Employment plays a crucial role in helping families escape poverty and move up the income ladder. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, created through welfare reform in 1996, showed that linking government assistance to work could increase employment and decrease poverty among single-mother families.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps (FoodShare in Wisconsin), also contains a work requirement. In this report, Badger Institute Visiting Fellow Angela Rachidi explores how its usefulness has been blunted.

Rachidi’s analysis of FoodShare data from 2012 to 2023 suggests that waiving Wisconsin’s work requirement led to an increase of 780 adults receiving benefits on average per county per month during this time — approximately 56,160 more FoodShare adults across the state.

Facing a $5 million bill to run the free streetcar known as The Hop next year, Alderman Scott Spiker wondered if a huge increase in handing out parking tickets is the funding answer.

Department of Public Works officials say that is not the case.

“The parking ticket increase is not at all tied into The Hop,” Tiffany Shepherd, Marketing and Communications Officer for DPW, told the Badger Institute this week. “Also, The Hop’s operating budget is $4 million. We don’t see that as a deficit.”

According to the Department of Public Works budget, The Hop’s 2024 operating budget is $5.5 million.

The Department of Public Works is adamantly opposed to charging for the downtown Milwaukee streetcar, which cost $128 million to build. But at the end of this year, funding from the trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is going to dry up for The Hop.

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The Badger Institute, formerly known as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), has long been at the forefront of the fight for school choice, right to work, welfare reform, tax restructuring, limited government, civil society and so much more. If you appreciate the Institute’s legacy and want to support free markets, opportunity and prosperity, please consider donating today. Your support will help the Institute continue to advocate for conservative principles now and in generations to come.

The Institute never has, and never will, accept government funding. We gratefully welcome your online donation or email Angela Smith, Executive Vice President.

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