Browsing: Act 10

Wisconsin’s newly elected are not there to serve special interests or serve donors. They are elected to serve the children and taxpayers, young parents and workers, retirees and twenty-year-olds alike.

Wisconsin labor and employment policy can, in some instances, tilt in the favor of insiders, impose costs on outsiders, and adversely affect the state’s economic performance.

Per-pupil spending by Wisconsin school districts is at its highest level since 2000 even after adjusting for inflation, according to data from the Department of Public Instruction.

In the 12 years leading up to Act 10, school levies across Wisconsin rose 72%, compared to 31% in the dozen years after that up to and including 2024.

By the best estimate, the Act 10 reforms saved Wisconsin taxpayers between $18 billion and $31 billion since 2012.

Wisconsin’s largest school district is planning to ask its voters to approve a $252 million annual increase in its revenue — and, consequently, spending — in an upcoming referendum. That district, Milwaukee Public Schools, has seen a sharp increase in spending in the two most recent years of state data after nearly a decade of spending that mostly kept up with but did not exceed inflation.

The bare-knuckle, politicized State Supreme Court race that just shattered national spending records and obliterated traditional judicial norms has raised anew the question of whether justices should be elected the same way as partisan Republicans and Democrats. Alternatives in use in other states include appointments and independent commissions.

Teaching is a complex task, at its best a performing art. You get summers off, but you’re grading papers at night all winter, drawing on depths of patience and stamina. You’d qualify for sainthood if you gave 100% every day as your employer’s check showed indifference. Act 10 freed districts to quantify their appreciation for diligence. Teachers responded to the appreciation. This is right and just.

Unions — and the progressives looking to make them again mandatory in Wisconsin — don’t get markets. They don’t get that in a market, a seller and a buyer or an employer and an employee must both benefit or no future deals happen. Instead, the game is zero sum, a fight for morsels, and only the bigger fist wins.

WEA Trust just announced it is terminating its health insurance business

The former governor reflects and responds to his critics 

Federal regulations force school districts to spend that money or face funding cuts

Even Democrats favor a right-to-work law that would end compulsory union dues from unwilling workers Back in the 1990s, Tiffany…

Among the many tales of woe that appeared in the media in the wake of the Wisconsin protests was the…

Hey, did you hear the one about how Gov. Scott Walker wants to kill puppies?

As is the case with any extended crisis, the Wisconsin stalemate has begun to create its own vernacular.  Previously familiar terms and phrases are used in foreign contexts.