Reader defends Evers veto

To the Editor:

In your April 7 edition, Richard Moore reports on U.S. Representative and possible next Governor of Wisconsin Tom Tiffany’s criticism of Gov. Evers’ veto of measures “that would have eliminated taxes on certain overtime earnings and on cash tips” because those measures, according to Rep. Tiffany, would have allowed Wisconsinites to keep more of their paychecks at a time when many working families struggle to make ends meet.

While that is certainly true, what Rep. Tiffany does not mention, but Gov. Evers, in connection with his veto, does, is that those Republican-sponsored tax elimination measures, if enacted, were stated to expire in 2028. Which raises two questions:

If the loss to state revenues by virtue of elimination of the taxes on overtime and tips would not have been significant, why did the Republican legislature limit the term of that tax elimination, ending it in 2028, an election year?

And if the loss to state revenues by virtue of elimination of the taxes on overtime and tips would have been significant, how would the Republicans have proposed compensating for that loss: by having the state incur debt, or by cutting state services. If the latter, which services?

At any rate, with that election-year termination built in, the gift of those tax measures to the effected taxpayers would seem to have operated a bit like what they say happens if you accept a gift of “help” from “the mob” for a “solution” to a “problem”: you are forever in the mob’s debt. 

Here, if many Wisconsin taxpayers get used to a little sugar for a couple of years from the hands of the current Republican legislature, and if that sugar would stop in the 2028 election year, who are those many taxpayers going to be more than otherwise inclined to vote into the state legislature in 2028, Republicans, who’ve been giving them sugar, or Democrats, who haven’t?

Gov. Evers also objected to “ceding control over the direction of state tax policy to Congress by connecting the proposed state tax deductions for tips to any change in the federal deduction (for tips), regardless of what is best for Wisconsin.”

What he was probably referring to is connecting Wisconsin’s tax policy to the tax policy behind the Republican Congress’s 2025 Big Beautiful Bill (now, in law, “The One Big Beautiful Bill”), where tax reductions for all federal taxpayers (individual and corporate) will have resulted over time in tax benefits estimated at as much as $7.3 trillion to all federal taxpayers, but going 80-90% to the highest tax payers (1%-0.01% of all?), and the remaining 20-10% of benefits to the remaining taxpayers (99%-99.99% of all?) (who among the latter include overtime- and tip-tax-eliminated individual taxpayers, like those endorsed by Rep. Tiffany for Wisconsin, and whose federal tax elimination also expires, as that under the vetoed Wisconsin tax bill would have, in 2028).

Which in turn has led to complaints that the federal tax reductions for the federal taxpayers getting only 10-20% of the benefits of those reductions — including the taxpayers receiving temporary (expiring in 2028) federal overtime- and tip-tax-eliminations — are political “peanuts” to that very large taxpayer/voter audience, designed to distract and divert its attention from the 80-90% of the benefits of those reductions going to that very small taxpayer/voter audience of super-rich (individuals and corporations), whose reduction is permanent and does not expire in 2028.

But the effect of all those federal tax reductions taken together over time would be to reduce federal tax revenues by that estimated $7.3 trillion, leaving the federal government with only two alternatives to cover that revenue loss: by increasing the federal debt by $7.3 trillion, or by making a $7.3 trillion cut to federal government costs (for example, Medicare and Social Security).

So if the state Republicans’ tax-elimination flirtation with a large swath of Wisconsin voters — which Gov. Evers cites as tied to a Republican Congress’s identical federal tax elimination — is successful in helping the Republicans keep control of the Wisconsin legislature after the 2028 election, what’s next with them? 

That in carrying out (with Rep. Tiffany’s help as Governor) a state tax policy in step with that of 2025 BBB’s federal tax policy they enact their previously vetoed overtime and tips tax elimination (now also time-limited) to benefit many Wisconsin taxpayer/voters while using that widely popular benefit legislation to divert and distract the attention of those many happy benefit-receiving voters from the legislators’ having bundled that benefit legislation (as with the bundled federal tax reductions under the federal 2025 BBB benefiting 99%-99.9%? of federal voters) with a much larger (and permanent) tax reduction benefit here for Wisconsin’s very few highest bracket individual and corporate taxpayers?

Which aggregate tax revenue loss to Wisconsin would be covered how — by incurring debt or by cutting state services? If the latter, which services?

Tom Dickson

Rhinelander