Go outside, Wisconsin, and take a deep breath. Mark it in memory, and if you’re in metro Milwaukee, do the same two weeks from now, on Jan. 16.

Will you be breathing more polluted air? No; almost certainly, you’ll inhale air that, like today’s, is much cleaner than just 20 years ago. Enjoy.

It doesn’t matter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: As of that morning, the EPA will bump metro Milwaukee into “severe nonattainment” status for ozone, the form of oxygen cooked by the sun out of other pollutants. The air will smell, feel and be unchanged, but by the feds’ reckoning, it will have become overnight the very flatulence of hell, and the EPA will respond with penitential regulations specially applied to metro Milwaukee.

The regulatory onslaught likely will do absolutely nothing to bring Milwaukee into compliance. What is likely is that the region will become poorer.

Wisconsin is well above the U.S. median for business formation. Forbes Advisor ranked Wisconsin the 14^th best state to start a business in 2024 — outpacing Midwestern peer states Illinois (28^th), Iowa (31^st), Michigan (40^th), and Minnesota (43^rd).

New business formation is widely distributed across Wisconsin’s 72 counties. Only four counties saw a decline in new private business creation between 2014 and 2023: Florence, Oneida, Forest and Price. Kenosha County led the state in percentage increase in new private business establishments with an increase of more than 41%. Other leaders in new businesses established by percentage included Pierce, Walworth, Chippewa and Richland.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court issued only 14 decisions during its most recent term, roughly one-third or less than any other term in at least the last 50 years, according to a statistical analysis by Marquette University professor Alan Ball.

Ball found that during the 2023-24 term the high court produced the fewest decisions since 1927, the earliest term for which data are available.

The most decisions issued in a single term were the 386 decisions handed down in 1932-33. The number of decisions was often over 200 until the late 1970s when the state’s Court of Appeals was created through a constitutional amendment. The number slowly declined after that but has been between 40 and 60 until the most recent term.

July 5, 2010

As both ideological and deeply personal disputes become increasingly public, the court’s members are issuing fewer opinions than any other Wisconsin Supreme Court in decades, according to their own statistics. The opinions they are working on, moreover, appear destined for release in a spastic flurry at the very end of the term.

Meanwhile, a long-term trend continues unabated: Fewer and fewer citizens feel it’s worthwhile to even petition the high court for justice.

“In a sane world, Covid spending levels would have been an extreme aberration, and we would have already returned to a more reasonable level of spending. But we haven’t, so let me propose a few of options for doing so.”

Ron Johnson, Fiscal Sanity Isn’t Too Much to Hope for This Year (New York Times)

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