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Federal Bill Gives WI Another Chance to Capitalize

Posted by Jon Erpenbach Press. State Senator 27th District
Jon Erpenbach Press. State Senator 27th District
State Senator Jon Erpenbach (D-Madison) - A former radio personality and legisla
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on Tuesday, 03 May 2016
in Wisconsin

aca-workingWisconsin taxpayers have missed out on hundreds of millions of dollars from the Federal government as a part of the Affordable Care Act implementation, but now there's a chance to push the “reset” button.


MADISON - That fact that Wisconsin taxpayers have missed out on hundreds of millions of dollars from the Federal government as a part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA-ObamaCare) implementation is not new news. One of the few states that to say “no thanks we don’t want our own tax dollars back, please send it to Illinois or Texas” has been a painful decision to watch as students cannot graduate because classes are cut, potholes get bigger and another school referendum hits property taxpayer’s pocketbook. Well the good news is that this bad decision by Governor Walker and the Republican majority in the Legislature can be reversed at any time. We could come in session tomorrow and get this done.

Now that no one from Wisconsin is running for President and we have seen the unnecessary struggle that the choice to refuse $320 million just this biennium has had on our state economy, we can come back to the table and accept Federal dollars and give access to affordable health care. Not taking Federal funds does not mean that our tax dollars are squirreled away and saved for a rainy day by Congress. It just means they send our money to another state, to help them balance their budgets and help their citizens with health insurance.

Excellent new news from the Federal government is the introduction of the SAME Act by Senator Tammy Baldwin and others. This bill would push the “reset” button for Wisconsin. We could choose to accept our tax dollars back as a part of ACA and start at the same full reimbursement rate that we could have had in the first place; 100% reimbursement from the Federal government for expansion of our current BadgerCare Plus program. Under SAME, for four years we would be at 100% reimbursement, phasing down to 90% reimbursement after another three years. Still a lot better than where we are now, which is zero. This could be a huge windfall for our state budget.

What people don’t understand is general purpose revenue (GPR) was used to backfill Medicaid expenses for Wisconsin this budget. That means dollars that should have gone to our schools, roads and UW schools were diverted because of the political decisions of the Legislature. Republicans can even accept the Federal funds for a year and then change their mind the next year. The flexibility and sheer amount of tax dollars makes this decision a no brainer.

It is time for the Legislature to put politics aside and accept Federal BadgerCare expansion funds so our financial house can improve. The SAME Act from US Senator Baldwin will provide Wisconsin a unique opportunity to hit the “reset” button for our taxpayers and citizens. It simply is time to put more than $320 million in our coffers without raising taxes and without cuts.

For more information on the BadgerCare Plus expansion dollars or the Federal SAME Act please contact my office at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call 888-549-0027 or 608-266-6670

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On John Doe, DAs Deserve Our Thanks!

Posted by Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Matt Rothschild
Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Matt Rothschild
Matt Rothschild is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a
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on Sunday, 01 May 2016
in Wisconsin

john-chisolmMADISON - The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign thanks the courageous district attorneys John Chisholm, Ismael Ozanne, and Larry Nelson for appealing the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision in the John Doe II case to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.

While the details of their appeal have not been made public yet, there are two solid grounds for the appeal.

The first is that at least a couple of the justices should have recused themselves from the John Doe case because of a conflict of interest.

The four justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court who dismissed the John Doe investigation concerning alleged coordination between Scott Walker and so-called outside groups were aided enormously by some of the very groups that were party to the John Doe case.

Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Wisconsin Club for Growth, and Citizens for a Strong America—all of which were reportedly embroiled in the John Doe--together spent more than $8 million in support of Justice Patience Roggensack, Justice Annette Ziegler, Justice Michael Gableman, and Justice David Prosser.

ismael-ozanne-daThe second, and even more crucial, basis for an appeal is the fact that the Wisconsin Supreme Court blatantly misread forty years of U.S. Supreme Court precedent on campaign finance.

In tossing out the John Doe II case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court said that the First Amendment prohibits the state of Wisconsin from imposing a ban on coordination between candidates and issue advocacy groups. But dating back to Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 and right on through Citizens United of 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court campaign finance decisions have been predicated on there being no coordination between candidates and issue advocacy groups.

In Buckley, the court ruled that expenditures by outside groups that are coordinated with candidates amount to campaign contributions. “The ultimate effect is the same as if the person had contributed the dollar amount to the candidate and the candidate had then used the contribution,” the court ruled. Such expenditures, it said, should be “treated as contributions rather than expenditures.”

Only the lack of coordination reduces the risk of corruption, the Court stressed in Buckley. “The absence of prearrangement and coordination of an expenditure with the candidate or his agent . . . alleviates the danger that expenditures will be given as a quid pro quo for improper commitments from the candidates.”

larry-nelson-daEven in its infamous Citizens United decision, which allowed independent groups to spend unlimited amounts of money, the U.S Supreme Court stressed that such groups had to be independent; they couldn’t coordinate with their favored candidates: “By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that line. He will be the crucial vote in this case, assuming that the U.S. Supreme Court hears it. And if Justice Kennedy stands by his own reasoning in Citizens United, the district attorneys have an excellent chance of prevailing and getting the John Doe II decision overturned.

That would be a tremendous outcome because unless the John Doe II decision is overturned, we will have little hope in Wisconsin of limiting the corrupting influence of dark money over our politics.

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"Private Academies On The Dole"

Posted by Mike McCabe, Blue Jean Nation
Mike McCabe, Blue Jean Nation
Mike McCabe is the founder and president of Blue Jean Nation and author of Blue
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on Wednesday, 27 April 2016
in Wisconsin

school-closed26 years ago, Wisconsin lawmakers started the Parental Choice Program in Milwaukee, the first Taxpayer-subsidized private schooling. It started with just over 300 students, now there are more than 30,000. Today, private schools are getting 20% more state aid per student than the public schools educating everyone else’s children. Why?


ALTOONA, WI - Some 26 years ago, Wisconsin lawmakers blazed a new trail by creating the nation’s first scholastic welfare program. It started in Milwaukee, expanded to Racine, and then was taken statewide. It started small, with just over 300 students. Now there are more than 30,000 in the program.

It’s officially called the Parental Choice Program. If there were truth in labeling, it would be called what it is: Taxpayer-subsidized private schooling. The small number of families getting the subsidies already had a choice. In fact,most of them were exercising their option to have their children privately schooled before handouts were ever offered.

So here’s what this boils down to: People who showed they have the means to send their children to private schools are now able to continue to send them to private schools but have the rest of us taxpayers pay their tuition for them.

The real kick in the teeth for taxpayers is that the value of the public-funded vouchers for private schooling is considerably higher than the amount of state aid for each student attending a public school in Wisconsin. The state is spending $236 million this school year on the Milwaukee, Racine and statewide “Parental Choice Programs,” and is cutting state aid to public schools by $75 million to help pay for it. Next year, the cost of the vouchers that scholastic welfare recipients receive will rise to $258 million and $83 million will be taken from the public schools to help cover the cost. This year, each voucher is worth $7,210 for elementary and middle school students and $7,856 for high school students. Next year, taxpayers will be picking up the tab to the tune of $7,323 for each elementary and middle school student and $7,969 for each high schooler. Meanwhile, when you look at all the different forms of state aid to public schools, the amount being spent on each of the more than 870,000 students attending public schools is less than $6,000.

Let that sink in for a moment. The private schools serving scholastic welfare recipients are getting roughly 20% more state aid per student than the public schools educating everyone else’s children are getting.

The lobbyists who sold Wisconsin lawmakers on this scheme a quarter of a century ago insisted at the time that the program would create competition and ultimately boost student achievement. It hasn’t. Students getting taxpayer-subsidized private schooling are doing no better than their public school counterparts. If anything, they actually are doing somewhat worse. And that holds true in other states that followed Wisconsin’s lead.

So why does Wisconsin keep throwing good money after bad? Scholastic welfare is a raw deal for taxpayers and a decades-long failure as an educational policy, but it has been very good for the campaign coffers of state politicians.

And why is so much money thrown at politicians to keep expanding a program that has never delivered on its promises? This is all about propping up private and parochial schools whose enrollments have been plummeting nationwide. Sure enough, while private school enrollments in Wisconsin were falling statewide, they were increasing in the counties where the scholastic welfare program was started. Keeping failing private schools alive is the one thing this program has succeeded in doing. That’s why the program was expanded statewide in 2013.

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Will Broadband Show Up in Rural Neighborhoods?

Posted by Kathleen Vinehout, State Senator 31st District
Kathleen Vinehout, State Senator 31st District
Kathleen Vinehout of Alma is an educator, business woman, and farmer who is now
User is currently offline
on Tuesday, 26 April 2016
in Wisconsin

internet-ruralSen. Kathleen Vinehout attended a meeting with business people, elected officials, telecommunication companies, and the State Broadband Director to discuss what can be done to solve the problems with rural broadband connectivity.


LA CROSSE, WI - “I don’t want to promise you fiber where fiber is not going to come,” Kent Disch, AT&T Wisconsin External Affairs Director, told Ellsworth community leaders.

Pierce County business leaders and elected officials gathered with telecommunication company representatives and local cooperatives to push for resolution to Internet problems.

Business leaders asked companies why they would not or could not bring services to businesses that were more than willing to pay. A concrete company owner noted his company is growing but lack of good broadband “is a bottleneck.” Broadband is needed to prosper.

One after another, the business leaders, county board members, and a former mayor shared community problems. People could not join mandatory webinars or attend virtual conference meetings. Locals frequently experienced dropped Internet connections. The Internet would not work at certain times of the day.

Families could not obtain services they needed for the business of life. Teens drove across the river to Minnesota to download files. Elderly women had inadequate phone service. Others completely lost phone service with no plans by the company to replace old copper lines. Some couldn’t get Internet at all.

“How motivated is AT&T to work here?” a local business owner asked. Clearly frustrated, she said, “I am still waiting for voicemail [for my business phone]. And it’s been ten years!”

“It’s not a great business investment to put in copper or fiber,” the AT&T representative told the group.

Here was part of the problem. Local people live in an area lacking large concentrations of people. The network of fiber is more valuable to a company as more people are connected. Without some type of incentive, the companies appeared uninterested or unable to connect rural residents.

Earlier this year three companies, AT&T, Frontier, and CenturyLink received more than $570 million in federal money to build rural broadband. As reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin is second only to California in the dollars given to the states through the Connect America Fund II program. Wisconsin also made a very modest investment of a few million dollars in grants to expand broadband.

With this incentive, one would think things were great and build-out would be coming soon. But, not so fast - maybe six or seven years - no commitments.

“We’re not going to go trenching through a bluff,” said the AT&T representative. “We are figuring out what facilities we have. We are a large wireless company…how do we leverage [our assets] to get the best bang for the buck…where can we grab the low hanging fruit…where do we have cell towers with capacity…there is a lot of engineering that goes into this.”

Throughout the discussion, residents learned the place they chose to live was largely responsible for the problems they experienced. Soaring bluffs, rocky outcrops, rolling hills – our beautiful state – was responsible for our lack of broadband.

People at the meeting reviewed maps of connectivity. However, the maps did not accurately show the void in service coverage.

“We know the map is incorrect,” said Angie Dickison, State Broadband Director as she handed me a brightly colored map of our Senate District. “Why?” I asked. She replied, “Data comes from the providers. Reporting is done on census block. If just one person receives service the entire census block is covered.”

When I asked specific questions about resolving people’s problems I learned most problems could be solved.

Does the Internet drop you? Your service is “oversubscribed” meaning there are too many people on the line. Is it hard to get on at certain times of the day? There are too many people and not enough equipment. Having problems with lag-time on the computer? A common problem with satellite service as the signal travels to outer space and back again.

Could the state get an accurate internet connectivity map? Yes. But the law requiring companies to provide detailed data was changed with the telecommunication “modernization.”

Wisconsin lost the levers of power to require certain actions by companies (such as providing basic phone service to everyone) by deregulation. Now, it seems, we are relying on the goodwill of the company and the lure of public dollars to bring broadband to rural areas.

But will the company deliver? There are no promises.

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"A New Economic Metaphor"

Posted by Mike McCabe, Blue Jean Nation
Mike McCabe, Blue Jean Nation
Mike McCabe is the founder and president of Blue Jean Nation and author of Blue
User is currently offline
on Thursday, 21 April 2016
in Wisconsin

wallstreetEver since the 1980's, the American economy has been under the spell of "trickle-down economics", a theory that produces feed-the-rich policies. They have made the rich vastly richer, and everyone else’s earnings stagnant. But there’s a geyser ready to blow, if we’re smart enough to shift our attention from supply to demand.


ALTOONA, WI - For close to 40 years now, the American economy has been under the spell of supply-side theory, better known on the streets as trickle-down economics. The theory is that expanding the economy’s capacity to produce more goods is the best way to stimulate economic growth. In practice, that theory produces feed-the-rich policies — such as steep cuts in the income taxes corporations and the wealthiest Americans pay — aimed at encouraging private investment in businesses, production facilities and equipment.

Those policies have worked like a charm in one regard. They have made the rich vastly richer. With everyone else’s earnings stagnating, the gap between America’s rich and the rest has grown dramatically by every statistical measure since trickle-down took hold of our economy. Trickle-down economics has been a colossal failure when it comes to producing shared prosperity. George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo economics” for supercharging the accumulation of national debt, but its biggest sin is that America was growing together before the supply-siders took over and has been growing apart ever since.

There are conspicuous reasons why the only thing trickle-down economics does well is produce income and wealth inequality. Feed the rich and they don’t eat much of what they are fed. They store it away. They amass more wealth. Every dollar added to their net worth is a dollar out of circulation that creates no multiplier effect in the economy. Put more money in the pockets of everyday workers and consumers and they spend it. That creates demand. When someone wants to buy, someone else is eager to sell. The economy is stimulated.

That’s the fundamental flaw in supply-side theory. You can shower incentives on corporations and the superwealthy to supply more goods, but if no one is buying what they are making the new factories will be shuttered in no time. Demand drives economic growth, not supply. Shared prosperity doesn’t trickle down, it springs from the ground up like a geyser.

Shifting from failed trickle-down economics to geyser economics means concentrating on stoking demand rather than trying to politically manipulate supply. Boosting wages is a good place to start. The federal minimum wage has been increased 22 different times, and every time supply-siders screamed that increasing it would be a jobs killer. Never worked out that way. The national gross domestic product (GDP) steadily grew through every minimum wage increase. And states that increased their own minimum wages have seen faster job growth than those that didn’t. That’s because workers earning more end up spending more. Good capitalists figure out how to supply what consumers are demanding. They scale up their operations to meet the increased demand, and that means hiring rather than laying off.

A critical next step toward geyser economics is overhauling our tax system. America effectively has two tax systems, one for the rich and another for the rest. That needs to change. We don’t need new taxes. We do need to make sure everyone pays the ones we already have. That will reduce the share of total taxes paid by low-income and middle-class Americans, leaving them with more to spend on other things. Demand will be further stoked.

Big business handouts are a favorite recipe in the trickle-down cookbook. Funny how so many of the handouts wind up hidden in shell companies and tax havens overseas and don’t actually create any additional supply — or jobs — here at home. States have fallen in love with this recipe too. Wisconsin’s corporate welfare office spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, creates no noticeable economic stimulation and hardly any jobs, and can’t even seem to keep track of how the taxpayers’ money is spent.

For the sake of free market capitalism and shared prosperity, geyser economics is predicated on doing away with crony capitalism. We’re better off taking the money wasted on handouts to corporations and the ultrawealthy and investing it instead in things like affordable, debt-free education. An entire generation of young Americans is buried under a mountain of college debt. With them spending 20, 30, even 40 years paying off student loans, think of how many are putting off purchases of cars and houses and other such goods. Imagine what it would do for auto manufacturers, car dealers, home builders and realtors if we made education as affordable for today’s youth as it was for us older folks. You don’t think they’d gladly supply what legions of young Americans would suddenly be able to buy?

There’s a geyser ready to blow, if we’re smart enough to shift our attention from supply to demand.

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