River News: Our View

Well it’s Pride Month and Gov. Tony Evers hoisted the so-called progress flag high above the state capitol last week as the governor saluted LGBTQ “folks” all across the state.

Nothing wrong with the salute per se, though raising the flag over the capitol is something else again. The problem is, the governor salutes all sorts of “folks” throughout the year but without really doing anything to help them.

Oftentimes his actions, especially when it comes to workers and farmers and parents trying to give their kids a good, value-based education, actually hurt these populations. So it might be Pride month, but it’s also a good time to point out that Evers himself has nothing to be proud of.

He is a weak excuse for a governor who should be hanging his head in shame.

If Evers really wanted to salute the people of the state, he would embrace policies that bring prosperity and freedom, rather than destructive woke and progressive dogmas. The fact is, his latest policies — which won’t be enacted, thanks to GOP legislative majorities — would only make life worse for just about everybody, even for the proud LGBTQ community.

Let us count the ways.

One way is by spending, by every means possible, as much money as he can on wasteful projects, stressing taxpayers, reducing private investment, and growing bureaucratic government. As we report today, to cite one example, the state has accrued $172 million in interest on unspent Covid dollars, and the governor refuses to relinquish control of those dollars, which should be put into the general fund for needed core government services or for redistribution to taxpayers.

By keeping it sequestered in a federal account, the governor can spend the money any way that suits him, and that generally means on some expansive woke policy or regulation. Never mind that state law requires such funds to be deposited to the general fund for legislative determination. 

Never mind, too, that the Legislative Audit Bureau says the general fund is where the money should go. Never mind all that: Evers defends his capture of what should be the people’s money. 

And yet, as Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto) points out, the law is quite clear: Any moneys coming into the state that are not from the federal government — interest earnings are not — and that are not prescriptive in how they are spent — theses funds have no federal strings — must go into the general fund.

As Wimberger points out, what the governor has right now is a $170 million illegal slush fund, and every week Evers refuses to hand over the money, he is “committing a misdemeanor, and holds himself personally liable to repay the missing interest.”

This is just one of many shenanigans the governor tries to pull. The latest budget proposal — a tome of curses if ever there was one — was loaded with so much lard that the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee (JFC) killed 612 items in the budget from the get-go. You could hear the progressive pork squealing all the way to the abattoir.

There’s too much to go into here, but a little example should do us, so let’s look at his climate change schemes. For starters, Evers’s stated climate goals are and have been no more than a transcript of the most extreme elements of the 2015 Paris Climate agreement, massaged for use here in the state. The budget’s major goal is for Wisconsin “to achieve 100 percent carbon-free electricity consumption by 2050.”

Now Evers must be aware that the United States has withdrawn — again — from the Paris Climate Accords. So in a sense, he is standing up for Wisconsin’s sovereignty, or at least for the sovereignty of the state’s bureaucracy.

All totaled, Evers proposed 55 climate solutions across nine economic sectors. That’s pretty impressive, given that we count only eight economic sectors. Like a baker’s dozen, the governor threw in one for the bureaucrats.

In the budget itself, the governor proposed more than $10 million over the biennium and another full-time position to create a community climate action grant program to assist local governments in preparing climate risk assessments and to help those governments implement emission-reducing and undefined climate action projects that those assessments called for.

Here’s the trick they play. The state lures local governments into taking the grants and then hiring left-wing state-recommended consultants, or bringing in the DNR, to help do those climate assessments. Guess what? The climate assessments always say the world will end, and end fast, if the local governments don’t undertake some massive infrastructure projects to adapt to extreme climate change and even more extreme weather events. And wouldn’t luck have it? There’s a state low-interest loan available through the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands to get these projects done.

Whew! That was a close one. Good thing we had taxpayers to pay for our survival! Meanwhile, local governments buy into infrastructure spending they don’t need, economic investment is stymied, jobs are killed, and Wisconsin stays closed for business. 

The JFC killed this proposal, thankfully.

Then there was more than $1.3 million over the biennium and yet another tax-supported position to administer a program to “promote community engagement on climate and clean energy needs,” including grants to local nonprofits to carry out the sacred pilgrimages. That means the state would pay climate change activists to travel around the state like the gypsies they are to proselytize for their radical hoaxology.

Killed by JFC.

There was lots of money, too, for renewable energy subsidies, for instance a $1 million pilot program at the Public Service Commission to “assist” developers and electric providers with the cost of developing renewable energy infrastructure on brownfield sites. 

As dead as a doornail, thanks to JFC.

And of course, $50 million in fiscal year 2025-26 to increase support to the Green Innovation Fund, “which will increase lending and investment activities in the renewable energy sector,” especially solar and any “net-zero energy use” project the governor happened to like, including “industrial decarbonization.” 

Into the budget toilet this provision thankfully went.

Gov. Evers is a fool to pursue immediate net-zero carbon emissions. As Dr. Judith Curry, climatologist and former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Harry DeAngelo of the University of Southern California School of Business put it in their new paper, “A Critique of the Apocalyptic Climate Narrative,” it’s a fatal assumption that fossil fuels are evil per se, as Evers does.

Curry and DeAngelo assert: “The Apocalyptic climate narrative incorrectly portrays CO2 emissions as inherently and unequivocally dangerous and an economic ‘bad,’ that is, a purely negative externality. This portrayal ignores the fact that CO2 yields direct benefits (e.g., it is plant food) and the inarguable technological reality that fossil fuels are currently irreplaceable inputs for producing food (via ammonia-based fertilizer), steel, cement, and plastics, which are central features of modern life.” 

Given the lack of developed alternative energy sources, the bottom line is that “net-zero” global emissions by 2050 can only be achieved by drastically reducing fossil-fuel use over the next 25 years, which would eviscerate our standard of living.

Thanks, guv, and may we once again recommend hanging your head in shame.

Speaking of standard of living, and on the other side of the spending coin, there’s the Wisconsin senior employment program, an employment training program for low-income, unemployed individuals aged 55 years and older. According to the Department of Health Services, the program provides subsidized, part-time work experience for a limited time through community service to obtain the skills necessary for permanent employment. 

The Senior Employment Program is funded under Title V of the Older Americans Act and is administered by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) through area agencies on aging and various other non-profit organizations. This past year, it is reported that the U.S. Department of Labor gave the state $2 million to serve 210 senior citizens. 

Evers just axed it, according to reports. Yup, he never included it in his budget so the legislature could have input. The administration just sent out notices terminating the program.

Before anyone feels tempted to say that this must have been directed by DOGE and the Trump administration from on high, it wasn’t. It is widely reported that the federal funding remains intact and that the directive came from inside the administration.

Now maybe there was good cause; maybe there wasn’t. But it’s telling that the governor who yells about more investments in human services unilaterally cuts what very well may be a core human services program, even as he proposes wild spending on climate change and other vanity projects. 

It’s a small amount of money to cut compared to all the money Evers spends. But it shows who Tony Evers really is — a governor who cares not for real people but who swears allegiance to dogmas that use vulnerable people as props to maintain and increase power and control.

The only real salutes the governor offers up is to progressive globalist causes and icons. To everyone else, it’s really a middle finger.

Hang down your head in shame, Tony Evers, for all that you try to do to the “folks” of Wisconsin.