Chickens are coming home to roost

     I wrote in this space on Dec. 22, 2010, that another budget crisis was looming; the shortfall of state and municipal funding for employee pensions would become another battleground.
     Fast forward to what's going on now in Wisconsin, New Jersey and a few other states. Correction: Fast forward to the attention that the problem is finally getting. Legislators have left the state to avoid being forced to provide the quorum on a vote they don't want to lose, which would eviscerate the power of government employee unions. The vote is up for action because the newly elected conservatives are doing what they think they have to in order to meet demands of the voters to cut spending and lower taxes, now.
     How did this mess happen?
     As I wrote in December, governments large and small have over promised and underfunded pension plans for government employees for years. The chickens have come home to roost, because you can't keep adding retirees to the list of takers without adding others to the list of providers.
     That's reality, perception or not. And I will get back to that simplistic concept that perception is reality in a moment.
     For years, the leaders of unions and government managers have pushed perceptions. Teachers and other government employees were recruited with the promises of good benefits packages and retirement plans and job security in lieu of the higher salaries that their college educations might have been worth in private industry. To be honest, many politicians exploited the fact that many teachers got into the profession because they were idealistic about making a difference in the lives of young people. We may not pay much, but this is an honorable profession, a great place to live and raise a family, so pass on the cash and wait for the pension, vacation time, etc.
     That got the teacher vote at election time. But in order to get the taxpayer vote, the same politicians chose to ignore the looming bill for those benefit packages.
     Perception was that all was rosy, but the reality was that it can't continue.
     Now the new perception in vogue is that you can turn on all those years of ignoring the realities and change everything right now. Emboldened by the tea party's simplistic but vote-getting slogans, the new boys and girls in office are once again acting without thought for the eventual consequences.  Here, in Maryland, as well as Wisconsin, and all the other places wherever there are showboating leaders, pro-union or pro-taxcutters, there is far too much willingness to pander to the base rather than work things through. The rhetoric is running on the fumes of futility on the part of the teachers' unions, and on the heady ether of arrogance by those still savoring political victory.
     The smell of success will give way, eventually, to having to deal with realities again. The solutions to the problems facing us in funding public work will not be found in locking ourselves in to demagogic policies, like super majorities to raise funds, but simple majorities to cut spending.  That perception of reality as espoused by Commissioners Haven Shoemaker and Richard Rothschild will not hold up in time. Dave Roush said so, but it fell on deaf ears, both on the third floor of the county office building and in the conservative-held bastion of Fortress Carroll.
     Perception is not always reality; in fact, it rarely is. Perception can be created, defended, chosen by popular demand and exploited, but reality eventually presents itself without artifice, and it is then that you see what leadership requires.