Browsing: Media

A new poll found a surprising gap in voters’ understanding of how Wisconsin taxes compare to neighboring states, even as an unprecedented state revenue surplus makes tax reform a key issue in Madison.

The poll, of 480 registered voters in December, asked, “How do the taxes people pay in Wisconsin compare to the taxes people pay in neighboring states?”

An ongoing series of articles and videos featuring the stories of Wisconsin parents seeking the best education options for their kids.

Wisconsin children can receive dramatically different education funding depending on where their parents chose to send them to school.

The Badger Institute’s visiting fellow, Eloise Anderson, explains why men who have been left behind are vital to a new civil society.

Twenty months after Congress passed a bill that rained $2.53 billion down on Wisconsin, the governor’s office in sole charge of administering the funding, as well as  legislative audit and budget officials, have almost no idea of how all that money is being spent.

Chershanta Smith can’t imagine her daughter, Gabrielle, attending school anywhere other than St. Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee’s Brewer’s Hill neighborhood. And that’s not only because she believes her daughter is receiving an excellent education at St. Marcus through the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, but because the school’s community has embraced and supported her entire family.

There are numerous ways Wisconsin could move to a flat income tax while benefitting Wisconsinites across the income spectrum. The most obvious solution is to flatten the rate while increasing the standard deduction, as proposed by the Tax Foundation and the Badger Institute in the July 2022 report Tax Reform Options to Improve Wisconsin’s Competitiveness.

At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Wishkub Kinepoway faced two family crises with some crying, prayer and a lot of determination. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and a Shawano County transplant to Milwaukee, Kinepoway knew she needed to make a change for her children. She also knew that change wouldn’t come without school choice.

Right after scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, came out, Wisconsin’s chief public school regulator, state Superintendent Jill Underly, issued a press release headlined, “Wisconsin elementary school students buck national trends in ‘National Report Card’ release.”

This is not true: Wisconsin’s scores fell by every measure since the last time children took the test, in 2019, just as scores fell for every other state.

The cops have had enough, says Kennedy, and the long lines that have stretched across generations in some families, grandfathers to fathers to sons who all were eager to serve and sacrifice – are being severed.

Flummoxed by a staggering amount of money and by guidelines for how to spend it, Wisconsin counties and cities are spending tens of millions of dollars of American Rescue Plan Act funds to try to administer American Rescue Plan Act funds.

It now takes, on average, more than 15 months to fully resolve, from arrest to closed case, a homicide charge in Wisconsin. Armed robbery takes a year and sexual assault cases average 14 months.

It’s campaign season, so the only numbers that seem to matter to the mainstream media are the ones in polls.

Institute research shows that flat tax would improve state competitiveness, increase prosperity October 5, 2022 — The Badger Institute today…

The bad news is that most Americans have lost faith in our national leaders. Only 32%, according to a 2022 Pew Research survey, have a favorable opinion of the “federal government in Washington.”

Milwaukee, mired in serious, often violent crime unlike anywhere else in Wisconsin, doesn’t have enough cops. That is the irrefutable takeaway from two chapters in the Crime section of this book.

Why would a citizenry want its government to require, by law, higher prices? At anytime, it’s a good question but, as veteran journalist Ken Wysocky points out, at a time of raging inflation, it takes on a new urgency.

Approximately 30% of the revenue in Wisconsin’s current two-year budget comes from the federal government — and that doesn’t include billions and billions of dollars sent to the Badger State to ostensibly get us through the pandemic.

State and local governments in the United States have wide latitude in setting economic policy. In the first half of the 20th century, the progressives chose an economic model for Wisconsin that called for high levels of taxation and government expenditure coupled with extensive regulation of business and labor.

One of the few things that all Americans agree on about education is that it must improve. How, specifically? There we differ.