Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Today is part two in our look at the Wisconsin Way’s “number of provocative proposals” to redo our tax system.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democratic candidate for governor, noted that “In 1970, Wisconsin homeowners paid 50 percent of all property taxes; today they pay 70 percent. The property tax burden on Wisconsin families and workers is too high, and the best way to lower it is to budget responsibly, manage spending, and create jobs.”

If Barrett is against business-related property tax exemptions — such as the machinery and equipment exemption signed into law by Democratic Gov. Patrick Lucey in the early 1970s — then he should come out and say that instead of inferring that the burden on families has increased because the burden on businesses has decreased. (And Barrett also needs to learn that all taxes on businesses are paid by business’ customers.) As for his last sentence, we’ll have to find out if “the best way to lower it is to budget responsibly, manage spending, and create jobs” is true or not, since state government has done none of those things.

The Wisconsin Way’s proposals to cut property taxes by at least 25 percent by increasing and expanding state and county sales taxes, and instituting new user fees including Interstate tolls, are accompanied by proposals to get local governments to “try to offer shared services with incentives from the state, or be ordered to do so within three years where appropriate.”

That is a favorite topic in this space. Wisconsin has 3,120 units of government — 72 counties; 190 cities, 402 villages and 1,259 towns; 427 school districts, most of which are K–12 districts, with about 10 percent either K–8 or union high school districts; 16 technical college districts; and 756 special districts, including fire, lake and sanitary districts — which places the 20th largest state in population and 25th largest state in land area 11th in the number of units of government.

Examples of too many governments can be found throughout the northeastern quarter of the state. The Fox Cities has only two merged public safety organizations, for instance — the Neenah–Menasha fire department and the Fox Valley Metro Police Department, covering Kimberly and Little Chute — when the Fox Cities should have one fire department and one police department from Neenah to Kaukauna. The city of De Pere has not one, but two separate school districts, which is indefensible in an era of bridges over the Fox River. Wausau is growing to the point where metro-area police and fire services should be considered. And there is the large number of towns with just one incorporated community within town boundaries where the town nonetheless still exists as a separate unit of government.

As a former member of a body that got to deal with state mandates, I don’t like the idea of mandating governmental mergers, except that, given how much the state funds local governments, the political Golden Rule applies: He who has the gold makes the rules. And taxpayers are tired of seeing talk but no action on economizing government.

Beyond voluntary or mandatory merging of units of government, there is no way — none — to control state spending without actual spending controls on all levels of government, regardless of how loudly elected officials and others from the spend-more-than-now special interest groups scream. We had the opportunity for spending controls with the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, but feckless Republicans in the Legislature failed to get TABOR enacted when they had the chance. Perhaps November will provide another opportunity.

Controlling state spending inevitably means controlling not just how much is spent, but where it’s spent. It boggles the mind to contemplate the number of school districts that run their own bus service — that is, hire and pay drivers and mechanics, figure out bus routes and maintain buses — when private bus companies are perfectly willing to take a non-educational function off the hands of educators for less cost.

For that matter, one wonders if state employees have been asked where money could be saved. Arizona state employees were asked by Gov. Jan Brewer how they would handle a potential 15-percent cut in funding, and, according to the Goldwater Institute, “responded with lists of programs and services that could be scaled back or managed in ways that rely less on general tax dollars.”

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the Wisconsin Way’s interesting policy proposals.