Pennies for taxpayers

To pay for Democrats’ war on success!

Democrats keep bailing out Republicans. They derided the Republican legislature’s tax cut package as a Billionaire giveaway. Not enough redistribution. It’s what they do: play class warfare.

While Comrade John enjoys playing the game of oligarchy, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau took a balanced look at Gov. Tony Evers’ veto.

• Taxpayers reporting $60,000 to $70,000 of household income, which is about the state’s median average — will get $44 in tax relief; Republicans would have given them $249.

• Taxpayers making between $90,000 and $100,000 will receive a $48 cut under Evers’ plan instead of the $515 under Republicans’ plan.

• Across all taxpayers, Evers: $36 or 0.9%; Republicans $573 or 15.1%.

Democrats need to explain their parsimony while sitting on a $7 Billion budget surplus!

Abortion issue neutralized?

A Dane County judge is doing her best to tilt the abortion issue back in Republicans’ favor. Guess what? That 1849 Wisconsin law doesn’t ban abortion after all! It only penalizes an attack resulting in the loss of the child (supposedly). Only in Dane County! But we’ll take it!

If that decision holds, the issue defaults to a 1985 law (§ 940.15) that made abortion a crime only after viability but even then permitted abortion to save the life of the mother. That puts the ball in the other court. Need to remind folks that the U.S. Supreme Court did NOT ban abortion, it just said the practice was not guaranteed in the Constitution. That decision, against the background of Wisconsin’s 1849 law, is credited with electing  a pro-abortion state supreme court justice this past April. But only 32% of Wisconsinites think abortion should be legal in all circumstances — another 34% in most cases, the Marquette Law School poll tells. The trick is finding that sweet spot with that 34 percent.

Wisconsin’s Democratic(ic) governor also protected the 189 state university diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats — allowing the legislature’s $32 million funding cut to be applied elsewhere. Nationally, Democrats also seem determined to pay off college debt for grievance studies majors, a recent entry on its victim ledger, and to defend affirmative action, despite its general unpopularity.

Is affirmative action immaterial?

On the way to making the point that only 6% of all college students attend schools with an acceptance rate at or below 25%, The New York Times put up a fascinating graphic of applicant acceptance rates by institution. The faceless bureaucrats here at the Werkes picked out this sampling (flagship campuses unless noted):

It's more difficult to get into Harvey Mudd than UW-Madison! (???)

Attend to your knitting

An obscure part of the State of Wisconsin’s bailout of Milwaukee: the City must maintain police and firefighter staffing levels or risk losing tens of millions of dollars in state aid. In other words, the taxpayers of Wisconsin are not going to keep propping up a dying city and your street car experiment if you can’t control street-level gunfire! 

Political Rohrschach test: John Nichols calls WI Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, “one of the wealthiest individuals ever to lead a Wisconsin legislative chamber.” To John’s fellow socialists, this is a slur. To the rest of us, we’re thankful successful people want to serve in the legislature for an annual salary of $57,000. In any event, we doubt that Vos is as wealthy as Bernie Sanders, co-author with Comrade Nichols of It’s O.K. to be angry about capitalism.

→ “Here’s how the Vermont Senator became a socialist millionaire.”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Blaska would say it’s O.K. to be thankful about capitalism. Elsewise, how would Bernie afford that lakeside vacation home?

Or would you rather emulate North Korea?