Scott Walker’s Revolution: The Sequel

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PJMedia:

It has been two years since Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker came into office in dramatic fashion. With a slim majority in both houses of the state legislature, Walker led a fiscal revolution and a one-man crusade to return fiscal sanity to public employment and open the doors of Wisconsin to business creation.

Despite Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes going for President Obama in November, something miraculous is continuing to unfold in America’s Dairyland. Republicans actually regained control of a state legislature they had lost briefly in April of 2012. They now have a 3-seat advantage in the Senate and a 21-seat majority in the Assembly. Scott Walker now has the tools he needs to continue the “Cheesehead Revolution.” Amazingly, he is up for relection already in 2014. Long before then, however, he will face for the first time a new and much stronger adversary which threatens to derail his aggressive and much-needed reforms and agenda — the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

 

Despite facing a 2012 recall election funded by unions across the nation, in less than a year Walker slew the dragon. In a state dominated by public employee unions just a few short years ago, he turned a $3.6 billion state deficit into a surplus. For the first time since 1996, school tax levies actually decreased, keeping an extra $228 million in Wisconsin taxpayers’ pockets. Walker protected seniors and needy families by investing $1.2 billion in new state funds for a Medicaid program in peril due to the loss of one-time federal stimulus funds and unsustainable program expansions. He balanced the state budget while still offering state employees generous pension plans unheard of in the private sector. He gave school districts the tools to balance their own budgets, and Wisconsin saw new-teacher hires outnumber layoffs and non-renewals by 1,799 positions. The teacher to student ratio in Wisconsin public schools dropped from 15.6 to 13.3.