Rep. Mark Green refuses to even address the big problems

Rep. Mark Green continues to offer 'plans' that are not even serious. His latest idea would be to give back-to-school shoppers a tax free shopping day for school items. However, he shouldn't be taken seriously since he offers no items out of the state budget that he would cut to pay for this loss of tax revenue.

Of course that is how he has helped Congress pile up a debt and deficit faster than anyone thought possible so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

In his press release announcing this idea Green says:

"A tax holiday will put money back into the pockets of students and parents trying to make ends meet while their paychecks don't seem to be keeping up with increasing costs."

Here's an idea. How about you take steps to fix that later part of that sentence Rep. Green? How about you vote to help working families increase their paychecks?

For example, Green could have voted to increase the minimum wage one of the eight times that he voted against it before he decided that in order for those making minimum wage to get an increase, Paris Hilton and the children of Bill Gates needed to have millions more in their pocket first. (And he didn't offer a way to pay for this $268 billion tax break for the wealthiest of the wealthy - see a pattern here?)

Or how about offering the working families of Wisconsin health care as good as the plan that the taxpayers pay for your family to have each year instead of offering up only health care savings accounts (HSA) as a 'plan'? HSAs not only will do almost nothing to reduce health care costs, they are financially out of reach for most of the people that are struggling with health care costs. But they do provide a tax break for those that need help with health care costs the least.

Or maybe while Green was in Congress he could have offered a plan to deal with the increasing pay gap between women and men?

Maybe instead of voting for an ill-conceived war that has turned into a bloody occupation that also drains our economy of billions of dollars, Rep. Green could have proposed or supported a plan to invest that money in our country so wages would not continue to decline.

With large deficits looming and a slowdown in debt-driven consumer spending apparently in the making, U.S. economic growth needs a new foundation. Higher wages must form that foundation. Unfortunately, average wages have a lot of catching up to do. After accounting for inflation, weekly wages dropped for the past three years in a row, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). These decreases were enough to erase much of the modest wage gains made in prior years. By December 2005, inflation adjusted weekly wages were lower than at the end of the last recession in November 2001 and only 0.2 percent higher than at the end of the last business cycle in March 2001. Stronger wage growth would fuel renewed expansion in consumption and would do so on a more sustainable basis.

All of the funding spent on the war and paying for the interest on the deficit could help address this problem if it was spent on our universities, infrastructure and business start-ups.

Rep. Mark Green could have chosen to lay out a plan to address the real problem in his sentence above. Instead, he chose to propose a cheap political stunt that isn't even well thought out financially, even though he spends his much of his time complaining about state budget problems.

A serious candidate should offer the voters more before election day.