State worries

This time of year I'm usually excited about planning for the next year. Vacations, diet goals, hobbies, etc. However, our newly elected VERY conservative governor has his red pen poised to drastically slash the state budget deficit. He's made it clear he'll do it mostly on the backs of state workers. He thinks we're all grossly overpaid and pampered compared to the private sector. Not true for salary in a vast percentage of cases. Yes, our benefits are nice, but that's why we stick around given the comparatively crappy salary. His current proposal has a furlough and additional benefits contribution that would result in a net 25% pay loss for state employees. That's 25% off both Chris's paycheck and mine.

The only shining light is that the UW is pushing for more autonomy given the shrinking contribution the state makes to the UW budget. Less than 12% of the UW budget is funded by the state, yet the control the entire UW budget and many of the policies. Running a research intensive university like a state agency doesn't work for many reasons. Our chancellor's push for more independence has some drawbacks...

• that ~10% gap would need to be made up, but could be done via some cost savings by not being locked into state contracts for supplies-many of which currently cost a lot more because they are obscure research supplies that no other state agency uses.
• less "cohesiveness" with the state to promote the university
• a hit for unions, as they'd have less influence at the UW...and some would argue this would be bad for workers.
• tution increases wouldn't need to be approved by the legislature. This could and possibly should concern students.

The good:

• wouldn't be at the whim of the current legislature on what kind of research we could do (e.g., stem cells)
• wouldn't be on nonsense furloughs (e.g., 80% of my position comes from federal grant funds or private research foundations, yet I'm on the same furlough as other employees...frankly, grant agencies aren't happy about the Wisconsin situation and it's not saving the state much money. A sensible solution would've been to prorate the amount of furlough taken according to how much of the position is from state funding).
• could better adjust faculty compensation to be competitive with other Big 10 and competing schools. We are losing a lot of faculty and that's a dangerous thing for a research intensive university in particular.

I've rambled enough. I'm just fretting and feel like life is on hold until after the new year.