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

A new poll found a surprising gap in voters’ understanding of how Wisconsin taxes compare to neighboring states, even as an unprecedented state revenue surplus makes tax reform a key issue in Madison.

The poll, of 480 registered voters in December, asked, “How do the taxes people pay in Wisconsin compare to the taxes people pay in neighboring states?”

Students in Milwaukee’s public high schools who want a better life and know that school is their only way up are being battered, assaulted and exposed to gunfire or other reckless conduct on a daily basis. The school board ignores that and listens to activists, who think cops are bullies.

The Legislative Audit Bureau criticized the state Department of Administration for its lack of openness in how it is deploying $5.7 billion in federal health emergency funds granted to Wisconsin.

The audit report, released Wednesday, comes months after the Badger Institute first called for a comprehensive audit of all state spending of funds provided through the CARES Act, American Rescue Plan Act and the Investment and Jobs Act.

We need to change something. Instead of blowing the surplus on padding government, we can use it to help Wisconsinites preserve their own freedom and prosperity. The “Mandate for Madison” has lots of ideas from some of the best thinkers about Wisconsin, many of them costing nothing, but consider two giant proposals.

On Dec. 14, the Badger Institute submitted the following comments to Gov. Tony Evers’ statewide listening session tour on the 2023-25 executive budget.

Using billions of emergency pandemic bill dollars to plug gaping holes in their budgets, local governments across Wisconsin and the country are setting themselves up to ask for tax increases or slash services as basic as police and fire protection when the federal funding runs out. 

Wisconsin’s per capita GDP in comparison to other Midwest states is troubling. Even more troubling: we’re trending in the wrong direction. In 2011, Wisconsin was the 4th most productive of seven Midwestern states per capita. We’re now second from the bottom.

An ongoing series of articles and videos featuring the stories of Wisconsin parents seeking the best education options for their kids.

Robin Vos, fresh off a victory that seals his role as Speaker of the Assembly and now coming on 30 years in local and state politics, threw out a couple olive branches at Gov. Tony Evers Thursday that cynics might say are just the post-election niceties that invariably morph into barbs and stiff-arms in the Capitol hallways.

Twenty months after Congress passed a bill that rained $2.53 billion down on Wisconsin, the governor’s office in sole charge of administering the funding, as well as  legislative audit and budget officials, have almost no idea of how all that money is being spent.

There are numerous ways Wisconsin could move to a flat income tax while benefitting Wisconsinites across the income spectrum. The most obvious solution is to flatten the rate while increasing the standard deduction, as proposed by the Tax Foundation and the Badger Institute in the July 2022 report Tax Reform Options to Improve Wisconsin’s Competitiveness.

Do the state education bureaucrats, the schools of education, the consultants, the unions and the central offices know the one right way to teach math? That big test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, found that not once in the past two decades have Wisconsin’s public schools managed to make more than 41% of 8th-graders proficient in math.

Right after scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, came out, Wisconsin’s chief public school regulator, state Superintendent Jill Underly, issued a press release headlined, “Wisconsin elementary school students buck national trends in ‘National Report Card’ release.”

This is not true: Wisconsin’s scores fell by every measure since the last time children took the test, in 2019, just as scores fell for every other state.

Flummoxed by a staggering amount of money and by guidelines for how to spend it, Wisconsin counties and cities are spending tens of millions of dollars of American Rescue Plan Act funds to try to administer American Rescue Plan Act funds.

It now takes, on average, more than 15 months to fully resolve, from arrest to closed case, a homicide charge in Wisconsin. Armed robbery takes a year and sexual assault cases average 14 months.

It’s campaign season, so the only numbers that seem to matter to the mainstream media are the ones in polls.

The bad news is that most Americans have lost faith in our national leaders. Only 32%, according to a 2022 Pew Research survey, have a favorable opinion of the “federal government in Washington.”

For the people who need it most — poor residents of Milwaukee, families and victims of particularly violent crimes like homicide and aggravated assault throughout the state, children in schools where politicians won’t allow police, and almost anyone awaiting a verdict — Wisconsin’s criminal justice system is failing.

Chershanta Smith can’t imagine her daughter, Gabrielle, attending school anywhere other than St. Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee’s Brewer’s Hill neighborhood. And that’s not only because she believes her daughter is receiving an excellent education at St. Marcus through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, but because the school’s community has embraced and supported her entire family.