In response, President Obama, national Democrats and their union allies have gone on the attack, helping organize protests that have flooded the Wisconsin capitol and shutdown public schools in Milwaukee and Madison. They’re even lending moral support to the state Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to avoid a vote.

The nation’s governors don’t need a lecture from a President who has never balanced a budget. On both the federal and state level, we need leaders who will make the tough decisions and stand up to the public employees unions.

As a conservative governor in a liberal state, I regularly battled with the public employees union and am familiar with the sort of tactics we’re seeing in Madison. When I proposed reforms to public employees’ benefits, we had protests and one of the longest transit strikes in American history. But we won in Minnesota because average taxpayers supported the reforms – and I’m confident that Governor Walker will win in Wisconsin.

Decades of overpromising and fiscal malpractice by government officials have created unfunded public employee benefit liabilities of more than $3 trillion. We must bring public employee compensation back in line with the private sector and reduce the overall size of the federal civilian workforce. President Obama has paid lip service to this with proposed spending freezes, but real reform means actually shrinking government and ending the pay premium for public employees.

We must also reform excessive pay and pensions for public employees. For example, in Minnesota, bus drivers demanded lifetime health-care benefits after working just 15 years. (I refused – and they went on a 44-day strike before conceding.) Ultimately, we need to end defined-benefit retirement plans for government employees in favor of the clarity and predictability of defined-contribution models such as 401(k) plans. This alone can save taxpayers trillions of dollars.

The gig is up for public employee groups who demand better benefits than the taxpayers who are paying the bill. I’m confident Governor Walker’s reforms will succeed in Wisconsin. Stand strong, Scott — average taxpayers everywhere are rooting for you. Now is the time for every freedom-loving American to stand with Gov. Walker and show their support for his efforts to bring fiscal sanity back to state government.

Today, the federal government owns or controls the nation’s largest insurance company, two of the three American auto manufacturing companies, the two entities that hold a majority of our mortgages, the entire student loan industry, wide swaths of the banking industry and now a major portion of the American health care delivery system.

Think about it. With his individual mandate, President Barack Obama and the federal government are now forcing Americans to buy a good or service simply for no other reason than they are alive. Their reform will lead to higher taxes and higher premiums – and not reduce the exploding health care costs that are the underlying problem of America’s health care system.

Let me put it bluntly: America is headed in the wrong direction.

We need to help good people running for office who understand that the federal government is overreaching and are willing to stand up and say, “Enough!” I’ve set up my Freedom First PAC to help elect those sorts of candidates to Congress this year.

The folks I’m talking with around the country tell me they’re ready to fight back against this massive expansion of the federal government. If you agree with them, I invite you to join me during my Facebook Town Hall on Wednesday night at 7:15 PM Eastern. I’m going to talk for a few minutes about some of the great candidates I’m supporting in 2010 and then I’m going to ask to hear directly from you. You’re going to get a chance to nominate conservative candidates for federal office to be enrolled in the Freedom First PAC’s fundraising program. My hope is that this program will give the grassroots unprecedented influence over the 2010 election.

I hope you will join me on Facebook Wednesday night at 7:15 PM Eastern. Bring your energy and your best ideas.

 Senate Democrats are pushing a vote on the 1,000-page bill now because the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the bill cost “only” $829 billion over the next 10 years. In truth, the bill raises taxes immediately, but the benefits do not kick in for another four years, so the 10-year numbers are distorted. This is an expensive experiment that cuts Medicare, and exacerbates state government budget problems by dramatically expanding Medicaid without providing additional funding.

How do the Democrats propose to pay for the rest of the new spending? There are a massive amount of tax increases in the bill, including over $200 billion in tax increases on insurance premiums, new taxes on individuals and employers, and over $120 billion in new taxes on medical device makers and other health care businesses.  All of these tax increases concern me, but the latter category does so especially: My state is the home of Medtronic, Boston Scientific, 3M, St. Jude Medical and other medical technology makers that employ 60,000 Minnesotans and save and improve countless lives. Increasing taxes on these businesses would not only be an unwise burden on these employers, but would siphon money otherwise spent on research and development.  It would also risk the cost of increased taxes being passed on, directly or indirectly, to those who rely on such devices or who cover their cost.

The Democrats are proposing these tax increases to offset the costs of mandating and subsidizing the purchase of health care by every American. Expanding health care access to all Americans is an admirable goal and one that I share – but one that also cannot be accomplished without addressing the root cause of America’s health care crisis, something the Baucus bill fails to do.

Expanding access is important, but achieving that goal, and doing so in a fiscally sound manner, requires that we focus on the forces driving up health care costs. Otherwise costs will continue to grow in an unsustainable way, and, as we’ve seen in other states, government mandates will only shift the burden of exploding costs onto the shoulders of taxpayers and ordinary Americans unable to cover them.

There are many bipartisan ideas that would actually cut health care costs, like medical liability reform, allowing employees to keep their insurance when they switch jobs, standardizing health information technology, and allowing consumers to purchase insurance across state lines.  In Minnesota, we’ve passed reforms that made price and quality more transparent for patients, moving the health care system towards paying for and achieving better health care outcomes, and empowering patients themselves to help drive down costs.

Congress should look at what we are doing in Minnesota, among the healthiest states in the nation, where we have the highest concentration of health savings accounts in the country and other market-based reforms that are containing costs. A vote for the Baucus bill today is a move in the opposite direction – towards higher premiums, higher taxes, and more government.

UPDATE: Today I rolled out a plan in Minnesota to combat the high cost of health care in a way that improves quality and costs for patients and taxpayers. You can read more about it here.