Math v. Vitriol

With Wisconsin lost, all that is left for the Left to do is mewl and spit vitriol.
This is the perfect time for Conservatives to take the high ground, and win the day with calm, common sense, and actual honest-to-God numbers.

As Matt Welch argues over at Reason, "No amount of crying over evil Scott Walker will help governments fix their bleeding balance sheets."

Get Serious About Governing, Democrats

  [...]   Wisconsin has been the front line of America's Democrat vs. Republican, blue vs. red rhetorical war for 16 months now, ever since newly elected Republican governor Scott Walker pushed through a budget repair bill that withdrew government from the union dues-collecting business for public employees and removed the collective bargaining power of most government unions, an act that triggered historic public protests. So on the morning after Walker survived a labor-led recall election by a higher margin than he originally won office in 2010, there were plenty on the left grumbling darkly about the Dark Lord rising over our once-free country. 

At The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson compared Walker's actions to a "jihad" and suggested (paradoxically) that a post-union labor movement might just resort to rioting. Walker "wins one for the plutocrats," Joan Walsh lamented at Salon, without really explaining how the monocle-wearers could win 38 percent of the union vote. 

Such demonization was of a piece with leftish commentary in the run-up to the recall. Esquire's Charles P. Pierce described Walker as a "goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin," which would now be subject to "the habits of oligarchy." Even more grossly, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in The Washington Post that Walker's policies were intended to "cleanse the electorate of people who don’t look, earn or think like him."    

[...]    

So, progressives: What is the right percentage of a government budget to be spent on public sector pensions? If this requires that cities and states simply need to come up with bigger budgets (through increased taxes) precisely how much bigger would be appropriate? If you don't want to increase overall budgets, what other government services are you willing to cut?    

[...]    

As long as Democrats keep dodging these questions, no amount of plutocrat-baiting will reverse their political fortunes. Governments at all levels are out of money. Progressives are going to have to come up with a better response to that than saying "we were robbed."

Indeed....