Browsing: News

Healthcare innovators are our best chance for better healthcare, as long as well-intended but stifling government regulations or laws, or an increasingly anti-competitive marketplace, don’t get in their way. The current reimbursement-driven system both creates roadblocks for innovators and simultaneously drives up costs. Direct pay removes these roadblocks.

A state Department of Health Services decision to take a year to remove ineligible people from Wisconsin’s Medicaid rolls — much slower than many other states — will cost federal and state taxpayers an estimated $745 million.

Legislative reforms mesh with recommendations in Badger Institute paper Sometimes, the most helpful thing a government can do is to…

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated this week that people who filed for unemployment insurance during the pandemic stole somewhere between $100 billion and $135 billion in benefits — just a portion of the estimated fraud across all federal pandemic programs.

The Legislature appears ready to confront one of the primary factors driving up childcare costs in Wisconsin: overregulation. Failing to confront this reality would miss an opportunity to improve the affordability and accessibility of childcare without adding to the budget. Eliminating unnecessary or unverifiable regulations can reduce compliance costs for childcare providers without sacrificing quality — savings that they can pass on to families. Fewer regulations will increase competition among childcare providers, return authority to parents and ultimately make childcare more affordable for Wisconsin families.

Volunteers are the backbone of emergency response in Wisconsin and many communities have struggled for years to find enough of them.

Wisconsin’s independent choice and public charter schools have drawn about 70,000 children, two-thirds of them non-white, and the programs are old enough to have piled up an undeniable record of better outcomes. Why do so many speakers in the DPI’s equity series oppose this? 

According to a Marquette Law School poll last fall, 64% of registered Wisconsin voters, and 43% of Republicans, favor full legalization. Thirty percent of Wisconsinites and 50% of Republicans think it should remain illegal. Only 6% of registered voters say they just don’t know.

As part of a training program, an initiative of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is bringing in high-profile left-wing speakers, including Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, to speak to potentially thousands of Wisconsin teachers about “educational equity.” 

The city of Milwaukee announced it is building a new line for the $128 million streetcar known as The Hop. Unanswered anywhere in the strangely incurious media is why the city would open that line now.

The American Dream isn’t primarily about money. 

According to Pew Research Center analysis, just 11% said “being wealthy” is essential to the American Dream. Large majorities cite “freedom of choice in how to live” (77%), having a good family life (70%) and retiring comfortably (60%).

Wisconsin doesn’t have to send back a single dime of the federal aid it has already received, budget experts told the Badger Institute.

Now that choice and independent charter schools are going to be less disadvantaged compared to district schools and to the prevailing cost of educating a kid, donors’ investments can go toward expanding capacity.

Gov. Tony Evers, who has set as a goal that “all electricity consumed in the state be 100% carbon-free by 2050,” is making sure that state agencies and local governments are able to ban the use of fossil fuels to run cars and lawnmowers, heat homes and power stoves.

Many SNAP recipients avoid healthy foods and spend a large percentage of their benefits on sugary beverages and prepared desserts, according to Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and visiting fellow at the Badger Institute.

A wedding barn is nothing like a tavern — especially in ways that matter for liquor laws. The Badger Institute is happy to join an effort to fill in Wisconsin lawmakers on why.

Partisans are actively hoping Janet Protasiewicz will have a role in casting a decisive vote on redistricting, school choice, voter ID and even rolling back Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10, prohibiting collective bargaining for most state employees. 

You know those decals that make your car look like it’s been hit by gunfire?

My family’s car has something like that, only more authentic: a bullet hole in the tailgate.

Social Security already is exempt from income taxes in Wisconsin. Now two Republican legislators are circulating a bill that would virtually eliminate all income taxes on retirees.

Minimum markup laws hurt consumers by making goods more costly. Wisconsin should repeal its antiquated minimum markup law, as Badger Institute has advocated for decades.