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• A duty, promise, or other obligation by which one is bound.
  
• A sum of money paid as bail or surety.
  
• A certificate of debt issued by a government or corporation guaranteeing payment of the original investment plus interest by a specified future date.

Not an exhaustive list of definitions, but one that contains the germ of our state’s budgetary dilemma. Diamond Jim Doyle’s bond to the teachers union trumped his bond to voters, causing him to bond our tobacco bond as a bond on future bonds, bonding us to our pattern of bonding prior bonds we bonded as bond for our bonds.

Gov. McCallum engineered his original tobacco securitization bond with the same zeal as the 19th Century French built the first levies for New Orleans. But clever levies don’t end the problem of rising water, any more than bonding solves rising debt. You don’t create debt to pay off debt. New Orleans’ first levies were 3 feet high. Now they are 24-50 feet high. Talk about compound interest.

Now Gov. James Bond wants to re-bond the tobacco bonds and spend the proceeds for things like his BadgerCare Plus expansion -- creating ongoing expenses with one-time revenue.

And the municipal bonds market stinks right now. This is not the time to be selling bonds. Call Citizens for Responsible Government! Call Americans for Tax Reform! Call Stephen Biskupic! Call the FBI! Call Gov. Spitz… (hmm… maybe not!). Gov. James Bond is trying to reverse mortgage our state!

Governor Doyle wants us to believe he is a deficit whittler. “Just like any real solution to a budget gap, this plan cuts spending and looks for good sources of revenue,” Gov. Doyle said, announcing his budget repair bill, “and it does it by protecting priorities like education, health care, and job creation while not raising taxes. The earlier it can be enacted, the more good it will do.” Maybe he caught audacity of hope from his buddy Barack. Hope is infectious, I hear. But even the audacious Count Dracula never hoped to suck blood from his victims’ great-grandchildren.

And Gov. Doyle’s hospital tax is more hopeful audacity – hoping to leverage a boatload of federal dollars that are “just sitting there.” Sen. Mike Ellis said it straight: “Today, the federal budget has a deficit of as much as $550 billion.… To get that ‘free money’ from the federal government, the government will have to borrow it.”

More audacity? Gov. Bond’s budget ‘repair’ bill borrows $257 million to backfill funds filched from the transportation fund! Even our beloved Tommy Thompson, who was no stranger to government spending, never tapped a segregated fund for general purposes. Some things are sacred.

We’re broke and Doyle’s draining our savings into his teacher pals’ pockets, tossing another IOU in the Transportation Fund, and declaring victory! And just to add a little bling-bling, even our Assembly Republican allies, local government friends, agreed with Gov. Doyle to delay a $125 million school aid payment – another budget balanced on an accounting trick. What’s next? Delaying shared revenue payments? Don’t think the city and county fiscal administrators I spoke with, haven’t posited this potential fiscal foible.

Politicians will not or can not make the critical spending choices. So we edge closer to bonding to make our bond payments.

Gov. Bond, James Bond. Licensed to kill … our credit rating. What if Wisconsin really needed the money and no one would buy our bonds for a reasonable rate, what do we do? “Hello, Payday Lenders, Gov. James Bond here and I need $200 million tomorrow. 200% interest? If that’s the best you can do …” Better yet, Governor, you can just call ‘Credit Report(dot)com.’

Local government should throw up their hands in an All-American tax revolt, only Gov. Doyle’s got their hands tied behind their backs - in Gov. James Bondage.

Richard Parins is the President of the Brown County Taxpayers Association.

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