and we are proud that you think so as well and he did a lot of the things that you have tried to do in wisconsin by executive order and as you said very clearly the state is in good fiscal condition to get cost containment right and that is a real challenge as you know we are then going to figure out the best publicly financed method to pay for it and that decision will be made in two thousand and thirteen mister burton are you familiar with the situation in tennessee with their government was going to control the health care and the expenditures and that sort of thing governor shumlin well i can tell you that i dont study massachusetts and other states as much as i study vermont and frankly we have already done that  we have doctor dynasaur which covers all our children the republican governor jim douglas passed catamount which covers you up to three hundred percent of poverty with a great benefits package we have vhap vermont health access so no one has better access i dont believe with the exception of maybe massachusetts than the state of vermont so my challenge is that we have done access we now have a cost problem they are doubling every ten years it is driving businesses and middle class americans who are paying more and more money for less and less pockets at a higher rate than they can earn for rising health care costs i pay it as a business person when i give my employees health insurance it is a health care tax rising cost for a tax on business and a huge hindrance to job probably will have a tax increase governor shumlin no we wont have a tax increase what we will do is design a system where we spend less on health care than we are spending now and find a way to pay for it where it follows the individual  isnt required by the employer the tax increase now is coming from the rate at which health care costs are growing about twice of our income that is what we are trying to fix mister burton i understand there is going to be an offset there but how do you make the offset i mean you how the local municipalities in your state who are facing rising costs could possibly have survived without huge property tax increases or other tax increases unless you did what you did  was very happy that you had the perspicacity to hang in there when you had those problems i would just like to ask you now i know this is before the court your supreme court do you have any idea when they are going to make a ruling on an appeal has been made to the supreme court right now very well maybe likely today the circuit court mentioned yesterday they may even by today or tomorrow put forth a ruling on the original issue on the the legislature i have said all along it is not if this will be the law it is when mister burton they are providing a speed reading course for members of congress so they can read two thousand five hundred pages in one twenty four hour period so i am happy that you in wisconsin w reading the bills as i understand it the state and local governments you asked the employees to contribute five point eight percent to their pensions and twelve six percent to their health care premiums and the current private sector employees are paying about twenty percent so what you were talking about was substantially less even though you were having an increase substantially less than what the private sector was paying  middle class taxpayers in our state are paying more and they are also on top of that paying for the government that  those individuals who are represented employees this would allow us to do that not only at the state level but ultimately at the local level which is particularly important in schools cities towns counties so forth we could pay for performance and that would be exceptional mister burton very good well i see the a contrast in approaches running a state government in hard times and i certainly want you to know that i recognize that there would be great differences between your two states both of you facing something of a backlash governor walker court cases and all the rest of it i do want you to know that i believe you faced a terribly serious situation for a new governor to com faced with what you and for that matter governor shumlin were faced with is nothing to do anything but take seriously there are certainly no more funds from the federal government as your related to unemployment compensation and changes that need to be made in the future or may need to be made we have an unemployment compensation council and both he and ms norton you are the head of the government you had the press conferences you called the shots these people are not going away you would not have to be engaged in negotiation with them or in the details but a simple meeting would that not send a  and unless they believe that their unions have a better relationship i dont know why in the world they would figure that somehow you could jump over them and have a better relationship given what has already happened to them governor walker  practice in the past is to work through the position that mister gracz has right now ms norton all right governor walker i see that you are just where you were it is what happened in the past that led to the most serious breach governors had with his workers in memory let me ask that the state employees voted to accept the two year three percent cut that the teachers are agreeing to three additional years of work before retiring and to contribute a greater percentage of their pay towards their pensions and pensions are at the root of much of the trouble of the states that your state employees association voted to increase the pension contribution by one employees association our state employee union into the office and tell them that i needed to make twelve dollars million worth of additional cuts and i wanted their cooperation through hiring freezes and other methods which are not part of the list of concessions  threaten them if they didnt governor shumlin i absolutely didnt threaten them i said we have to work together to solve this problem and guess what they stood with us and we have made the cuts in fact we have exceeded the twelve million target that we needed to get for this fiscal year my point is i have seen both examples in the last eight years we had a republican governor who never invited the teachers union up to his office and therefore turned to the speaker and myself to get the concessions on the twenty five dollars million from them my point is that  reasonableness compromise common sense that is what the american people are looking for but what they are looking for more than anything is for us to all sit around the table together to solve real problems we have done that in vermont i know that other governors are doing it i think we all would be well use an analogy based on relationships here in the congress you are aware that the congress is considered to be very polarized now the chairman and i are on very different sides when it comes to matters affecting national policy and affecting even the district of columbia but when i have had a disagreement with him while i have not recruited him to my position i have always felt that this was somebody i could talk with and that we would have a civil conversation i am known to be combative sir i represent vote for this congressional resolution coming up so i am not going to tell you what to do but i do want you to know i am in the minority here and whether i was in the minority or the majority and even though we vote often party line we maintain good relationships analogizing that to your situation after you have had a tough fight with a bunch of unions i would want to take the high road and say i am the big guy here i am calling you in this is why i did it i hope things go better in the future and be done with it thank you mister chairman chairman issa i thank the gentlelady we have a vote i do not want to hold the governors over so we have to thank both you gentlemen for not only your patience but your very thoughtful responses i am concerned that there appears to be a systematic attack on american workers and part of that attack seems to be designed to blame them for fiscal challenges facing the states governor shumlin in your testimony you attribute state budget shortfalls not to american workers but to  the greatest economic recession since the great depression as you stated our revenues are down and the need for government services is up is that an accurate not facing at the moment they are not caused by labor unions that is also true for new jersey for ohio and for the other states there was no sharp rise in collective and two thousand and seven no major reforms of the countrys labor laws no dramatic change in how unions organize and yet the state budgets collapsed revenues plummeted taxes had to go up and spending had to go down all across the country blame the banks blame global capital flows blame lax regulation of wall street blame home buyers or home sellers but dont blame the unions not for this recession governor walker how do you respond to that  thank you representative for your question as i mentioned earlier in my testimony i think there are a number of reasons that brought at least wisconsin to a three dollars sixty cents billion deficit one like vermont and other states is the economy no doubt about it you mentioned a bunch of different reasons that acknowledge were a part of the recession i wont get into the details of that but tell you that one significant part without a doubt is the economy and that is why we are working so hard to improve that and show that wisconsin indeed is open for business so future budgets are easier to tackle in our state though beyond that and something i have acknowledged is not a partisan issue it has been democrats and republicans alike in the past have deferred tough decisions for sixteen years the last eight biennial budgets and  goes back before that probably but for at least sixteen years since the state started measuring the structural deficit state lawmakers and past governors have deferred tough decisions by raiding things like the transportation fund or the patient compensation fund in our and in home health care and at the same time gave tax breaks to wealthy corporations how do you justify that position governor walker i would say that is just not true if you look down the line at the budget  proposed the biggest beneficiaries of our budget are middle class taxpayers in the state of wisconsin the biggest tax relief we provide is an absolute freeze on the property tax levy in the state of wisconsin in our budget that affects middle class taxpayers as much as anybody else out there  in terms of the middle class i would contend in our state the middle class are the very people who have been paying the largest share of taxes to pay for the expanse of government in the past if you look at just the numbers three dollars sixty cents billion our reforms save one dollar seventy cents billion that means the rest of that nearly two dollars billion that has to be balanced come from a variety of other areas some of that has to come from a reduction of state aid to local governments but that is because in turn unlike other states that are cutting aids to local governments we chairman the governor and i have a really long history we are friends i am crazy about his kids and his wife but i am not going to spend my five minutes pretending that we agree on anything i am going to start by between what the agencies request and your austere budget so in between there there is a lot of debate about whether or not there is a three dollars sixty cents billion structural deficit you know even when you consider stuff the medicaid payment which was one time only one hundred and sixty nine dollars million two hundred dollars million in that patient compensation fund that the courts say you have to pay back but of course that wasnt even in your budget which reduces revenue for the next fiscal year and in contrast to giving these wealthy people tax breaks you cut the earned income tax credit doubling the taxes on the poorest parents by cutting their earned income tax credit with respect to collective bargaining you know you said in your testimony that folks were running and having a fit to people that you raised you said yourself that the pension fund is ninety nine point six seven percent funded so the question is choice or necessity and in terms of public workers making more money than the private sector that is not true they make eight point two percent less considering their education and training and that is what pension funds are deferred compensations they have bargained for years for less money in order to have a pension which is deferred compensation now let me ask you choice or necessity did you really have to end medicaid benefits for dialysis patients or put waiting lists for disabled people who need home health care what in the world does balancing a budget have to do with your program in milwaukee to expand education vouchers so that the richest person in milwaukee county can take thousand five hundred dollars away from the poorest kids in the state for education what in the world does that have to do with balancing a budget you reinstate the thirty hour work week on welfare recipients and  going to say you gave four hundred and ten dollars million to your favorite fund and your favorite folk you love to the highway people four hundred and ten dollars million governors in the past have raided it for education you took a billion dollars out of education which most governors dont do but you didnt do it for transit there are twelve communities in wisconsin that give twenty four million rides a year that are going to suffer because of what you have done and you know you are going to lose forty million in federal funding because you have taken collective bargaining away and that is against federal law so you know governor i asked the question if you have time to answer state and local transportation there is a transportation prohibition against we have communities in wisconsin that provide public transportation and you have to have public workers collective bargaining agreement right have a lot of unanswered questions but only because many of us spent too much time not asking the questions and in some cases we simply ran out of time so i would ask both the governors if you with the aid of your staff would mind answering some expanding on any answers you gave or providing supplemental information i thank you again this has been great for the committee and i am sure good for those who took the time to watch or to attend with that we stand recessed until about ten minutes after the last