Throughout the 2012 election cycle Republicans have pined for a bold, conservative reformer—a leader courageous enough to make difficult choices and articulate enough to explain them to a skeptical public. The good news is they have such a candidate. The less good news: Scott Walker isn’t running for president. He’s running to hang on to his job as governor of Wisconsin.
Walker is the target of a recall effort funded by national labor unions. Why? Reforms he made to balance the budget have dramatically diminished the influence of public employee unions. If not reversed, these reforms will inspire similar efforts across the country, and the outsized power of public sector unions will finally be reined in.
The election in Wisconsin—which will happen in late spring or summer—could have a profound impact on the 2012 presidential race, with the winning side emerging from the battle organized and energized in one of the most important swing states this November.
Walker came to office in the Republican wave of 2010. He inherited a mess. Under his profligate predecessor, Jim Doyle, state government had operated almost as a slush fund for public employee unions. Giveaways to teachers and others put the state on an unsustainable fiscal path, so Doyle raised some taxes and threatened to raise others. He raided a state fund set up to cover medical liability, essentially stealing contributions doctors had made to the pooled account. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against that pilfering, but the money had already been spent. Even after budget gimmickry that would make Fannie and Freddie blush, the official deficit was $3.6 billion.
Just over a year later, Walker and the Republicans in the state legislature have nearly eliminated the deficit. For the two-year budget cycle, the state will show a $143 million shortfall because the stagnant economy has resulted in lower tax receipts than had been projected. But the shortfall is for the first half of the cycle; Wisconsin will run a surplus in the current fiscal year. And Walker said last week that he will eliminate the remaining shortfall without raising taxes. It’s a credible claim. He reduced the deficit without raising taxes. In fact, one of his first moves upon being sworn in was to cut taxes on businesses. His subsequent reforms have allowed property tax receipts to go down for the first time in years—by some $47 million.(more…)
DAN FOREST, CANDIDATE FOR NORTH CAROLINA LT. GOVERNOR, WAS THE GUEST SPEAKER ON FEBRUARY 13, 2012, AT THE TRIANGLE REPUBLICAN WOMEN’S CLUB IN DURHAM. FOR MORE INFORMATION ON DAN FOREST, PLEASE GO TO
After the 2008 election, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and, of course, the presidency. They used that victory to push through an agenda as radical as any seen in this country since FDR—unprecedented deficit-financed stimulus spending, more regulations, a new health-care entitlement, etc.
In 2010, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and seven Senate seats in a startling reversal of fortune. But instead of rethinking their agenda, Democrats in Washington have doubled down, marching in lock-step toward ever bigger government.
Well, the states are now starting to change the playing field. The latest shock to the Democratic agenda is Indiana’s adoption of a right-to-work law that bans contracts that require private-sector employees to pay union dues. And there are many more such changes on the state level to follow.
Most high-school civics students would agree that no American worker should either be prohibited from joining a union or required to join one as a condition of employment. And no union member—or anyone else for that matter—should be required to contribute to political causes they oppose. Yet in 27 states, if more than 50% of workers agree to create a union shop, workers are still required to join the union and pay dues even if those dues are used for political causes they disapprove of. (more…)
RAEFORD — A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.
The girl’s mother — who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation — said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a “healthy lunch” would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.
“I don’t feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home,” the mother wrote in a complaint to her state representative, Republican G.L. Pridgen of Robeson County. (more…)
Pat McCrory, Republican candidate for North Carolina Governor, was the guest speaker at the Orange County Republican Lincoln Reagan Dinner in Chapel Hill on Saturday, February 11. A number of our members of Conservative Women’s Forum were in attendance.
Pat McCrory, guest speaker at Lincoln/Reagan Dinner
Joyce Cotten and Pat McCrory
Frank Roche, Master of Ceremonies
John Wright, Cathy Wright, candidate for NC District 54 House, Kitty Felten and Robin Staudt
On May 8, 2012 the voters will decide whether this provision should be added to the State Constitution:
“Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State. This Section does not prohibit a private party from entering into contracts with another private party; nor does this section prohibit courts from adjudicating the rights of private parties pursuant to such contracts.”
This Marriage Amendment would recognize only domestic legal unions between one man and one woman. Domestic partnerships or civil unions, whether opposite-sex or same-sex, would not be valid or recognized here. The Amendment would prohibit the government from creating “same sex marriage”(more…)
One Sunday afternoon last spring, as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was working in his front yard, a car rolled slowly by and blared its horn. He and his two teenage sons looked up to see two middle fingers directed their way as the car screeched down the street. A few minutes later another car rolled by and a voice shouted “Hey governor!” Mr. Walker reluctantly looked up—to find two thumbs up coming through the open window.
No American politician had a more polarizing effect on voters last year than Scott Walker. This time last year, thousands of irate protesters were occupying Wisconsin’s state Capitol, comparing Mr. Walker to Hitler for trying to reform the pension and collective-bargaining systems of public-employee unions. He needed an entourage of 25 security officers to escort him through the building at the height of the pandemonium.
Now he faces what he predicts will be his most bruising fight of all: a union-funded recall election intended to toss him out of office. His opponents last week submitted one million signatures to trigger a recall election as early as spring or summer. Mr. Walker expects this to be a $70 million brawl—a record for Wisconsin and twice the total spent in the 2010 governor’s race. Smiling, Mr. Walker says he hopes to be the “first governor re-elected twice during his first term.”
Associated PressWisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (more…)
Now that the governor has controlled state spending, he’s pushing tax reform and hoping to steal businesses and residents from neighboring blue states.
Garden State Gov. Chris Christie has a message for the top 1% of income earners: Please occupy New Jersey. “I’m going to start going after a lot of these hedge-fund guys who are in Connecticut and New York and say, ‘You’re going to get a better deal with us,'” says the country’s most important Republican not running for president.
Mr. Christie’s new tax-reform plan also offers an improved deal to the bottom 99%, which is why he may be able to move it through New Jersey’s Democratic legislature: a 10% cut in tax rates across the board.
The governor is two years into a four-year term. In 2010, he told the Journal’s editorial board that the Garden State represented America’s best example of a “failed experiment” in rising taxes and bigger government. As he returns to the Journal for another visit, it’s time to check the results of his counter-experiment.
Politically, so far so good. A recent Quinnipiac poll gives him a 53% approval rating among the state’s registered voters, and Mr. Christie says that private polls show him “in the low 60s.”
Economically, unemployment in the state has fallen to 9% from a high of 9.8%. With almost 3.9 million people working, New Jersey has added almost 60,000 private-sector jobs since he took office, while shedding more than 21,000 government jobs. Reforms of the pension and health programs for government employees will save taxpayers an estimated $120 billion over the next 30 years. A new limit on local property-tax increases appears to be working. (more…)
Roger A. Keats has it right in his letter of Jan. 14 (“Protecting the Election of Democrats”) when he describes how a minority-Anglo Texas has ruffled the national Democratic Party. In my 49-year stint as a resident in Texas, I witnessed a 100% Democratic state in the 1950s change to one of the reddest of red states today. Among other states, its economy and job creation are beyond comparison. It has become the absolute opposite of California; it does not need nor require a state income tax; and it pays for a substantial homestead exemption on resident and senior-citizen property taxes.
It appears that Sam Houston had it right in his negotiations with the U.S. Congress over the 1845 Treaty of Annexation when he reportedly said in essence that Texas is going to keep ownership of its public lands or we are not going to join, thus laying the groundwork for its economy to become unique among the 50 states. Texas doesn’t have a significant share of its area under federal control, as many other states do, and it is able to profit from royalties on state lands on which it encourages development.
Here’s the full text of Mitch Daniels’s response to the State of the Union, as prepared for delivery:
“The status of ‘loyal opposition’ imposes on those out of power some serious responsibilities: to show respect for the Presidency and its occupant, to express agreement where it exists. Republicans tonight salute our President, for instance, for his aggressive pursuit of the murderers of 9/11, and for bravely backing long overdue changes in public education. I personally would add to that list admiration for the strong family commitment that he and the First Lady have displayed to a nation sorely needing such examples.
“On these evenings, Presidents naturally seek to find the sunny side of our national condition. But when President Obama claims that the state of our union is anything but grave, he must know in his heart that this is not true.
“The President did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight. But he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse: the percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades. One in five men of prime working age, and nearly half of all persons under 30, did not go to work today.
“In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt. And yet, the President has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead. The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy; it borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours. (more…)
