Scott Walker began his tenure as Governor of Wisconsin on January 3, 2011. In this month and a fortnight he has ginned up a fiscal crisis, driven off his dedicated opponents and now promises devastations of Mubarak-esque extremity, all the while tending a jaunty little moustache of a style not seen since 1947. This is the publicly expressed view of the larger throng demonstrating lately in Madison. It is in many regards complimentary of the Governor as it implies that he has powers of pursuasion and deception on the scale of some comic book telepath. And maybe he does? He’s looked pretty good on TV. Maybe he is exercising supernatural or technological powers. We at least owe it to the numerous people of Good Faith thronging the Capitol to take their concerns and views seriously.

So the criminal Walker has cooked the books. He must have used some recent innovation given the speed and thoroughness of the deed as he has also taken in his Democratic predecessor who sat in his chair up until January 2. Also we might well have a more-or-less explicit admission by Walker as he has never once claimed that he “inherited” this fictive deficit (claimed to be $3.6b over a two year budget) allegedly so terrible and immediate. This is the deafening silence of a dog that didn’t bark.Obviously if he has not created this beast he would have explained, as responsible holders of high office do, that this disastrous situation is the handiwork of his predecessors of the antagonistic party, that he has been deceived by the bigwigs and gunslingers of that party about the nature of these problems and that indeed, there is little to be done about it except to raise revenues by raising tax rates.

The Walker Gang is unlikely to adopt this common-sense approach to fiscal and labor issues, given their stubborn depravity, but again let’s indulge the publicly displayed wishes of the pro-union protestors and put their slogans into action. Let us allow them their best case scenario and run it through the hypothetical mill.

The Walker Scheme threatens to demand deductions from public employees for part of their benefits. This has been somewhat deceptively reported. The concessions would amount to 6% of the employees salary that would go towards plumping up the state’s pension fund. This they have never done before and since we are letting them have their way, they will not do it now. The other, and larger, concession (for the lowest earners anyhow) is the proposition that they will pay 12.5% of the COST of their healthcare. The two percentages have been sloppily tossed about together in news reports, implying this would be a total of 18.5% of the gross pay, but this is not so. At any rate, in our hypothetical world, they won’t be paying this either.

In short, the protestors want things to carry on as before. Before Walker, that is. If they were truly nostalgic they might look back three decades or so when nearly every state, like the federal gub banned collective bargaining in the public sector unions, when they didn’t ban the unions themselves! But we aren’t that regressive. Not today. All we want is our lives back from the gloom and deprivations of the last 48 days. Very well. Certainly that seems modest enough.

So now what? Barring the secession of Wisconsin from the Union giving them the ability to print their own currency, there is only one eventuality that does not involve overall defaults. That is Walker’s back-up revenge plot. Wearing the mask of the Deficit Monster that he himself created Walker will, in a few months time, seek layoffs of some six-thousand state employees with about the same number dismissed from local payrolls. Plainly, this will be as unnecessary as Walker’s Plan A so in our current world of total capitulation to Walker’s opponents, we won’t do the layoffs either so there will be no more public strife at the Capitol and things will carry on as ever they have. Lovely.

Only over the course of months will we see if Walker’s beast is a bluff, though. And if it is not? Since no one has yet come up with any hard evidence of Walker’s fraud, perhaps we should seriously address this impossibility, just to be prudent. Again we will let the legitimate voices of labor speak through their puppet Best Case Walker. Of course the solution is to raise taxes. Currently Wisconsin is hovering around the ninth highest total tax burdens among the states generally. Whether this is alarming or not depends on how many states there are so, obviously, we will have to seek out that number. But in any event Wisconsin will have to claw more… much more money from her 5.5 million citizens. Today the top income tax rate is 7.75% at 225k. Wouldn’t a nice round 10% be appropriate? The bottom rate is 4.6% that kicks in after $9,400 for singles and $17,010 for couples. Let’s use round figures again, shall we, and knock this up to 5%. Certainly a fatcat earning $23,000 or so can afford that. They will scarcely miss it. Other rates and property taxes, the usual base for school funding, will of course go up commensurately at the least.

Continuing to bend events to the expressed will of the Madison chorus, let us also presume that the Big Three of economic prosperity also return and persist reliably not just in Wisconsin but in the nation at large. These are: 5% unemployment, 4% growth and 3% bond yields. Of course this is one area where Scott Walker The Man and Scott Walker The Dream intersect. The $3.6 billion figure of his concoction ALSO presumes, as nearly every gub set of figures does that we will pretty quickly return to that delicious old normal we left behind so long ago. Every day we do not return to this presumed median, every percentage point we are away from it makes all the debts bigger and all the funds to service the debt smaller and this bleak cirucumstance only addresses the principle of the debt. This sort of vicious cycle has a historical habit of making investors a bit nervous, for whatever neurotic reasons of their own, and therefore drive up borrowing costs, which must be serviced or, guess what? We drive up borrowing costs more and that is if we can find anyone to lend to us.

And do not forget that Wisconsin is no special case. There is a good argument to be made that they are, at worst, in the middle of the pack as regards their fiscal condition while they are also a relatively small fraction of the population and total state budgets which altogether are a tiny fraction of the federal gub’s fiscal problems, both of today and tomorrow. So let us all, now, join those protestors on the streets in Madison as our President and other national figures have encouraged us to do. They hope and pray fervently for their best case scenario. Unless Walker gets his evil way, we shall have to pray for it, too.

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