WISTAX breaks silence to promote pro-corporate agenda
| By Cody O - Jun 16th, 2009 at 2:53 pm EDT |
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Categories: State Budget Priorities, Corporate Accountability , Media Accountability, One Wisconsin Now - The "tOWN Hall", Budget Issues
Categories: State Budget Priorities, Corporate Accountability , Media Accountability, One Wisconsin Now - The "tOWN Hall", Budget Issues
A year ago the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance tried to convince the media and its audience that there was no looming budget deficit in Wisconsin and thus no need to close corporate loopholes or raise taxes on the top one percent. And since May of this year—after official reports pegged the deficit at $6.6 billion—WISTAX has remained silent on their glaring error. But today, just in time for the budget to hit the Senate floor, the conservative-leaning, pro-corporate group finally came out of hiding.
Dale Knapp, the long-serving research director for WISTAX, was quoted in the Appleton Post-Crescent asking a rhetorical question to emphasize the size of Wisconsin's budget deficit:
"Have we reached a tipping point, where we are going into a budget with a structural deficit... so big that it will be really, really hard to get out of it?"
Why the media continues to cite WISTAX as a credible, non-ideological source is beyond me. A year ago, WISTAX was telling the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram that official figures putting the budget at $5.4 billion were overstated and "unreal". At that time, WISTAX estimated the budget hole to be just $1 billion at its deepest. Then they were silent for a month after new figures put the deficit at $6.6 billion. But now, just as the Senate is about to hit the floor, WISTAX comes out suggesting the deficit is at its "tipping point." The timing is entirely suspect and it’s clear that the group is using its falsely attributed status as non-ideological and non-partisan to promote a pro-corporate economic policy.
If the overwhelming number of contributions to conservative candidates by WISTAX board members wasn't enough to convince the media of the group's bias, and WISTAX's glaring underestimation of the size of the budget deficit wasn't enough to convince the media of its unreliability, perhaps the suspect timing of Knapp's recent statement is enough to convince the media of WISTAX's hidden agenda to promote pro-corporate economic policies.
Dale Knapp, the long-serving research director for WISTAX, was quoted in the Appleton Post-Crescent asking a rhetorical question to emphasize the size of Wisconsin's budget deficit:
"Have we reached a tipping point, where we are going into a budget with a structural deficit... so big that it will be really, really hard to get out of it?"
Why the media continues to cite WISTAX as a credible, non-ideological source is beyond me. A year ago, WISTAX was telling the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram that official figures putting the budget at $5.4 billion were overstated and "unreal". At that time, WISTAX estimated the budget hole to be just $1 billion at its deepest. Then they were silent for a month after new figures put the deficit at $6.6 billion. But now, just as the Senate is about to hit the floor, WISTAX comes out suggesting the deficit is at its "tipping point." The timing is entirely suspect and it’s clear that the group is using its falsely attributed status as non-ideological and non-partisan to promote a pro-corporate economic policy.
If the overwhelming number of contributions to conservative candidates by WISTAX board members wasn't enough to convince the media of the group's bias, and WISTAX's glaring underestimation of the size of the budget deficit wasn't enough to convince the media of its unreliability, perhaps the suspect timing of Knapp's recent statement is enough to convince the media of WISTAX's hidden agenda to promote pro-corporate economic policies.
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Dale Knapp
WISTAX Research Director
We will continue to lose tax revenues as long as corporate-supported, anti-tax fairness organizations like the conservative Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance continue to provide aid and comfort to the fallacy that somehow "we're all overtaxed." The middle class and the poor are paying a higher share out of their bank accounts in order to finance the ever-shrinking percentage paid by those in the top one percent - and absolutely those in the top 1 hundredth of one percent.
As a side note: Everyone in the bottom 99th percent of income earners should read Pulitzer Prize-Winner Reporter David Cay Johnston's "Perfectly Legal." It points out how tax policy over the past 35 years has shifted wealth from the rest of to those at the top. This is done through three insidious methods. 1. Tax rates are dropped for "everyone" but the benefits overwhelming benefit those at the top. 2. Complex and ethical scandalous tax shelters are created by highly-paid tax attorneys to shield the wealth of the wealthiest from its obligations to the rest of us. 3. Tax policy has been changed to value inherited and invested wealth, than money earned from, you know, actual work.
This has been allowed to occur because of the brand of wealth that finances the conservative Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance has government and the media in its pockets - well, it actually owns the media and for all intents and purposes it owns conservatives in the federal and state government. Using the media mouthpieces and "news broadcasts," it creates the false impression somehow the superrich and corporate America and the middle class are in the same boat tax-wise. It's nonsense and it's exactly this philosophy allowed to run amok under George W. Bush which is why our economy collapsed.
Because the media are as much to blame as a failed watchdog as are the foxes which raided the chicken coop of our national treasury, you'll not hear proper atoning - which is why failed anti-tax fairness messengers like Newt, Grover Norquist and WTA's Todd Berry continue to get a voic,e when they in any just society, they'd be forced to stand on blocks of concrete in the middle of town squares across the country with heavy wooden signs hanging around their necks reading "I betrayed the middle class."