Budget failure no longer a bipartisan problem
September 25, 2007
Once upon a time, the two houses of the state legislature were governed by different parties. One party wanted to create a large, new program to guarantee universal health care for everyone in Wisconsin, and raise the taxes necessary to pay for it. They came up with an ambitious but politically unlikely plan. The other party wanted to slash funding for our schools and universities, again.
The first party thought they had public support, and that their big election victory gave them a mandate to pass the bills they were elected to pass. The other party thought they lost the last election because of insufficient fealty to the “cut funding for our schools” theory of government, and they were determined to get their groove back.
The result was predictable. The Senate passed a progressive budget. The Assembly passed a conservative one. No one was willing to compromise. If David Broder had lived in Madison, his head would have exploded with glee at the thought of all the vituperative “both sides…” op-ed pieces he could write.
But let’s say the first party offers to drop their Healthy Wisconsin proposal for universal health care. If the other party responds, like Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch, by play-acting a middle management version of Don Corleone — “I am providing you nothing in return” — then it’s no longer a bipartisan problem.
It’s Republican obstructionism, and it would be nice if news outlets in the state would stop pretending that both sides are equally to blame.
September 25th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
I’m not from Wisconsin so I have to ask what happens if no budget is passed?
September 25th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
The state will continue operating with last year’s budget, which, because of some crazy accounting games played in the past, will result in a nasty $600 million property tax increase that no one wants. The continuing uncertainty also means that cities and counties don’t know what level of revenue to expect, or what tax caps there will be, so they’re not able to adequately plan infrastructure projects or budget cuts on a local level.
September 25th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
And tax revenues for the state are being severely affected already.
The Wisconsin Legislature’s own state employees alone have lost an estimated $17.2 million in cost of living increases in salaries, benefits, etc. Its current annual budget is $68.8 million, and it now is a quarter of its fiscal year along.
And there are many thousands of other state employees, of course, who are still working at last year’s pay — and some didn’t get last year’s cost of living increases until the last paycheck of the year. So this is nothing new for them in some ways — as delays occur in many budget bienniums, while the state banks the dollars due its employees.
But that also contributed to Wisconsin not doing as well last year in overall state income levels, so look for the same in the data for this year.
And you can see thatthe longer the state budget is not in place, the more out of whack its revenue projections will be, as they include tax revenues projected from one of the largest groups of employees in the state: state employees.
Basically, imagine that the largest employer in the state was, instead, a private company. And imagine that company’s employees didn’t get any raises. The impact on that state’s tax revenue would be significant, as it is other businesses that count on those employees to spend a lot of what they have left after taxes. (This is significantly adding to the housing bust here, too, when such a large group of employees just got last year’s cost of living increase a few months ago and may wait many more months for this year’s.)
Essentially, to those who say it’s no problem to just keep going along with last year’s budget, they ought not be surprised when Wisconsin falls farther behind in income and thus revenue.
September 26th, 2007 at 2:57 am
Some might say that it is better than the Ginormus Tax Increases that were proposed