Milwaukee is significantly less safe than it was a short time ago. In fact, compared to 2019, overall crime in Milwaukee is up 22.6%, with violent crime up 15.6% and property crime up 26% from three years ago.
Gov. Tony Evers has asked that Wisconsin spend another $750 million to expand broadband in the state without knowing the current status of nearly $100 million in broadband projects paid for with federal pandemic funds.
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.”
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos on Wednesday renewed a call for Wisconsin to adopt tolling as a way to pay for state infrastructure projects. An alternative is needed, he said, as increased fuel efficiency and an increase in electric cars on the road are contributing to declining gas tax revenues.
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, the federal government has assumed a larger role in funding and running safety net programs, leaving states with little ability to address flaws such as employment and marriage disincentives and little power to make changes. State leaders must work to change this.
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.”
A spokesman for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson has told the Badger Institute it is “likely that Milwaukee police officers will have a renewed presence in some Milwaukee Public Schools in 2023.” Should Milwaukee Public Schools and the Milwaukee Police Department follow through, it would be the first time officers have been posted in schools since 2016. The School Board allowed officers to patrol around schools for four years after that but voted unanimously to prohibit that as well in June 2020 after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
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.
Lisa McCloskey: If this is about the children, then make it about the children and not about bureaucracy and dollars only to traditional schooling. This is not a cookie-cutter type of situation where everyone learns the same thing at the same time at the same level. Not so with my daughter.
The public is unlikely to ever know how the state Department of Administration came to decide how to allocate and spend nearly $4 billion from three federal pandemic emergency spending bills.
Questioned by a sometimes frustrated Joint Legislative Audit Committee Tuesday at the Capitol, DOA leaders acknowledged that many of the decisions about how to allocate money to state agencies and local governments were made in phone conversations and emails with Gov. Tony Evers and his staff that were not documented.
Dogged by a huge backlog for occupational licenses and complaints by applicants and lawmakers, Wisconsin’s Department of Safety and Professional Services must submit to an audit of its operations.
An all-Republican majority of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted Tuesday to direct the Legislative Audit Bureau to examine an agency that fields between 5,000 and 10,000 calls every week. The LAB website projects the expected release of the audit in fall 2023.
“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.”