Doyle budget repair VS Walker budget repair

Doyle's Budget repair vs. Walker's Budget repair

There is an idea that Walker's budget repair bill is roughly equivalent to Doyle's 2009 budget repair bill.

There are similarities; both were passed or attempted to be passed in a short amount of time with no public testimony.

The differences are many. Doyle's budget repair was not nearly as divisive as Walker's BRB. It did not prompt a Filibuster from the opposing party, and no Republicans fled the state. Is this because the Repubs all firmly believed that the governor and majority party should be blindly followed in every situation? Perhaps. It also could be because Doyle's BRB was not abhorrent to the Republicans. The main complaints about the Doyle BRB is that it increased taxes. It did raise taxes by 360 million, as well as a retroactive hospital tax. The hospital tax raised the total taxes raised to 1.2 billion, however the hospital tax would bring in federal funds, so the hospitals wanted to be taxed. The unwanted taxes were also raised, and plenty of Republicans were unhappy.

I believe that raising taxes in this manner is not equivalent to stripping effective collective bargaining rights from public employees, selling state power plants in no-bid contracts, restructuring badger care so that an appointee makes all eligibility decisions instead of the legislature, allowing companies to pollute wetlands, expanding the Milwaukee voucher program without requiring equivalent testing, and all of the other inflammatory craziness that the Walker bill contains.

Unlike Walker's BRB, all of the representatives were allowed to vote when approving the Doyle budget repair. The Democrats did not try to vote before the Republicans arrived, and I can't seem to find this specific data, but I don't think that their microphones were turned off. furthermore, I believe that Doyle had many influences for his budget repair bill, but there is no Democratic equivalent to the ALEC which is a collaborative effort between owners of large corporations and republican lawmakers to draft "model legislation" which is then promoted by the republican lawmakers around the country. Walker's Budget repair Bill is full of Alec-inspired legislation.

The Doyle BRB, though far from perfect, was not nearly as divisive or far reaching as the Walker BRB. Raising taxes on capitol gains by 60% as well as increasing income taxes for the wealth(over 225K) to 7.75% was not as far-reaching as stripping effective collective bargaining from public employees.

Finally, at some point this debate becomes a "my value" versus "your values" situation. I believe that people are sincere when they say that such-and-such legislation reflects their culture, beliefs, and core values.
I do not believe in moral relativism. I believe that people can be manipulated and that there are and have been a lot of really bad ideas in the world that have been excused as culture and heritage. I believe that promoting the interests of the powerful and wealthy at the expense of the poor and colored is wrong.