CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – If this was an election year, Tony Evers probably wouldn’t have vetoed a big tax cut. The legislature proposed a $574 tax break for the middle and upper classes. Evers said too much of it went to the wealthy.
Two things to remember: Many of Governor Ever’s supporters don’t earn enough to pay taxes. He’s holding out for the non-payers to get some kind of tax credit. Secondly, Governor Evers did sign a tax cut that Republicans included in his first budget. And then he campaigned as a tax-cutter.
Lawmakers came back with a second tax-cutting proposal. Governor Evers has again said he won’t sign it. Evers wants more money to go towards childcare and public education. The governor’s reasoning is nonsense. He used his line-item veto to extend school funding increases for 435 years. The budget before that included the biggest K through 12 increase in state history. Still, Tony Evers painted the GOP is being stingy with the schools since only half of what the governor proposed made it into the budget. Surely the schools have been taken care of. A more logical question is why, with these big increases in funding, are so many inner-city schools in Wisconsin failure factories.
So the state is holding onto a record surplus, and there’s no way for taxpayers to get their money back.
The lesson here is to make it more difficult, or nearly impossible, to raise taxes. One GOP proposal would require a two-thirds supermajority for tax increases. That’s a step in the right direction, but it also won’t be signed into law.
So it’s easy to take your money, and the political environment now makes it impossible to get it back. You can be sure that there will be many proposals to spend it, and very little possibility of giving your money to you.
If you’re thinking, ‘hey, I could have used that $574,’ you’ll have to vote for someone else for governor.
Chris Conley
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