State budget:
Like all others, blends pluses and minuses

		Eye on the  Capitol  John Huebscher

One of the Senators for whom I worked years ago once told us, "The state budget has so many things in it any politician worth his salt can justify a vote for it or against it."

His assessment reflected the fact that perfect legislation is a goal that fallible human beings rarely attain. Budgets, which by their nature touch so many different issues, will always represent a mix of sound and unsound judgments, wise choices and ones best adapted at the earliest opportunity.

As good as expected

What can we say about the budget the legislators sent to the governor this year?

Overall, the 2003 budget was as good as could be expected given the fiscal situation facing our state and the nation as a whole. Given decisions made in other legislatures, Wisconsin's relatively generous safety net fared rather well.

Lawmakers spared programs that target benefits to needy persons - Medicaid, BadgerCare, Wisconsin Works, and the community aids program - from major reductions in funding.

Needy families who rely on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program also benefit from budget provisions that make it a bit easier to access the program and for children to remain in the program even if their family income increases by a small amount.

In these respects the budget exercises an "option for the poor," that is difficult, but important in times of fiscal austerity.

Raises questions

At the same time, the budget contains provisions that raise questions for the future.

The budget makes significant reductions in state support to the University of Wisconsin (UW). Some of these will be offset by tuition increases. Proponents of these cuts point out that students attending the UW will still pay the lowest tuition in the Big Ten universities.

While this is true, it is also true that students now pay over one-third the cost of their education, compared to the one-fourth share that students of my generation were asked to contribute.

Citizens may wish to consider if this evolution in policy has affected the affordability of college education for children in working class families.

While the legislature avoided steep cuts in programs that provide aids to schools and local governments, it adjusted the formulas by which aid to local government is calculated in ways that may serve to disadvantage less affluent communities in future years.

The budget includes a "property tax freeze" that will make it difficult for school districts and local governments to increase their local property tax revenues to offset reductions in state aid or to cover costs that exceed the increase in state aid.

This move is likely to be popular with taxpayers and problematic for local officials who believe they should retain flexibility to make local financial decisions and take the political consequences for them.

Those who enjoy debating the "principle of subsidiarity" which holds that decisions should generally be made at the most local level appropriate, can be expected to engage that debate as they consider the merits of the freeze.

Don't know final form

Of course, the final shape of the budget won't be known until Governor Jim Doyle determines how he will use his considerable power to veto parts of appropriations bills to alter the package.

What is certain is that politicians will find enough good and bad in the final product to defend their budget votes.

John Huebscher is executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference.

Power of culture: Undervalued in politics

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

One of the oddities of recent Roman commentary on world events has been the virtually unanimous criticism of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's celebrated argument that the 21st century world will be shaped by a "clash of civilizations."

Professor Huntington is a friend and colleague so perhaps I'm a suspect witness. But ever since Huntington first sketched his proposal in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article, I've been convinced that a good bit of his analysis should commend itself to the Vatican, and indeed to anyone interested in what was once called "Catholic international relations theory."

For Professor Huntington quite agrees with the classic Catholic view that culture is the most potent force in history and that at the heart of culture is cult: what we cherish, honor, and worship.

Power of culture

Many foreign policy analysts undervalue the transformative power of culture. During the Cold War, for example, "realists" insisted that "power" was something you could measure, militarily, economically, and politically. M1 Abrams tanks, Pershing-2 missiles, and a hi-tech economy were, to be sure, measurable forms of "hard power" with real political consequences.

The communist crack-up was accelerated, however, by the "soft power" of aroused convictions, including religious and moral convictions. Those convictions sustained the human rights movements that laid the cultural foundations of civil society and, ultimately, democracy in east central Europe. The Catholic Church played a considerable role in this process.

Sam Huntington is that rarity among academic international relations specialists, a man who takes the power of culture seriously. Surveying the post-Cold War landscape, Huntington saw that the world of the 21st century would be shaped by the dynamism and interaction of different forms of civilization or culture: Western, Islamic, Chinese, Eastern Orthodox, Hindu, Buddhist, Latin American, African, Japanese.

Among other things, Huntington's distinctive analysis challenged those secularization theorists who had argued for decades that, as the world became more "modern," religious conviction would wither as a force in human affairs. Religious conviction, Huntington insisted, would play a large, perhaps even determinative, role in shaping post-Cold War world politics.

Fault-line examination

As Professor Huntington ruefully noted in the book that grew out of his Foreign Affairs essay, his original article ". . . had a generally ignored question mark in its title." A "clash of civilizations" - in the sense of a world of cultural conflicts boiling over into violent confrontations - was a possibility.

But a cataclysmic "clash of civilizations" was not a certainty, and in any event, cultural Armageddon was not a desirable future that Professor Huntington was avidly promoting (as some of his Rome-based critics evidently assumed). What Huntington did insist upon was a careful, empirical appraisal of the cultural or civilizational bases of the fault-lines that were shaping the 21st century world.

Like Huntington's critique of the alchemists of secularization theory, Huntington's analysis about what happens, for good and for ill, when cultures abut each other should commend itself to Catholic students of world politics. "Catholic" means "universal."

The Catholic "presence" in the world is genuinely global in scope. Thus it's inevitable that tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of Catholics are going to find themselves in zones where the tectonic plates of civilizations grate against each other - as the unhappy situations in Nigeria, Sudan, and Indonesia, to take but three examples, make clear.

Looking at hard facts

Huntington's courage in looking these hard facts in the face, disturbing as the view may be, should commend itself to a Church that has long rejected the utopian politics spawned by the left wing of the Protestant Reformation.

Professor Huntington reports that the most controversial phrase in his original article was his reference to Islam's "bloody borders." Yet here, too, facts are unavoidable. Of the three dozen or so armed conflicts in the world today, two-thirds involve Islamic militants, insurgents, or terrorists.

How can a genuine Catholic-Islamic dialogue ignore this? Shouldn't one goal of that dialogue be to strengthen the hand of those Muslims who resist the violent politics of the Islamists and who want to develop an Islamic case for tolerance and pluralism, precisely on Islamic religious and legal grounds?

Sam Huntington's seminal thinking about the dynamics of 21st century history should be critically engaged, not summarily dismissed. To misread Huntington is to miss a lot of contemporary history.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.