Weirdness in Madison

In spite of all the political weirdness in Madison, I will offer you a bowl of sanity with a fine cream of chicken, wild rice and shitake mushroom soup.

For this you will need:

2 qts. Full Bodied Chicken Broth

4 oz Wild Rice

1 Large Onion finely diced

3 cup Diced Chicken

½ cup Cream

4 oz Fresh Shitake Mushroom sliced (8 oz would be better)

½ tsp Paprika

¼ tsp Thyme

2 Tbs Butter

2 Tbs Flour

This recipe begins with a full bodied chicken broth. I was fortunate to have the left over carcass from a roasted pasture raised chicken on hand. I simmered this in one quart of water and one quart of low sodium canned chicken broth for two hours until the meat was falling from the bones, but had not been rendered into tasteless mush.

I picked the bones clean and returned them to the pot and let the broth simmer for another hour. The meat from the carcass, wings and neck amounted to three cups.  There are other roads to two quarts of rich chicken broth and three cups of meat. My pasture raised chicken was a four dollar a pound gift. I did not want any of it to go to waste. In the end this chicken was a roast chicken diner for four, soup for six and three sandwiches.

In any case, with two quarts of rich broth at hand, add the wild rice, shitake mushrooms, diced onion, thyme and paprika. Bring to a hard boil, cover, reduce heat to low and simmer, about and hour, until the rice softens and expands. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a sauce pan over a medium burner then mix in the flour and allow it to brown slightly into a blond roux.

When the rice has cooked bring the soup to a boil, add the roux and cream to thicken it, then add the chicken to finish. Adjust seasoning and serve.  The result is a very rich and savory soup. In that there is sanity.

As for the madness in Madison, at issue is a projected $3.5 billion shortfall in the next biennial budget or just over 5% of the roughly $60 billion the government is on track to spend over the next two years. It’s not a big deal, except it is a structural deficit that the state has encountered every budget session for the past ten years or so. In the past it had been closed though a combination of tax increases, borrowing and wonderfully creative accounting.

The current governor campaigned on specifically on eliminating this structural deficit without new taxes or more debt. In the 2010 election the governorship and both houses of the legislature went from Democratic to Republican control. Much of the weirdness in Madison over the past two weeks has been the result of an insane denial of the new political reality and is a temper tantrum if you will.

But there is deeper insanity. That is the economic reality that few of us will acknowledge. In this blog I’ve tended to view things from the perspective of households. I believe households are foundation upon which so much rests.

There are roughly 2 million households in Wisconsin. At $30 billion a year, the state is spending roughly $15 thousand dollars per household. Add to that local property taxes and that number begins to approach 20 thousand. Given that there are just under 115 million households in the US. At $4.5 trillion a year, the federal government is spending another $34 thousand per household per year. 11 thousand of that is barrowed on our behalf.

The median household income in the US is around $50 thousand per year. Given that reality, temper tantrums simply will not do.