Author: Wisconsin Budget Project

September 18 marked the one-year anniversary of the bill authorizing massive subsidies for a Foxconn plant in southeast Wisconsin. Although we still don’t know many specifics about the plant that will be built and the new jobs that will result, we have learned a lot in the last year, and the current picture is considerably different than what we had been led to believe a year ago. Here are eight significant things we have learned since the Governor pushed the huge subsidies through the legislature in great haste last year: 1) The plant will be very different from what...

A new poll found that Wisconsin residents believe that excellent public schools are important to the state’s success, and are concerned that recent changes have harmed public schools. Cutting taxes ranks relatively low among voter concerns, the poll showed. Voters all across the state place a great deal of value on Wisconsin’s schools, with nearly half (49%) naming K-12 education as among the two most important issues facing the state, according to the August 2018 poll from Marquette University Law School. In contrast, only 13% of voters identified tax cuts as among the most important issues. When presented with...

“The Census is the bedrock upon which we construct our system of representative democracy. It provides for apportionment, redistricting, and the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars of federal funding.” – Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross By this time in the decennial cycle over the last five decades, funding would be ramping up so the U.S. Census Bureau could scale up its activity appropriately to undertake the constitutionally-required enumeration of the U.S. population scheduled for 2020. Yet the Congress has underfunded the Bureau for the last several years, and estimates for a shortfall for 2018 alone now range...