Next Walker Budget: Two More Years Of Rightwing Rule

Not much reason to tune in tomorrow night and watch Scott Walker deliver his 2013-'15 budget address, though we'll still go through the document line-by-line looking for the landmines hidden in bureaucratese or footnotes that confer a generous benefit to a special interest or a sucker punch to the powerless and the unsuspecting.

Walker has drained the speech of drama by announcing or leaking what his side will call reforms and initiatives, and the rest of us see as dropping another bomb on important services, middle-class priorities and basic fairness that used to be part of The Wisconsin Idea:

*  Health care for lower-income Wisconsinites: Walker turned down available federal funding for a Medicaid expansion. Some persons will be newly covered by a state program, but more will miss the federal expansion to satisfy the right's ideological need to teach the poor a lesson.

*  Public schools will get a few new pennies after two years of massive cuts, while home-based, private and charter schools free of union teachers get a taxpayer-paid windfall. Local boards and government bodies will try and make up some of the shortfall, but state-imposed caps will continue the Grover Norquistian suffocation of public education that is job-one in Walker's privatized world.

*  Speaking of jobs: Walker will toss out a symbolic cut in personal income taxes - - putting something like an extra $2 a week into your pocket.

And he'll make some effort to brew that extra cup of coffee into some kind of Reaganesque free-market achievement, but any fair assessment of Walker's first two years in office will rate his leadership on employment growth - - especially that absurd, 250,000 new jobs campaign PR pledge - - an abject, caffeine-free failure.

Walker will twist data, manipulate terminology and point self-servingly to governing through economic "uncertainties," like Act 10 protests, Obamacare, fear of the fiscal cliff or the defeat of an environmentally-crippling mining bill he still oversells as a real, and real time job-creator - - but the damage he inflicted on the purchasing power of thousands of public employees with Act 10 benefit cuts and their multiplier effects is a major factor in the state's relatively-slow job growth and recovery.

*  The highway lobby - - including contractors and compliant politicians who get back a dollop of highway expansion dollars in campaign donations - - is ticketed to receive fresh billions to overbuild in an era of declining driving.

And holding a yard sale to pay for some of the unneeded concrete.

Left at the curb: local transit systems, which disproportionately serve urban minorities, lower-income citizens, the elderly, and students.

Whether you're without a car in Milwaukee and cannot access work in Waukesha or Washington County, or you're a low-income woman now hours away from a Planned Parenthood clinic Walker's ideology-first spending is closing, or you teach in an urban school system, the message is the same:

There's nothing compassionate about the conservatives running Wisconsin right now.