May 11, 2023 at 11:53 a.m.
River News: Our View
Wisconsin's GOP: An ongoing kamikaze act
Right now in Wisconsin, a version of that movie is playing out. The only differences are that the central character is the state Republican Party, and, over the past decade-and-a-half, it's the voters who have intervened and prevented the party from succeeding in carrying out its death wish.
There are signs, though, that the voters are tired of intervening - hence, the string of recent statewide election losses for the GOP - and that the Republicans are finally about to do themselves in once and for all.
The loaded gun this time is the shared revenue plan the GOP is proposing. The Democrats will kill it, and some sort of devilish compromise will be worked out, but here's the bottom line: The GOP has already surrendered fiscal conservatism on the issue by buying into the absurd notion that local governments are broke and need more money.
Once the Democrats and special interests got them to that point, well, the whole issue was lost. The Republicans have now conceded they have been wrong all along on local government spending and that they need to lather local governments with oodles of new cash to make everybody happy.
Only, in the end, when local governments go off the spending deep end as they did during the years when Jim Doyle was governor, the voters are not going to be happy, and the Republicans are going to pay with their political lives.
Once upon a time Republicans knew this. That's why fiscal limits were imposed in the first place. The Democratic base would never be convinced, but all other voters - independents and conservatives - were fed up and revolted and said, never again. To now ignore what the voters commanded so long ago is to deny breath itself.
Some people commit a type of suicide known as Death By Cop. For the state GOP, it's apparently going to be Death by Voter: They are going to continuously insult us and rob us until we have to off them in the ballot box, and they are well on their way by maliciously proposing to turn loose local government big spenders, the worst of the breed.
As we report, the GOP has introduced just a nightmare of a shared revenue bill that would shovel 20 percent of the state's sales tax collections to local government, at a time when those local governments just blew through billions of dollars of "free" federal Covid money.
Oneida County alone received $6.9 million in mad money, and, as county supervisor and Hazelhurst town chairman Ted Cushing said recently, the towns and the counties have been on a spending spree.
In Oneida County, the spending was so fast and furious that supervisors spent all the money before they even knew it. Recently, there was discussion in Oneida County about two projects, at least one of which seemingly fell from the sky, as so many of them do, and supervisors planned to use Covid money to fund them until, as supervisor Steven Schreier put it, "we realized there was no money left."
To his credit, Schreier has been consistently calling for budget discipline in the county, especially in the planning of capital improvement projects. Unfortunately, it's a call that will go nowhere because, as long as taxpayer dollars keep falling from the sky, so will various projects to spend that money on.
Take cover taxpayers! It's the iron rule of government bureaucracy: It will spend every dime given to it, and then some.
To be sure, Oneida County doesn't need new shared revenue dollars. The county's overall personnel count never declines, and for years the county has refused to cut nonessential programs and services, such as the UW-Extension, even as county supervisors cried and whined about days of austerity ahead and the "fact" that the day was fast approaching when the county would have to cut services and programs.
That day has never come, and, if the Republicans and Democrats get their way, it never will.
Oh sure, GOP officials are hopping around the state as bloated and bloviating as bullfrogs, croaking about how new shared revenue dollars will have to be spent on police, fire, EMS, and transportation, and that local governments must adopt a maintenance of effort in those budgets, meaning they must maintain funding levels in those areas or suffer a penalty.
See? We're imposing fiscal discipline with this money, they say. Sounds good, doesn't it?
But the GOP has left out the most important mechanism, without which the spending limits are useless - a prohibition on revenue shifting. There is absolutely nothing in the bill that would prevent local governments from using new shared revenue dollars earmarked for police, fire, EMS and transportation in place of currently allocated local dollars for those services and then shifting those currently allocated local dollars to something else - thereby creating new programs and growing government.
So if the county spends $100,000 a year on an essential service and now gets $30,000 in new revenue from the state to spend on that essential service, that frees up $30,000 in local revenues for the county to go and spend on a non-essential service, and you can bet local governments will do just that.
Surprise!
That's not all that is wrong with this bill. For one thing, as Republican state Sen. Steve Nass points out, it's a bailout bill for the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. He points out that it grants those big urban entities the ability to create new local option sales taxes, which he correctly says will feed the desire to spend even more money, and it will "kick open the door" for smaller counties to come to the legislature with their hand out for their own new sales taxes.
Nass also took issue with how the bill was stitched together - through a series of closed-door meetings with a small cadre of GOP establishment legislators and special interests - and then rushed to public hearing on a fast track before anyone could really digest or debate what was really in it.
In other words, business as usual for the Republicans, and a sure sign they are not really all that interested in what the public has to say.
All that said, there are some good policy prescriptions buried in the bill. Unfortunately they have nothing to do with shared revenue and everything to do with the time-tested trick of attaching controversial policy prescriptions to unrelated legislation that everybody wants.
It helps to avoid debate, but, again, it's not a good look.
For example, there is in the bill a requirement that any Stewardship project or activity north of Hwy. 8 must gain the approval of all affected local governments before monies are obligated and before it can be presented for review to the Joint Finance Committee.
That's a good policy, but it should not be in this bill but debated as stand-alone legislation.
Ditto for a provision that would prevent local health departments from closing businesses for more than 14 days in times of epidemics and communicable disease outbreaks. The closures could be extended by 14 days with the approval of the elected governing body.
Here again, there are good reasons to limit the power of the public health bureaucracy, but it should be debated on its own merits in a stand-alone bill.
Indeed, this bill is a perfect example why that should be. Predictably, the public health establishment opposes this provision, but, not so predictably, some small businesses do as well, mainly because they think unelected bureaucrats should not be able to close a business for even 14 days.
They also argue that the 28 days of closure the bill would authorize with approval of a governing body would be devastating to many small businesses.
By burying this provision in a fast-tracked larger shared revenue bill, and not affording it its own bill and public hearing, the voices of those small business owners are effectively silenced.
Why do they do this? Well, we guess, we're supposed to just trust the GOP to know what is right for us. They must think this way, for the bill also prevents local advisory referenda, another way that the public can speak.
Why are Republicans afraid of advisory referenda, or any referenda, for that matter? Why do they not want the public to speak?
We know they are scared of the fringe left putting all sorts of nonsense on ballots, which the left does, but our advice is to trust the people. When big-spending advocates managed to put a $1-million tax hike on the Oneida County ballot a couple of years ago, voters soundly rejected it, as voters have been doing on spending initiatives around the state.
The voters know what is good for them and what is not.
Sad to say, the same cannot be said of the Wisconsin GOP. For if they knew what was good for them, they would not follow in the footsteps of Democrats in wanting to burden taxpayers with boatloads of cash for those already excessive spenders known as local government officials.
To be sure, Democrats want to give them more money than the GOP does, but, make no mistake about it, the path the GOP is pursuing is just the opposite side of the same big-spending coin. No matter whose version of shared revenue wins, local governments will once again spend like there's no tomorrow, and once again the voters will ultimately have to be the ones to correct it.
Conservative and independent voters will correctly see how their Republican representatives fell so blindly in line with the big spenders, as is their historic pattern of being the party of Big Government Lite.
Add in the GOP's refusal to embrace real tax reform such as repealing the state income tax, instead favoring the smoke and mirrors of a flat tax, which preserves special interest prerogatives, and what you have is a state party oblivious and uncaring even for its own well being.
In the movie, even Otto knew in the end he should live. That's a realization the state GOP apparently has not made. Unlike in the movie, though, if the state party doesn't wake up, the ending won't be bittersweet but tragic, for all of us.
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