Your most-viewed reports, articles and commentaries of the year | |
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By Katherine Loughead
A new report from the Tax Foundation and the Badger Institute offers five comprehensive tax reform options to enhance Wisconsin’s tax competitiveness.
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For the people who need it most — poor residents of Milwaukee, families and victims of particularly violent crimes, children in schools where politicians won’t allow police, and almost anyone awaiting a verdict — Wisconsin’s criminal justice system is failing.
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By Jeremiah Mosteller
Wisconsin’s court system is plagued by massive delays and a growing backlog of criminal cases. It now takes more than a year for a court to resolve an armed robbery charge, 14 months to resolve a sexual assault case and more than 15 months to resolve an allegation that someone committed a murder.
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By Mike Nichols
Robin Vos, fresh off a victory that seals his role as Speaker of the Assembly and now coming on 30 years in local and state politics, threw out a couple olive branches at Gov. Tony Evers Thursday on both talk radio and in a conversation with me.
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Scarlett Johnson is a suburban Milwaukee mother of five and one of the organizers of an effort to recall members of the Mequon-Thiensville School Board.
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By Scott Niederjohn
Debt forgiveness amounts to spending $1 trillion from the federal Treasury exclusively on people who went to — and in most cases graduated from — college. This essentially punishes Americans who didn’t go to college and, because of that fact, are more likely to need government help.
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By Mike Nichols & Mark Lisheron
Approximately 30% of the revenue in Wisconsin’s current two-year budget comes from the federal government — and that doesn’t include billions and billions of dollars sent to the Badger State to ostensibly get us through the pandemic.
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By Mike Nichols
WEA Trust, the teachers’ union-created insurance company that once had a lock on hundreds of school districts in Wisconsin, just announced it is terminating its health insurance business by the end of this year.
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By Angela Rachidi
For decades, the federal government has assumed a larger role in funding and running safety net programs, leaving states with little ability to address flaws such as employment and marriage disincentives and little power to make changes.
State leaders must work to change this.
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By Mark Lisheron
Twenty months after Congress passed a bill that rained $2.53 billion down on Wisconsin, the governor’s office in sole charge of administering the funding, as well as legislative audit and budget officials, have almost no idea of how all that money is being spent.
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By Mark Lisheron
Using billions of emergency pandemic bill dollars to plug gaping holes in their budgets, local governments across Wisconsin and the country are setting themselves up to ask for tax increases or slash services as basic as police and fire protection when the federal funding runs out.
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By Katherine Loughead
There are numerous ways Wisconsin could move to a flat income tax while benefitting Wisconsinites across the income spectrum. The most obvious solution is to flatten the rate while increasing the standard deduction, as proposed by the Tax Foundation and the Badger Institute in the July 2022 report Tax Reform Options to Improve Wisconsin’s Competitiveness.
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Elita Williams and Brielle King sat down for a Q&A with veteran journalist Marilyn Krause to talk about the benefits of being able to choose a school and education program and the key role the choice program plays in providing access and funding to attend a private school.
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At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Wishkub Kinepoway faced two family crises with some crying, some praying and a lot of determination. A member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians and a Shawano County transplant, Kinepoway knew she needed to make a change for her children. She also knew that change wouldn’t come without school choice.
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By Katherine Loughead
In Wisconsin, comprehensive tax reform that prioritizes gross state product growth and personal income growth ought to be a top priority for policymakers, especially given the recent reforms made by many of Wisconsin’s regional and national peers.
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By Patrick McIlheran
It’s time to start treating families more justly by living up to another bedrock American principle: All children are created equal — even the ones who by sixth grade show the gumption to opt for a better education.
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By Patrick McIlheran
While authorities faced no resistance to closing schools early in the pandemic, parents raised questions as the closures dragged on. So, as Madison and Milwaukee and many other districts stayed out as the 2020-21 school year began, many parents judged — correctly, we now see — that the costs outweighed the benefits.
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By Patrick McIlheran
Right after scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, came out, Wisconsin’s chief public school regulator, state Superintendent Jill Underly, issued a press release headlined, “Wisconsin elementary school students buck national trends in ‘National Report Card’ release.”
This is not true.
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By Patrick McIlheran
The big test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, found that not once in the past two decades have Wisconsin’s public schools managed to make more than 41% of 8th-graders proficient in math.
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By Robert Poole & Benita Cotton-Orr
Every credible projection shows the gas tax is fading as a revenue source as federal mandates and consumer tastes prompt a shift toward electric vehicles and, among remaining gas-powered ones, much more efficiency. More and more vehicles won’t be paying for their share of pavement. Wisconsin needs a replacement for the gas tax.
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By Andrew Hanson
Nationally, Wisconsin ranks as the 29th most productive state (including the District of Columbia) as measured by GDP per capita and the second lowest among seven Midwestern states. This is a marked change from 2011, when Wisconsin was the fourth most productive Midwestern state per capita.
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Wisconsin’s politicians prohibit over 1 million citizens from working unless they have government permission.
This is the root of the scandalous backlogs plaguing Wisconsin’s occupational licensing bureaucracy, which is forcing many people to sit on the sidelines after they move to our state or graduate from their training, unable to work in their chosen field.
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For 35 years, the Badger Institute, formerly known as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), has 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 $35, $350 or $3,500 today. Your support will help the Institute continue to advocate for conservative principles for the next 35 years – and beyond! | |
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