The U.S. Senate has an opportunity to slow the growth of Medicaid, something that hasn’t been seriously tried for decades, Sen. Ron Johnson says.

Miss it, and Wisconsin and nine other states are at serious risk of caving to political pressure, expanding their Medicaid programs, and setting off a frenzy of spending on the fastest growing welfare program in the country, the Wisconsin Republican says.

“This is our moment, if we’re ever going to do it,” he says. “We have to be clear about what we’re doing, and we have to keep it simple.”

Part of the budget reconciliation bill that narrowly passed the House of Representatives last month is a recommendation for reforms projected to reduce the growth in Medicaid spending by least $720 billion over the next 10 years. The savings would be achieved in part by curbing a system of state taxes on health care providers and federal reimbursement that Johnson has called nothing less than a money laundering scheme. The other component is requiring millions of childless adults on Medicaid, a program intended for the poor, to get jobs.

Rep. David Steffen is one of the authors of a bill that would give utility regulators a year to pinpoint where in Wisconsin would be good places to put new nuclear power plants, and at first blush, you wonder why.

Didn’t the feds do a study on this? Yes, they did, last fall, pointing out that transmission lines and friendly neighbors already surround Wisconsin’s one operating nuclear power plant, Point Beach, and the closed-but-usable Kewaunee Power Station.

All good, but we’re going to need a lot more sites than that, said Steffen, a Republican from Howard.

Federal air rules already have led Wisconsin utilities to close large coal-fired plants that long formed the backbone of Wisconsin’s power supply. More closures seem baked in — even as plans blossom for what Steffen described as “tremendous increases in demand that we already have and more that will spike very quickly.”

“If we start taking options off the table,” he said, “we had better be prepared to put some others back on the table.”

Gas prices for Midwestern motorists have once again fallen below the $3 per gallon threshold on a three-month rolling average basis, recent figures from the Energy Information Administration show.

The EIA manually gathers price data by surveying about 1,000 retail outlets by phone or email every week. The price reported includes taxes. For the purposes of government statistics, the Midwest region is defined as the area bounded by Michigan to Tennessee on the east and by North Dakota to Oklahoma on the west, and everything between.

WSAU: WI Morning News — June 5, 2025

A reform that wonks are calling “decoupling” — an excellent way to simplify school choice funding and eliminate choice’s impact on property taxpayers — is being opposed on the grounds it will eliminate a source of “negative attention” that choice critics have long used to mount opposition.

Don’t fix the problem, in other words, because then there won’t be an unfixed problem to continue to complain about.

Progressives fret about who has power and who doesn’t. School choice is a sharing of power with the people that progressives told us were powerless. Now they’re not: Thanks to school choice, they have the power to protect, nurture and enlighten their children, perhaps the primary power any parent could wish for.

That is what legal challenges to choice would take away.

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