Browsing: News & Analysis

Wisconsin’s Republican lawmakers recently introduced Assembly Bill 660, aiming to help employers provide support for working families in meeting the costs of childcare. While the bill’s intentions are commendable, the approach of directly subsidizing employers to create and subsidize childcare slots has proven ineffective in other contexts.

Over 70,000 Wisconsin students could be impacted If successful, a lawsuit claiming Wisconsin’s private-school parental choice program and public independent…

After Gov. Tony Evers announced last week he was diverting $36.6 million in federal emergency pandemic funds for, among other things, a soccer stadium, a sports center and a railroad museum, state Sen. Duey Stroebel tweeted, “I struggle to see how any of these projects relate to pandemic relief.”

Legislative leaders say costly project not needed or wanted Wisconsin officials in the Evers administration, supported by politicians in many…

Saying they “have not given up on a colorblind society,” Wisconsin Republicans have filed a bill to remove race-based considerations from an array of UW System and technical college financial aid programs.

Every year, more than 600,000 Wisconsin vehicle owners in seven counties dutifully trudge out for their mandatory biennial emissions test. From its start in April 1984, the program has cost taxpayers approximately $271.4 million, according to the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB).

In a speech to the Badger Institute Thursday night, Congressman Mike Gallagher, the Green Bay Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, issued a clarion call for America  to rearm and stockpile critical munitions, issued a stark warning about authoritarian regimes and terrorist groups across the globe and said the future is still up to us here in America “but won’t be much longer.”

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 discussion on black conservativism that took place on the UW-Madison campus and was broadcast live on Zoom Saturday was interrupted by what appeared to be a coordinated protest when someone hacked into the online portion, insulted speakers with vulgar language and was joined by a handful of others who exposed  themselves onscreen nude or masturbating.

Healthcare innovators are our best chance for better healthcare, as long as well-intended but stifling government regulations or laws, or an increasingly anti-competitive marketplace, don’t get in their way. The current reimbursement-driven system both creates roadblocks for innovators and simultaneously drives up costs. Direct pay removes these roadblocks.

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.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated this week that people who filed for unemployment insurance during the pandemic stole somewhere between $100 billion and $135 billion in benefits — just a portion of the estimated fraud across all federal pandemic programs.

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

As part of a training program, an initiative of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is bringing in high-profile left-wing speakers, including Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, to speak to potentially thousands of Wisconsin teachers about “educational equity.” 

The city of Milwaukee announced it is building a new line for the $128 million streetcar known as The Hop. Unanswered anywhere in the strangely incurious media is why the city would open that line now.

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

Gov. Tony Evers, who has set as a goal that “all electricity consumed in the state be 100% carbon-free by 2050,” is making sure that state agencies and local governments are able to ban the use of fossil fuels to run cars and lawnmowers, heat homes and power stoves.

A wedding barn is nothing like a tavern — especially in ways that matter for liquor laws. The Badger Institute is happy to join an effort to fill in Wisconsin lawmakers on why.

Partisans are actively hoping Janet Protasiewicz will have a role in casting a decisive vote on redistricting, school choice, voter ID and even rolling back Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, prohibiting collective bargaining for most state employees. 

Minimum markup laws hurt consumers by making goods more costly. Wisconsin should repeal its antiquated minimum markup law, as Badger Institute has advocated for decades.