Browsing: Spending and Accountability

Public subsidies turn journalists into sycophants, undermine true scrutiny of government excess, distort the market for news and entertainment, create unfair competition for privately funded media, and are a waste of tax dollars.

President Trump’s executive order to halt federal funding for public broadcasting will save taxpayers nearly $8.5 million annually in reduced federal outlays to public television and radio networks in Wisconsin alone.

Gov. Evers’ 2025 budget proposal would reduce the General Fund balance to an amount equal to only 2 percent of annual General Fund state spending — well below the 16 percent that experts in state finance recommend.

With fewer passengers and mostly empty seats, it’s time to shut down the Hop, Milwaukee’s $128 million streetcar.

More than half of the employees in the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and more than 40% in the Department of Administration still work remotely, five years after COVID sent them home.

Despite a much ballyhooed second line added last April, ridership on Milwaukee’s financially challenged streetcar, the Hop, last year was still nearly 30% below that of pre-COVID 2019.

Lawmakers are seeking support for legislation that would prohibit Wisconsin’s 700,000 FoodShare recipients from buying candy and soda with program benefits.

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.

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

Results from the nation’s most comprehensive experiment in offering people a guaranteed basic income offer a warning: Unconditional cash payments did nothing to permanently lift participants out of poverty and dependency.

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.

Facing a $5 million bill to run the free streetcar known as The Hop next year, Alderman Scott Spiker wondered if a huge increase in handing out parking tickets is the funding answer.

Government overregulation is imperiling the start of a $1 billion plan to expand broadband service to the hardest-to-reach places in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin’s largest school district, whose voters narrowly approved a quarter-billion dollar increase in funding last spring, is breaking the news to those voters that it may have to close some schools. But the process isn’t moving quickly.

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.

Many Wisconsin independents and conservatives were hoodwinked this week into voting against the two constitutional amendments that together would have given legislators shared responsibility with the governor over big buckets of federal spending.

Passing the amendments would give Wisconsin’s 33 state Senators and 99 state Assembly members, elected by you, a say in where huge sums of federal money go. It doesn’t get much more democratic than that.

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.