” he said. “Every dollar that we spend ought to be adding value for taxpayers and this doesn’t.”

What it does do is make the police and fire unions happy, and their members contribute money to lawmakers who support union causes, and they issue endorsements that common taxpayers – the ones who don’t know about the Corillian Death Ray aimed at their pocketbooks – don’t realize are bought and paid for. “If the cops like this guy,” voters think, “he must be OK!”

If you believe that, I’ve got a Series 4 Deatomizer to sell you.

The really sad thing is: Twas always thus, as the bipartisan “pay to play” scandal illustrated so well. When the Republicans are in charge, they are capable of being every bit as venal and fiscally irresponsible as the Democrats.

H.L. Mencken said, "People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard." If the voters don’t start paying attention, they’re gonna get smacked with a Corillian Death Ray – and they’re gonna deserve it.

-January 26, 2010

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