Walker, GOP legislators play the big cut/small back fill $$ game

[Updated 5:28 p.m.] There it is again - - that phony budgeting game played so well by GOP elected officials in the name of trimming budgets: Walker announces a major state budget cut - - for the UW system, for example - -  then GOP legislators save the day by putting back a small portion of the cut and the budget-cutters come out as heroes.

Like here:

UW cut trimmed but tenure, shared governance changes infuriate faculty

And here:

GOP plan reduces cuts to UW System funding

Yes, thank goodness the GOP had a plan!

The stories below the headlines are rich in detail, but many people look only at the headlines, and readers' conclusions could easily be, 'Hey, good for the GOP. Their 'plan' is helping out poor old Bucky.'

And it's much like the Walkerites' plan to slightly raise K-12 public school funding which Walker had proposed cutting - - though the proposed legislative increase is not to the level Walker cut in his first budget, with his legislative allies' enthusiastic approval.

That cut was the largest in the nation at the time, by some estimates

And this proposed slight increase heroically inserted Friday into the budget by GOP legislators will be negated by their fresh, short-to-long term budgetary transfer of gobs of public education dollars to so-called choice, private and parochial schools, the legislature's non-partisan analysts have determined.

Thank goodness the GOP had a k-12 education plan, too.

Update - - Don't forget this version of Walker's game: Invite people to a news conference announcing your expansion of a plan to assist seniors and the disabled - - but leave out of the announcement that the feds forced you to do it. True story, circa 2011.

I'd said a couple of weeks ago his shell game could continue because Walker played it when he was Milwaukee County Executive.

He'd heroically budget cuts - - honoring taxpayers - - and then the County Board would try as best it could to finance a restoration.

Walker would say after the budget was approved that he'd continued an unbroken string of budgets that froze taxing and spending, and then he'd heroically submit his next budget based on the budget which the Board had increased.

As I'd written recently about his current scorched-earth budget:

Here's how he plays the game: He deeply cuts a program - - this time, state educational TV, and there have been others (in the last budget, a smidgen returned to schools after budget #1's huge cuts), and we're not done yet - - and the legislators heroically add back a portion. 

He gets to play the arch-fiscal conservative and perennially campaigning 'friend-of-the-taxpayer,' the legislators play the 'moderates, and the public, their programs and the staffers get the shaft.

The larger game - - promoting a brain drain from Wisconsin campuses among faculty and students believed to be leftist commies, and Democrats.

Thank goodness the GOP has a plan for that!