…is only disastrous for unions:

…for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen.

Of course, Wisconsin unions had offered to make benefit concessions during the budget fight. Wouldn’t Kaukauna’s money problems have been solved if Walker had just accepted those concessions and not demanded cutbacks in collective bargaining powers?

“The monetary part of it is not the entire issue,” says Arnoldussen, a political independent who won a spot on the board in a nonpartisan election. Indeed, some of the most important improvements in Kaukauna’s outlook are because of the new limits on collective bargaining.

It will be interesting to see if stories like this appear in Wisconsin media, particularly in Madison.

…leavin’ on a jet plane:

…the clumsy attempt at class warfare probably wasn’t even Obama’s most disheartening moment during the presser. Several others were at least equally as bad…

But about what one would expect from someone so completely lacking experience or competence for the job: our Class Warrior in Chief.

[Update a few minutes later]

The president’s peculiar press conference:

It all had the feel of a childish tantrum by a person who desperately wishes he were living in a different reality—one in which he is the heroic man of action and his opponents are irresponsible and weak. But the fact is, the president and congressional Democrats have so far utterly failed to offer any path out of our fiscal problems—problems that they have greatly exacerbated. The president proposed a budget in February that would have increased the deficit, and then he retracted it in April and proposed nothing in particular in its place. Senate Democrats have not proposed a budget in two years; they now suggest they finally have one, though apparently it won’t really be brought to a vote. Republicans, meanwhile, have proposed a specific path out of our fiscal mess—averting a debt crisis and setting the budget on a course toward balance through discretionary cuts, budget-process reforms, and gradual but significant entitlement reforms. Rather than negotiate over that budget, the president has chosen to play the demagogue, simultaneously insisting that the budget offers nothing and that it goes too far in cutting government services (medical research, food inspectors, and the weather service are apparently in particular danger, he said yesterday, providing a kind of Salvador Dali map of post-modern lifestyle liberalism).

Now, having added about $5 trillion to the national debt since taking office (nearly doubling the debt), the president wants permission to add another $2 trillion, and he’s upset that rather than being given that permission together with a set of class-warfare tax hikes he is being asked to agree to some spending, budget, and entitlement reforms in return for that permission. Entitlements—the chief drivers of the even greater explosion of debt now coming at us—appear to be off the table altogether as far as he’s concerned. And while the president insists that failing to meet the August 2 debt-limit deadline would unleash a train of calamities not seen since the book of Job, he seems to be willing to risk them all in order to enact a set of tax increases that would yield largely trivial sums of revenue and whose only plausible justification could be the political appeal of envy.

It’s what class warriors do.