Browsing: Viewpoints

Pathways, a public school, gets $9,200 per pupil from taxpayers, the funding Wisconsin offers to all charter schools. By contrast, the average district public school in Wisconsin spends about $15,300 per child, the latest “total education cost,” according to the Department of Public Instruction. Why the gap?

Robin Vos spoke a hard truth the other day, something unpleasant because it is incontrovertible.

Speaking about the future of funding an important Wisconsin priority, the speaker of the state Assembly said, “The gas tax is declining whether we like it or not.”

Wisconsin’s flat tax is about what needs to happen next year and the year after that, and down the road even further when our kids are grown and tempted to take that job in Austin because all that’s left here is vacant office space and minimum wage gigs at the local vape shop. It’s about growing the pie the way CROWE assures us can happen.

For decades, “a lot of kids didn’t get phonics instruction or much of it,” said Hanford. “They weren’t taught how to sound out the written words. And it became pretty clear by the 90s that that had been a big mistake.”

More than one former Wisconsinite has told me over the years that to be considered a resident of another state – and be exempt from paying Wisconsin’s high taxes without completely abandoning your family and friends back home – you have to spend six months and a day there.

Turns out that’s not true.

“It’s becoming more and more important that we raise up generations of young people who know what’s right and wrong, who know what’s truth and what’s false,” said Festerling.

“If we don’t do that, they’re going to go off to these wolves who will eat them alive. And so I’m just so thrilled that school choice is giving guys who have a book called the Bible, that can preach the truth and the gospel, and if parents like that and want that, they’ll subscribe to it and send their kids.”

Many of the folks proudly wearing the cardinal and white are Wisconsin transplants who are now sunburnt Florida residents. They were lured south, many of them, for short stints by the sun and the surf, but stayed for the taxes — or, actually, the lack thereof.

In recent years, Wisconsin has been transferring money from the general fund into the transportation fund. And for many years, every projection has shown that gas tax revenue likely has peaked and henceforth will decline as cars get better mileage and as more electric vehicles hit the road.

Know what puts a crimp in any effort to fight crime? Not being able to do anything with suspects once the cops catch them.

My hope for 2023 is that every legislator in Madison will talk to somebody in their district who lost their small business or their job, and ask why.

Shouldn’t be hard to find them.

Between March of 2020 and March of 2021 — the last period of time for which I could find data — 17,364 Wisconsin establishments opened and 13,698 closed, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Almost all of those were small businesses.