Joe Klein on Wisconsin

As goes Wisconsin...So Goes the Nation, at Time.  He drops this pearl into the story early:

It is good to remember that, in the end, the prairie fire over the rights of public employees is about people like Randall Wentz — and many who are less fortunate than he is: the school-bus drivers, home health care workers and cafeteria workers who, even with union protection, barely make enough to keep their families afloat. It is also good to remember that America's most prosperous time — the period from the 1950s to the '70s — was also when its trade-union movement and its middle class were strongest. That was not a coincidence: the rights and wages won by workers in the industrial turmoil of the 1930s created a consumer class eager to buy every product, from homes to hula hoops, American capitalism could produce.

He spends much of the rest of the article explaining ways in which the public sector unions have abused their power, but closes with this:

"You're arguing this from a good-government standpoint," says Scott Gletty-Syoen, one of the union members who is meeting with me at the Madison tavern. "But do you really think that's what Scott Walker wants? Do you really think that's where we're headed in Wisconsin?"
Fair point. And no, I don't. I think Scott Walker is a reflexive conservative who would probably be trying to bust his public employees' unions even if there were a budget surplus. His views are, in part, a reflection of the antitax fetishism that has become something of a mania in the U.S. If you want first-class public services — especially those, like education, that require real skills — you have to pay for them. (The idea, floated recently by Michigan's governor, that Detroit's schools can function with 60 students in a classroom seems a recipe for continued social disaster in that benighted city.) The existing arrangements between government and its employees clearly need a profound overhaul, but the idea that America can return to the mythic stability and prosperity of 40 years ago without a well-paid middle class, including public employees, seems a very dangerous experiment to undertake.

I have some more wide-ranging opinions on the future of the U.S. and the middle class, which I haven't been able to articulate while this debate has been going on.  I'll try to put them down in words soon, although it will be pretty pessimistic.