Government overregulation is imperiling the start of a $1 billion plan to expand broadband service to the hardest-to-reach places in Wisconsin.

The problem is nationwide, with telecom companies balking at bidding for a piece of a $42 billion federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, a tiny part of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed by Congress in November 2021.

Nearly three years after passage of the bill, not a single household or business in the U.S. has been connected by a foot of broadband fiber. Program directors are conceding that work is unlikely to start anywhere before well into next year. At a luncheon this summer, Wisconsin Public Service Commission chair Summer Strand was less than confident the project could be completed by 2030.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ new housing down payment assistance proposal, which would give $25,000 to qualifying first-time home buyers, would dramatically increase housing prices, particularly in Midwestern metro areas such as Milwaukee, according to a new study by scholars at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Scrutiny of the proposal reveals that rather than alleviating the housing burden on FTBs (first-time buyers), the down payment assistance plan will harm both FTBs and repeat buyers,” states the study by Edward Pinto, Tobias Peter and Sissi Li.

The injection of down payment assistance, a government subsidy of first-time home buyers, would cause home prices in metro areas to increase by an additional 4.1% on average nationwide.

If a home in Madison, Wisconsin’s most rapidly growing metropolis, is increasingly hard to afford…

And it is: The median single-family home sold in metropolitan Madison, which went for $470,800 this spring, cost well over five times the median household income.

… And if most young families really do prefer a single-family house …

Which they do, in survey after survey.

… And if metropolitan Madison is surrounded by flat, buildable farmland, what’s the problem?

Why not build enough houses to satisfy buyers?

Although Wisconsin has notched some substantial budget surpluses in the past handful of years, analysis of its budget records shows that the state has a long history of running short, at least when it comes to general purpose revenue and expenditures.

Out of the 28 fiscal years for which records are available online from the Wisconsin Department of Administration, the state spent more from the general fund than it collected in taxes in 18 of them.

The Biden administration’s climate adviser told a “sustainability conference” this week that the president wants to reactivate decommissioned nuclear power plants.

Investors already have announced plans to restart the dormant reactors at two closed plants, in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Asked if any additional plants could be restarted, White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi told the Reuters IMPACT conference in New York Monday, “We’re working on it in a very concrete way.”

The news follows a Department of Energy report in September that examined the potential for adding new reactors at currently operating nuclear power plant sites or at recently closed — but still intact — nuclear power plants.

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