The Walker way: Don't pay, blame Ament

As Milwaukee County exec, Scott Walker's budget philosophy is simple: To hold down taxes, just don't pay the bills. Joel McNally explains in the Shepherd Express:

Walker's philosophy of government is incredibly simple: Not paying your bills is easy. It's coming up with the money to pay your bills that's hard.

In politics, coming up with the money to pay your bills is not only hard, but it also makes you very unpopular. The way government pays its bills is by raising taxes. And politicians who raise taxes are unpopular.

The last thing Walker wants to do is raise taxes and be unpopular when he's running for governor. So he submitted a county budget that doesn't raise property taxes one bit.

Walker's budget also leaves out the money to pay for a few little things. It shortchanges the amount needed to fund the county pension system by $27 million. It also leaves out money to pay 25% of the staff for the county's courts...

The other guiding principle of a Walker administration is to point fingers, blame someone else, and never take any responsibility yourself. Former County Exec Tom Ament lost his job -- and Walker won it -- because of a pension scandal. Back to McNally:

Even though Walker has been county executive since 2002, he still likes to pretend Ament is sneaking into his office at night and messing everything up.

When Walker submitted his latest budget, he explained that he wasn't providing enough money for the pension system because he didn't want the "horrific" pensions passed under Ament to force cuts in other crucial county services.

But the reason the pension system needs so much money is not just the pension benefits approved under Ament. It's also the fact that Walker himself underfunded the pension system in previous budgets to avoid raising taxes.

This isn't the first time deadbeat Walker has failed to pay his bills. Now those bills are coming back to him with all kinds of penalties and interest. It's a downward spiral that eventually leads to what Bruce Springsteen calls "debts no honest man can pay."

One of the more compelling reasons for Walker to run for governor is to try to beat it out of town before this entire shaky financial house of cards comes tumbling down.