RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, for three days last week I told you the amazing story of Scott Walker, governor Wisconsin and the rebirth and revitalization of his state, a blue state, with conservatism. Conservative economic policy has revitalized that state. The upshot of it is that there’s a near $1 billion budget surplus that he is returning to the taxpayers in the form of income property tax cuts.
Interestingly, by the way, the Wisconsin legislature is opposing him on this. They want to spend the money on… what do you think? Education. Oh, yes. We’re not spending enough on education, the magic words, the children. We’ve got to spend it. And I must add, even some Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are opposing Scott Walker on this and don’t want to rebate the surplus. It is an amazing story. It did not get reported anywhere that I saw other than little filler AP type stories in Wisconsin.
Our buddies at NewsBusters, which is Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center news analysis website, they got around to reporting that it had not been reported on anywhere else. And look, I’m not spoiling for anything here. I’m just making an observation. Fox News didn’t even do this. Fox News didn’t even cover it. And it’s huge, folks. It’s the way out! It’s what the Tea Party claims to want. It’s what conservatives say will happen if you implement the policies that Scott Walker implemented, and they were right. They did happen.
Scott Walker, they tried to destroy his career twice. His career and more, actually. They went after his reputation, his political life. He did everything that conservative voters want their elected officials to do. He hung in. He defended himself and his voters. He stood up for what he believed in. He fought tooth and nail to get it implemented, and it worked. It worked great! And it still remains a national secret. Now, we know why the left-wing media’s not gonna report it. This is anathema to them. But it has finally made it outside this program.
UK Telegraph, Tim Stanley. “How Walker & Conservatives Saved Wisconsin. America, Take Note.” And here’s a pull quote. “So the message to America, and the rest of the world, is this: get spending under control, cut business taxes, create a welfare system that encourages people to seek work and you will balance the budget, reduce unemployment and be able to let people keep more of their money. It turns out that conservative economics, applied with determination and care, can work.”
It really, really worked, folks. It did. Everything that we tell you, theoretically, will happen, did. Unemployment’s down, prosperity is up. The government has more money than it needs. He’s rebating it in the form of a tax cut. Property taxes, big to people, income taxes. And right here in the UK Telegraph it says, “How did he do it? With a mix of conservatism and pragmatism.” But he did it. Now, I don’t know whether he can parlay this into a run for the presidency. That’s not my point here. The point is this is the way out of the mess that we are in.
The Republican establishment’s not happy about this. This is not where they are. Scott Walker deemphasized the size of government, deemphasized the role of government. And even now, when he talks about the budget deficit, he refers to it as the people who own the money. It’s their money, they produced it, they earned it, they had it taxed, more was taken than was necessary because of the policies — this is everything that we have demanded, asked for, suggested, promised, told people would work. And all of these things matter. Wisconsin is the American founding playing out again right in front of our faces.
The Republican Party has another golden opportunity to latch on to this and make it their own. He is one of them. He is a Republican governor. And I want to remind you of something I reminded you last week. He is very closely associated with the Heritage Foundation. Together they hung in there. They were extremely loyal to their own policy beliefs.
Now, there’s a Wall Street Journal piece, I guess you could call it a companion piece. The headline here: “States Weigh New Plans for Revenue Windfalls.” Now, what this story is about is what generally happens when states have budget surpluses, and primarily Democrat states, when they get a little money, they insist that it be poured into failed systems, every time.
They insist that their surplus be plowed back into something already overfunded, and not working, and maybe not working because it’s overfunded. The big department that seems to work the magic is education. All you have to do is wring your hands and say, “We’re not doing enough to educate the children!”
A little extra money, send it there, and it seems that that works in getting the taxpayers to agree because everybody loves their crumb crunchers. Here’s a pull quote from the Journal piece: “Last week, Mr. Walker proposed using Wisconsin’s revenue increase largely to cut income and property taxes, following similar reductions last year.” Yeah. This is not budget gimmicks, by the way, or accounting gimmicks. This surplus happened because of policy.
“‘What do you do with a surplus? Give it back to the people who earned it,’ [Scott Walker] said in his annual state of the state speech. But he is facing pushback from members of both parties in the [Wisconsin] Senate — where Republicans hold a slim majority — who are concerned about looming cost increases for existing state programs. Some Democratic legislators also argue the state needs to restore money for education.
“The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, last year said Wisconsin and 33 other states are providing less funding per student now than before the recession on an inflation-adjusted basis.” Now, they never talk about reforming or changing the failed education industry, do they? They only ever talk about throwing more money at it. They never talk about fixing it, except to the extent that they claim the money will fix it. But it hasn’t, and it won’t.
Because the education system in most of the states, the federal government, is flawed structurally. It’s flawed theoretically. It’s flawed the way it’s put together. So the Journal piece is saying (summarized), “Well, you know, yeah, yeah, but the Democrats are always gonna be a problem ’cause they’re gonna want to put the money anywhere but back in the taxpayers’ pockets,” and that’s absolutely true.