I wonder if Ed Thompson agrees with what Grover Norquist has to say about the hardworking farmers in Thompson’s area. Namely, that they’re “welfare bums.”   Read More »

A new study from the Citizens for Tax Justice shows just how far Ryan is willing to go to sell out the middle class for the sake of America’s richest one percent.

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When Steve Walters was reporting for the Journal Sentinel's Madison bureau, a lot of Democrats thought he just put Tommy Thompson's news releases -- or Jim Klauser's memos -- right in the newspaper, without bothering to edit them or ask anyone for an opposing viewpoint.

So it was a pleasant surprise when Walters, now a producer at Wisconsin Eye and a WisPolitics columnist, said he has a few questions for Scott Walker about his tax cutting plans if he's elected governor.

Unfortunately, Walters is asking the wrong questions:

By “employers,” Scott, do you mean all Wisconsin businesses? (Scott? Sounds a little chummy, ain'a?)

Specifically, will you recommend cutting -- or even abolishing -- the
$700 million corporate income tax?

Scott, would you freeze property taxes only on homes, or also on other types
of property (manufacturing, commercial, farmland, utilities)?

Interesting questions, perhaps, but irrelevant to a large extent. Walker has already said quite clearly what he wants to do. There are four major pieces of his tax policies, which he's talked about on the campaign trail, including
in LaCrosse in November:

Walker took aim at Wisconsin’s new “combined reporting” taxation law, which treats parent companies and subsidiaries as one corporation for income tax purposes.(What was known as the Las Vegas Loophole allowed companies to pretend to be headquartered elsewhere and avoid Wisconsin taxes. Walker wants to reopen the loophole.)

Walker said he would try to repeal the increase in the top income tax bracket... (the top one per cent, who make over $225,000 a year)

and new changes in capital gains deductions... (Guess who pays most capital gains taxes?

He also promises to eliminate Wisconsin’s tax on retirement income...

Quite a list. But the questions that begs for some reporter to ask -- and maybe even follow up when Walker blathers some generalities -- is how Walker plans to pay for those cuts.

The price tag on those four items, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, is about $2-billion. The state's already facing a $2-billion deficit, so Walker's grand schemes would double it.

So the question Steve should ask his friend Scott is, "What programs are you going to cut if you give away another $2-billion in tax cuts?" (most of which would go to corporations and the highest income earners in the state, by the way)

One easy way to raise the $2-billion would be to end shared revenue to the state's municipalities, an $1.86 billion program. that of course would result in either sky-high property tax increases or severe cuts to vital services, like shutting down police and fire stations and inadequate snow removal and road repair.

Walker actually proposed ending shared revenue to municipalities when he was in the legislature, so that is not so far-fetched. A guy named Scott McCallum wanted to end shared revenue, too, but that didn't work out so well for him.

One Wisconsin Now offered some other possibilities for Walker to consider to save $2-billion:

--Ending health care assistance to over 100,000 families (two adults, two children) per year enrolled in the state’s BadgerCare programs.

--;Firing 14,000 public school teachers

--Cutting nearly all funding to the University of Wisconsin System

Let's hope that Walters's questions are just the first in a series that some enterprising reporters might ask.

Let's also hope that the reporter asks them of Walker not on paper but face-to-face, or better yet, on camera, and insists on some real answers.

We can only hope.

Ed Thompson announced today that he’d be singing Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” In his latest press release, Thompson raises the roof for Norquist and his group, Americans for Tax Reform, for championing a belief in anti-working class tax policies. Score another one for the fat cats.   Read More »

A great retort from AFSCME's Marty Biel about WPRI's attack on the state pension system that their president, George Lightbourn, a 20-year public employee himself who managed and now receives benefits from the system, posted by Sly this morning:

Your State Pension Under Attack

Executive Director Beil Blast's Opponents of State Pension Plan
Defends Public Sector Workers

Marty Beil - State Pensions Under Attack
Posted by SLY IN THE MORNING at 7:45 AM

Scott Walker and right-wing radio want to blame State pensions for the budget mess despite Wisconsin having one of the best run pension programs in the country. State employees make lower wages in exchange for a secure but modest retirement and its saves taxpayer money in the long run. Listen to AFSCME Council 24 Executive Director Marty Beil (http://slysoffice.blogspot.com/search?q=State+Pensions).

Listen to the radio show - Approximately 38 minutes
http://slysoffice.blogspot.com/search?q=State+Pensions

So “Wisconsin’s Free Market Think Tank” released yet another report reinforcing the pro-corporate agenda of conservatives. Big surprise.   Read More »

During some downtime between creating super awesome and totally relevant Ayn Rand fanboy videos and posting them on Facebook, Paul Ryan managed to find time to offer up the latest GOP lead-balloon plan for propping up the rich and corporations while selling out the middle class. Ryan’s ‘Roadmap for America’ was brought to the forefront of the debate during the question and answer session between the President and House Republicans. The President even praised Ryan for offering a substantive idea, and though President Obama didn’t say so, I’m sure he was thankful to hear something from the Republicans that didn’t question his citizenship, attempt to incite racially-charged violence or contain a reference to teabagging. A breath of fresh air, if you will.

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WISTAX Watch is asking the conservative Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance to explain why its latest report focusing on fee increases in cities and villages ignores county governments. The state is in the midst of a gubernatorial campaign between Milwaukee's conservative county executive, Scott Walker and Milwaukee's mayor, Tom Barrett.

It defies logic that WISTAX focuses on cities but not counties, given its history of lumping taxes together in its annual total tax reports. WISTAX goes so far as to single out the city of Milwaukee for special coverage to get headlines advancing its conservative agenda.

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We here at One Wisconsin Now have worked tirelessly for close to a year developing WISTAX Watch—a comprehensive expose on the pro-corporate, conservative bias of Wisconsin’s most vocal and visible tax policy think tank, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX). Among the most blatant examples of its bias is the overwhelming amount of contributions to Republican and conservative candidates and committees. So just how partisan is WISTAX?   Read More »

Gotta quiz for you...Which supposedly "independent" and "unbiased" organization in Wisconsin fits the following?

Its president and leading voice is a former Republican administration official and local Republican party executive committee member.

Members of its board of directors since 1994 have donated nearly $1.3 million to Republicans and conservative political candidates.   Read More »

WMC Watch News: WMC's new board chair is calling for bipartisan efforts to stimulate job growth in Wisconsin. Laughable, given the extremely partisan disposition of the organization he now heads and his own partisan campaign contributions.   Read More »

Readers of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel business section will know the name John Torinus. Torinus seems to be a busy man in the business community: he is the current chair and former CEO of Serigraph, Inc.; a current board member of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce--our state’s largest pro-corporate, anti-public investment lobby group; and a past board member and chair of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance--the state’s most prominent pro-corporate, anti-public investment, tax research group.   Read More »

The failed conservative economic policies of giving endless tax breaks to corporations and the rich finally got a full-throated repudiation last night as voters in Oregon passed a tax increase on the wealthy and corporations to fill that state’s gaping budget hole.

Voters sick and tired of watching corporations get rich while state services and funding for public education are cut endlessly finally stood up and said ‘ENOUGH!’ Despite the typical crying and scare-tactics from corporate interests that somehow paying their fair share will “kill jobs,” Oregonians knew better. Many corporations in Oregon have skirted taxes for years, often paying the minimum tax allowed by Oregon law, ten bucks. Ten dollars – yeah cause that’s paying a fair share for the state services that corporations so willingly use.

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So let me get this straight.

Wisconsin's facing a budget deficit of something like $2-billion, and Scott Walker's idea is to dig the hole deeper with a big corporate tax break? And the news media treat him seriously?

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Master Terrence Wall Street simply does not like the Recovery Act. In fact, he dislikes the Recovery Act almost as much as he disdains paying his fair share of taxes that the rest of us pay.

The Untaxable Terrence, has not only used his Twitter to criticize efforts through the Recovery Act to turn America around, but also featured in the Daily Reporter as having said the following:

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Nine out of ten times isn’t just a coincidence; it’s a pattern of behavior.

And nine out of the last ten years, silver-spoon fed real estate developer Terrence Wall paid no state income tax. Because one of Madison’s wealthiest business men didn’t make any money in the last ten years. Right.

When T-Wall’s income tax doge was first revealed, we only new about the last five years, and T-Wall chalked up his non-existent tax payments to the down economy. But that certainly doesn’t explain his lack of tax payments over the last 10 years. T-Wall tried to explain it away by claiming he paid his fair share in business taxes, but we haven’t uncovered any proof of that, nor has T-Wall provided any.

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Hardworking State Sen. Dan Kapanke (R-La Crosse) bravely stood up to recent media reports that he had still not paid back taxpayers for the $38,000 tab we had coming after footing the bill for his legal woes over his use of taxpayer resources for campaign business and his obstruction of an open records request: He hastily announced he would pay a small portion of the bill.

Y'know if we can get the press to write a story about his opposition to job creation measures, maybe tomorrow he'll do an announcement he's going to start trying to create economic opportunity for Wisconsin.

It's worth a shot.

As a side note: although Kapanke advocates for ridiculous tax cuts for the rich and has a baseball team, he is not like George W. Bush.

The polling project between the UW-Madison Political Science department and the state’s shrillest right-wing, corporate-friendly think tank has turned out to be as suspicious as we first feared.

Documents obtained by One Wisconsin Now through the state’s open records law reveal that political considerations were front and center in the decision making surrounding the polling project and the publication of the poll’s results. The results of the poll showed statewide opposition to private school vouchers, but the press release from both UW and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) played up figures that showed support for school vouchers in Milwaukee.

According to the email we obtained, in the day before the release of materials on the poll, the head of WPRI pushed to have the statewide opposition to vouchers to be removed and to use the Milwaukee County numbers instead. When UW professor Ken Goldstein pushed back, saying the change would go against standard operating procedure, George Lightbourn of WPRI pushed back even harder, saying:

“I’m not concerned about journalists. I’m concerned about the Scott (sic) Ross types who would enjoy being able to portray WPRI’s own data as showing lack of support for choice. I know it’s a pain in the ass but I’ve been burned a couple of times and I don’t need to be the one holding the gas can.”

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If you haven't had the chance yet to grab your wagon and take the kiddies down to "Tax Free' Terrence Wall's $2 million pumpkin patch, there's no time like the present.

Take a virtual tour here.

As One Wisconsin Now previously reported, Wall Land Investment, LLC, one of multi-millionaire Madison developer Terrence Wall’s companies, has reclassified $2 million in prime Dane County commercial real estate into “agriculture” property, which allows the company to eliminate $34,000 in local property taxes. Wall was already under criticism for using a Delaware post “office” box to possibly avoid paying Wisconsin business tax.   Read More »

From the Oshkosh Northwestern:

"A crowd of about 150 parents, teachers and concerned Oshkosh residents packed into a commons room at West High School Tuesday night for a public forum on upcoming spending cuts as high as $5 million. About 30 people spoke out against budget cuts that would close schools and layoff teachers."   Read More »