Browsing: Budget Analysis

Providing free breakfast and lunch for all Wisconsin schoolchildren will burden taxpayers with the cost of assisting households that likely do not need the benefits.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson says he will lead an effort to produce a balanced budget and restore the value of the dollar.

Sen. Ron Johnson kicked off Badger Institute’s 2025 Speaker Series with a clarion call to fiscal responsibility.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has renewed his proposal that legislators allow themselves to be cut out of the process of making state law and permit bills to be passed or statutes to be repealed by petition and referendum, an idea that the Legislature’s leaders dismissed as dead on arrival.

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.

In his new book, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch laments the vast expansion of the federal government into matters once left to the states, and he cites Badger Institute’s “Federal Grant$tanding” book, published in 2018.

Although Wisconsin has notched some substantial budget surpluses in the past handful of years, analysis of its budget records shows that the state has a long history of running short, at least when it comes to general purpose revenue and expenditures.

How does Wisconsin’s spending compare to other states? It depends which ones you’re looking at and what sort of spending counts.

Of the seven remaining two-year branch colleges in the Universities of Wisconsin system, three are within walking distance and the rest are within easy driving distance of technical colleges that now are offering many of the same liberal arts courses.

A legislative committee formed to study falling enrollment across the University of Wisconsin System could recommend putting an end to what’s left of a tottering two-year branch campus system.

After a year-long disenrollment, there are still 163,221 more people on Medicaid in Wisconsin than there were before the start of the pandemic, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $50 million a year.

In both of the two most recent legislative sessions, Wisconsin legislators introduced just over 2,300 bills and saw less than 12% enacted.

A formal agreement passed by the regents says that UW-Madison will seek philanthropic support to create an endowed chair that will focus on conservative political thought, classical economic theory or classical liberalism, depending on the donor’s interest.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds announced the state government finished its fiscal year business with a surplus of $1.83 billion. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a Republican tax cut.

A state Department of Health Services decision to take a year to remove ineligible people from Wisconsin’s Medicaid rolls — much slower than many other states — will cost federal and state taxpayers an estimated $745 million.

Volunteers are the backbone of emergency response in Wisconsin and many communities have struggled for years to find enough of them.

Wisconsin doesn’t have to send back a single dime of the federal aid it has already received, budget experts told the Badger Institute.

It’s telling that Gov. Evers, Sen. Larson and the rest keep using words like “the wealthy” and “rich” to talk about their targets. The Wisconsin income tax is levied not on wealth that people have saved but on income — what they earn. If you say “rich,” with its implications of inheritance or luck, you don’t have to grapple with how taxes take what someone is working for.

VIDEO: Watch a brief history of how the Wisconsin governors’ veto power has been used on state budget bills throughout the years.