Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Not to depress readers before the final three-day weekend of the summer, but the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison notes another contribution to the state’s downward-spiralling finances:

A Dane County judge heard arguments this week on the legality of a $200 million raid state leaders made on a special fund that's supposed to cover large medical malpractice awards. …

The state raid was just the latest in a series of poor financial moves that voters should remember when voting for legislative candidates this fall.

Voters should favor those candidates willing to scrutinize spending and resist expensive new programs. The accounting tricks and money raids need to stop. And the longer Wisconsin waits to get its financial house in order, the harder and more painful it will be to fix. …

The troubling court case follows a separate state Supreme Court decision last month that will force the state to pay back as much as $265 million in sales taxes improperly collected on computer software. And the lack of this revenue stream is likely to leave the current state budget $28 million short.

Then there’s a federal court fight over $100 million in gambling payments that the Ho-Chunk Nation says it doesn't owe but the state is counting on.

The State Journal doesn’t mention the state’s actual deficit according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or the state’s structural deficit created by shifting spending into the next budget cycle. Those two deficits are estimated to total $4 billion, to which we can now add $200 million for the medical malpractice fund raid, $28 million for the state’s no longer being able to illegally assess sales taxes on custom software (how the $265 million in overpaid sales taxes will be repaid is anyone’s guess at this point), and perhaps the $100 million in gambling payments on which the state and the Ho-Chunk disagree — a fiscal hole the size of about one-fourth of the entire state budget.

No wonder Gov. James Doyle is angling for a job in the Barack Obama Adminstration. The remaining 5 million of us get stuck holding the bag, of course.