Tom Barrett and Mark Neumann set new speed records last week, trashing Scott Walker’s proposal to eliminate 4,000 vacant state government jobs. Barrett called the idea a “gimmick” and Neumann dusted off his math teacher credentials to ridicule a plan for recovering money not being spent in the first place.
But the joke is on them. As is common among candidates who aren’t getting traction, Barrett and Neumann overlooked two things: Walker doing his homework and crafty Doyle administration bookkeeping.
The vacant positions, it turns out, are a sort of slush fund. They’re authorized in the state budget and money is appropriated to fill them. When they go unfilled - whether by accident or by design - the governor orders agencies to lapse the money to the general fund to pay for other state spending.
Big-government advocates would call this a win-win. State budgets are built by assuming a percentage increase over previous spending, and phantom positions assure continuing growth of an agency’s funding base while making more money available for who-knows-what.
Walker’s plan would strike a blow against state government’s pervasive practice of collecting money for one purpose and spending it for another, while chipping away at the recurring structural deficit in state budgets.
The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau realistically has to include the state’s obligation to fund all authorized positions when it calculates whether the budget is balanced. Thus last week’s announcement that the next budget cycle begins with a $2.5 billion deficit is based partly on salary and benefits for thousands of nonexistent state employees. De-authorizing those positions would be a start at addressing the structural deficit.
It would also mean tougher choices in spending areas that could no longer lean on money from phantom jobs. Those who prefer not knowing where your tax dollars really go, raise your hands.
Don't Touch My Train!
The scramble for money to fix Milwaukee’s deteriorating Hoan Bridge offers an interesting look at how liberals defend their priorities.
Last week, County Exec
Scott Walker and two
Milwaukee Democrats, State Sen. Jeff Plale and State Rep. Christine Sinicki, suggested shifting money to fix the deteriorating Hoan Bridge from the $810 million federal “stimulus” for car-speed Milwaukee-Madison train.
Governor Doyle instantly denounced the idea as absurd.
Walker has said the rail project is toast if he’s elected governor.
And Doyle knows the only chance for his train is to get the state deeply committed to heavy spending, hoping future leaders will blink at the prospect of killing the project only to be accused of wasting what was already wasted.
Mayor Barrett joined in with a request to use new federal highway aids that have magically appeared, and—SURPRISE!—a Madison Democrat in the Assembly called for new transportation taxes.
But perhaps the sharpest insight into what drives things like the train (almost) nobody wants can be found in Terry McGowan’s defense of the rail project against any funding shift. McGowan, business manager for Local 139 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, was quoted in Milwaukee’s Daily Reporter offering his reason why hapless taxpayers should be stuck with car-speed rail:
“I’ve got a lot of bridge-builders out of work. I was glad to see the high-speed money come in, because there’s a long, 1.3-mile bridge proposed on that route, which would be great for us.”
Less damage would be done if they just built a bridge over a cornfield someplace, and the rest of us weren’t burdened with the train.
The American Nightmare
If building economic and family security through home ownership is the American Dream, what do you call it when you’re taxed harder for owning a home, even as it loses value?
Lots of Wisconsin residents are confronting that question, with the tattered economy pushing down residential property values and local governments increasing levies to keep their revenue stream intact.
Last week the nonpartisan Public Policy Forum released a
report showing local governments across seven counties in southeast Wisconsin responded to the shrinkage of taxpayers’ wealth by claiming a bigger share of it.
To quote the report, ”For the first time since the Forum began analyzing property values in the region in 1992, those values declined. Yet, even with this decline, the gross tax levy for southeast Wisconsin increased 3.9 percent from 2009 to 2010. The increase was made possible by a significant increase in the aggregated gross tax rate for all municipalities and school districts in the region, from $19.34 per $1,000 of property value in 2009 to $20.36 in 2010.”
A warning sign is that the erosion of values afflicted 28 area municipalities from 2007 to 2008, and 95 from 2008 to 2009. That trend—virtually guaranteed to continue unless the economy recovers convincingly—will have taxing jurisdictions looking for rate increases in subsequent years.
The Forum points out “a gulf between an increasing need for government services and decreasing availability of tax resources” and then, regrettably, concludes this calls for “renewed debate and discussion of revenue diversification for counties, municipalities and school districts in Wisconsin.”
Translation: “creative new ways to hit up the same taxpayers for even more money on the pretext of making the property tax go away.”
If you wonder how well that would work, remember it’s how Wisconsin got an income tax and, half a century later, a sales tax. Nice being rid of the property tax, isn’t it?
