Post-2011 prosperity depends on an ongoing stream of good decisions
Want to see what good decisions look like? You can watch the results filling in the industrial parks of southern Kenosha County.
In a steady stream, manufacturers keep showing up in Pleasant Prairie, employing people, making things and spreading prosperity. Instead of choosing or staying in Illinois, they opted for Wisconsin, where they’re treated more justly.
This is what Wisconsin’s experiment in economic freedom looks like on the ground.
Economist James Bohn recently documented the breathtaking results of that experiment in which Wisconsin — for a century a high-tax, high-regulation state atrophying in a straitjacket of antique progressivism — turned in 2011 toward free-market policies. Illinois, meanwhile, once one of the freer states, embraced interventionist economics.
He compared counties on either side of the state line — places with similar culture, climate, transportation and other factors, but working under differing state policies.
From 2001 to 2010, Wisconsin counties on the Illinois border saw their private-sector economic output grow 30 percent, while the neighboring Illinois counties grew 40 percent.
But from 2011 to 2024, Wisconsin counties were beating their Illinois counterparts 103 percent to 68 percent, more than one-third faster at delivering prosperity.
Sticking just to Kenosha County and its neighbor across 128th Street, Illinois’ Lake County saw its private sector output grow 48 percent from 2001 to 2010, while Kenosha County lagged at 34 percent. After Wisconsin’s turn, fortunes reversed: Lake County’s output grew 66 percent from 2011 to 2024, while Kenosha County’s grew 92 percent.
Businesses already in Kenosha County grew, and businesses opting to cross the border joined them. News stories tell of expanded plants or shifted headquarters for the pump distributor and the packaging maker and mustard maker and the medicine maker and the other medicine maker and the paint company and the shampoo maker and the tool maker and on and on — individual decisions adding up to a tide.
“Wisconsin checks a lot of boxes when companies are looking for new facilities,” said Rebecca Gries, who heads Milwaukee 7, a regional nonprofit that recruits move-ins. “That includes cost structure and productivity.”
Wisconsin’s corporate income tax, for instance, is 7.9 percent — though since 2011 a credit lowers it to 0.4 percent for manufacturers. Illinois’ used to be 4.8 percent, but it began rising in 2011 and now is 9.5 percent.
Wisconsin in 2015 passed a right-to-work law, meaning workers couldn’t be forced to pay dues to a union as a condition of being hired. Illinois permits such abuse. That advantage “certainly comes up,” said Gries, when companies are eyeing a move.
A central part of Wisconsin’s experiment was shucking off public sector unions’ power to inflate government budgets. The Act 10 labor reforms required government employees to start contributing to retirements, and they reined in skyrocketing health coverage costs. That gave Wisconsin an advantage over Illinois, where public sector retirement liabilities are vast and underfunded.
“We’re one of the most fiscally solvent states in the country,” said Gries. “Other states that are not in that position because of state employment funding issues, those states that are in the hole or in the red will have to make some hard decisions.”
Businesses would rather not be in that blast zone.
“Companies ask all the time whether our policy will be stable,” said Gries, who reassures them there are a lot of checks and balances.
Yes, but there are a lot of decisions being made too.
Last week, for example, Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill to peel back the 1,700 percent fee increase on livestock auctions that one of his regulatory agencies imposed last fall. That icy slap of costlier government came after the progressive majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court stripped away the Legislature’s oversight of bureaucracies, “empowering unelected bureaucrats to rule over the people,” as a dissenting justice put it. Regulators immediately began measuring out new shackles for the economy.
What becomes clear is that while the results of Wisconsin’s turn toward liberty are in the books, the policies underlying it aren’t permanently inscribed. They’re at the mercy of ongoing decisions.
The Act 10 reforms are under legal attack and could be overturned by the state Supreme Court. Evers tried to raise Wisconsin’s top personal income tax rate to nearly 10 percent. The leading Democrat in the race for governor makes videos suggesting that Wisconsin doesn’t tax “billionaires” — we do, harder than most other states, but animus toward making money seems to sell among some voters.
That animus might matter less to billionaires, who have the means to move, than it does to other Wisconsinites. The choices Wisconsin voters and leaders make will determine whether the policy we live under is attractive to prosperity or repellent to it. If people with the power to decide where to hire and where to grow businesses see those policies as treating them justly, they will go on hiring and growing in Wisconsin, and Wisconsinites will go on enjoying the prosperity that is just reward for their work.
Patrick McIlheran is the executive editor at the Badger Institute.
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