Well at least he’s consistent. Anytime a democrat is beating a republican in the polls prior to an election, WTMJ radio talk show host Charlie Sykes starts his aggressive smear campaign. This time his intended victim is Chris Abele, the Milwaukee philanthropist who is running for Milwaukee County Executive against Jeff Stone. Sykes is a big backer of Governor Scott Walker and his plan to kill collective bargaining and give big tax breaks to billionaire corporations. Abele is not. As a State Representative, Jeff Stone has rubber stamped the Walker plans.

For weeks now all that Sykes has had to attack Abele for has been the fact that Abele seems to rack up an average of 3 parking tickets each month. He pays them, but apparently Sykes believes this is akin to a crime.

In his lust for muckraking, Sykes is howling about an old OWI ticket. It turns out that 15 years ago, which incidentally is about the same time that Sykes left his wife and children to pursue an adulterous love affair with his now-wife, Abele got behind the wheel after having a few too many drinks. I’m not going to try to excuse it, and neither is Abele, but a little context is needed here.

Abele was in his 20′s.

Clearly it wasn’t the most mature thing to do, but it wasn’t like he was a mature man well into his 30′s running off with some tart while he had a wife and children at home. That would be Sykes.

It’s a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Meanwhile, the candidate who Sykes hopes to benefit, Jeff Stone, is happy to chortle over the new found ticket. But really now — there are massive protests of 100,000 plus Wisconsinites marching at Madison to protest Governor Walker’s budget and Stone just rubber stamped the plan. Stone’s approval of the Walker plan wasn’t a bad decision 15 years ago, it was this month. There are several Republican Senators who are going to be facing recall elections within the next few months to pay for their complete and utter contempt for the middle class, but Stone doesn’t seem to care what his constituents thing. If not for a Wisconsin law that protects politicians in the first year after they are elected, Stone would be facing a recall himself.

So if we’re going to talk about credibility, let’s talk about what’s going on now, not something that happened when one of the candidates was in their 20′s.

To be honest, I have never liked Congressman James Sensenbrenner (5th district, Wisconsin). But until I went to one of his town hall meetings today, I never realized the depth of the difference between him and me.

Let me step back and tell you why I was at his town hall meeting. For the last few weeks, I have been volunteering to remove Alberta Darling from her role as State Senator. I was in Menomonee Falls this weekend collecting signatures when I found out that Congressman Sensenbrenner would be holding a town hall meeting at the Menomonee Falls Village Hall on Sunday.

I thought I would attend because the Congressman invites state representatives to be at his town hall meetings with him to address any state issues that might arise. This meant that Senator Darling might be there.

I arrived to a packed room, but no Alberta Darling. I stayed anyway, wondering what I would hear.

It didn’t take long. In response to the first audience question regarding light rail, Congressman Sensenbrenner said, in part, that in order for high-speed rail to work in Wisconsin, it would have to have a feeder system like they have in Europe and Japan. Then he said, “Or like they had in Japan until a few days ago. Heh, heh.”

Yes, he guffawed.

And, guess what, most of the audience laughed with him.

I was sickened. I couldn’t believe what I had heard.

I stayed for another 30 minutes, but after a few more uncomfortable moments like this, I just had to leave.

I know that the Congressman has video of it because one of his staff set up an iPhone to video the meeting. I am sure he will not share it.

I never wanted to become an expert in pensions. Thanks to now-Governor Scott Walker I had no choice. Now, many public workers in Wisconsin are getting sideways glances from their neighbors just as public workers in Milwaukee County have ever since Walker started his anti-government crusade back in 2001.

You would think from the news media that pensions greatly inflate costs to taxpayers. That is not true. In fact, if invested right, they don’t have to cost taxpayers anything. What better deal could government get? Rather than paying the larger salaries of the private sector, government could use its larger collective investment abilities to pay for the pensions entirely.

So picture this — a large pool of money, which has grown from taxpayer money, could be used so that taxpayers never have to contribute again? Sounds perfect right?

Well, not so perfect when you add politicians to the mix.

First you need to understand that pension funds are segregated funds. A local or state government cannot simply draw off of these funds to pay for ongoing expenses. Yes, if you get a whole bunch of politicians in a room and they’re talking about a fund that has done well, they’ll say it’s been under their watch and they should have access to those funds. However, and this was wise legislation that was once passed at the federal level, it is illegal to tap into those funds for anything but pensions.

So schemes have been developed to tap into those funds to lower the tax burden. Essentially these are schemes to work around existing law but still allow the government to tap funds that should not be theirs to tap.

One such scheme that backfired helped to bring Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to power. In Milwaukee County workers agreed to take lower pay in exchange for fatter pensions. The County had the actuarial firm Mercer & Associates look at their fund and Mercer testified to their County Board that increasing the pensions for all county employees would be cost neutral. In other words, it would cost taxpayers nothing.

Now you have to understand that it sounds like candy to a politician when they hear they can solve a problem and it won’t cost anything. You can then run back to your district at election time and tell them you didn’t raise taxes. It frees them up to work on other quality of life projects.

Here’s where the personal part comes in. I was serving on the County Board at the time. The Executive sent a proposal to us to approve union contracts with lower salaries but higher pensions. He based his decision to submit this proposal based on numbers from Mercer & Associates. He then sent his people to the county board and they presented it to board members as a responsible program that would not be extremely lucrative but would be fair and could cost taxpayers nothing. He also sent his people to give presentations to the unions and they presented it as a program that would enrich county workers when it mattered the most — in their senior years.

It was two stories and the county board was never the wiser. It was a ruse on the County board but he was unaware that the big ruse was on him — Mercer never did their homework and they were telling him what he wanted to hear.

Fast forward through the drama of the next 6 months and Scott Walker rose from being an obscure State Representative known for putting out weekly press releases on everything under the sun (Opposing the Million Man March) to being the County Executive of Wisconsin’s most populated county.

There’s lots of controversy right now as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is bullying through a bill to strip workers of their rights to bargain collectively. Once that happens, the best workers will leave and Wisconsin could see a generation of declining education.

Anti-teacher bills like this do not have a temporary impact. The impact is long lasting. If you cut a teachers pay, then you increase the cost of their benefits and reduce their pensions the profession of teaching sounds much less appealing. Yes, people get into teaching because of their love of children and because they want to make a positive impact on the world. But they do so at a cost. Public workers do not make the same as private sector workers do. This is not conjecture, it is fact. The Wisconsin Policy Institute did a study of Wisconsin public workers versus private sector workers in the same type of field and they found that public workers make less.

But how will this have a long term effect? As we watch the Walker fiasco unwind in Madison, young people in college are studying to go into their preferred fields. To be a teacher requires specialized training including in-classroom experience. These teachers in training have hands on requirements which are unpaid but contribute to well run classrooms. Think about what these young people are grappling with as they hear that todays teachers are finding their pay and benefits slashed because some politician gave away a massive tax break to his buddies who supported him in the last election, is paying or that tax break by cutting teacher compensation.

Why would anyone go into teacher knowing that they will be treated like that?

You’re made the punching bag of many dirty politicians. Rather than being seen as someone who has dedicated your life to children, you’ll be seen as the enemy.

Now let’s say that you get your masters degree. If you’re in the private sector and you have your specialized degree for your field you can expect to make a sweet $100,000 per year if you include your pay and benefits. As a teacher, you can make up to about $70,000 after many years on the job.

That’s a 30% discrepancy.

First, yes that is a lot of money. I will not dispute that either of those salaries are very good salaries. The difference is that the public employee, who has spent the same amount of time getting their career specific degree, is compensated at a lower rate because they are a public employee.

Starting salaries for teachers tend to be in the mid to high $20,000 range. As you hone your skills and earn your raises those amounts can go up but are limited by how far you went with your degree. Teachers with bachelors degrees obviously earn less since they have less college training — the same way the private sector works.

The problem right now is that states are having problems balancing their budgets as healthcare costs continue to explode. This problem is not going away. Healthcare costs are expected to continue to rise as Congress failed to enact sufficient healthcare reform in the last session and in this session there are tea party activists who have been elected who have vowed to try to reverse what was passed. Rather than see healthcare for the comprehensive issue that it is, they choose to stick to the simplistic idea that the private sector does everything better and that insurance is the way to go. Now that insurance costs have exploded and deductibles soared, the public is experiencing record high costs.

Healthcare costs will continue to rise whether you strip teachers of their benefits or not.

But if you strip teachers of their benefits, you will have fewer young people who take classes in teaching. They will simply switch their majors to pursue careers in the private sector where they will not be vilified and their salaries and benefits will not be scrutinized by uneducated, ill informed, low paid private sector workers who see only the dollar signs and discount all of the work, commitment and years of study that teachers have put in all for the right to teach their children.

I have no horse in this race. As a business owner I have to deal with high costs too but I understand the benefits of a highly educated workforce. My wife is a former teacher who left the profession because of the long hours coupled with low pay. As a family we made a decision that it made little sense for her to continue to dedicate up to 18 hours per day plus many Saturdays working to educate the children of other people while being compensated the same as an administrative assistant with no college what so ever. Having the summers off is little compensation for the amount of time that we lost her during the school year.

But to those who do have that commitment and have chosen to stick with it, hat off to them. Most work long hours. Some work in hostile school environments. It is easy to get jaded. And when those same teachers are told that they are the problem and the way to fix it is to take away that which they went to college to earn, the best will leave the profession and the education of our children, who are our future workforce, will suffer.

Bills change when they’re in the legislature, as I hope this one does, but as it stands now Representative Jeff Stone’s voter ID bill would make it illegal to use anything but a military ID, a driver’s license or a state-issued ID.

That means that even a passport, the ID which is the most difficult to duplicate in our country, would not be deemed sufficient to prove your identity at the polls.

Wisconsin may have a proud progressive tradition of same day voter identification, but that will soon change. We will go from being one of the easiest states in the nation to vote in, to being one of the most difficult — at least in the part where a voter identifies themselves. What is next — pre-registration? A 30 day waiting period after registering but prior to voting? Will we make it more difficult to vote than to buy a handgun?

Extremism in any form is not healthy for our republic and this bill is no exception. It is certain to pass since Stone has the support of former Milwaukee County Executive, now Governor Scott Walker. Both men are in the same party and both houses of the legislature are controlled by Republicans. It is highly unlikely that the republicans will fracture. Even legislators like Alberta Darling, who ten years ago was seen as a moderate, are clamoring to jump on the tea party express or risk being tarred a RINO (Republican in Name Only) by members of her own party and talk radio.

Governor Scott Walker wants to kill the state unions. His thinking is that they’re standing in the way of balancing the Wisconsin state budget. Walker’s problem is that he doesn’t seem to understand simple economics.

There’s nothing in the handbook they give you when you give up your private sector job to go work for the state that says you could receive up to a 15% cut in pay but as your bonus they’ll give you 15% of your time back in the form of furloughs. With the 7-8% in furloughs that former Governor Jim Doyle gave state workers, and with Walker promising to balance the budget with even more furlough days, that 15% could quickly become a very real number.

Here’s a little news for the folks that think the recession makes it so the workers have no where to go. The national unemployment rate for white folks, and if you go to any Wisconsin Departmental office you won’t see much diversity, stands at 8%. Folks with Bachelors degrees are only at about 4-5%. Most of the folks manning those offices have a degree.

I spoke with a Kelly Services executive last week and he said that he placed twice as many people in 2010 than he did in 2009. I know we’re not at the point we were in 2002 when the economy was still amazing and employers had no where to turn to find those educated workers, but this policy will make state government shed their best of the best.

The low productivity workers will stay through massive cuts. Many of them aren’t exactly what you would call highly marketable. It will be the most productive, and most effective civil servants who will leave to pursue more lucrative private sector opportunities.

In the end, Walker’s quick fix cuts may balance the budget, but the level of service for nearly every area that State workers perform, will be eroded.