But even that’s not the full story here. Public employees aren’t being asked to make a one-time payment. Rather, Walker is proposing to sharply curtail their right to bargain collectively. A cyclical downturn that isn’t their fault, plus an unexpected reversal in Wisconsin’s budget picture that wasn’t their doing, is being used to permanently end their ability to negotiate with their employer what their health insurance should look like.

That’s how you keep a crisis from going to waste: You take a complicated problem that requires the apparent need for bold action and use it to achieve a longtime ideological objective. In this case, permanently weakening public employee unions, a group much loathed by Republicans in general and by the Republican legislators who have to battle them in elections in particular.

If you read Walker’s State of the State address, you can watch him hide the ball on what he’s doing. “Our upcoming budget is built on the premise that we must right-size our government,” he said. “That means reforming public employee benefits -- as well as reforming entitlement programs and reforming the state’s relationship with local governments.” Not a word on his actual proposal, which is to end collective bargaining for benefits.