MacIver News Minute: Tax Cut Stunt

The MacIver Report: Wisconsin This Week

Wisconsin taxpayers will never see it, but they certainly heard a lot of lawmakers bragging about a $3.5 billion income tax cut they put in the state budget. The same income tax cut that Gov. Evers promptly vetoed out of the state budget. Nobody should have been surprised by that. After negotiating with the governor to ensure they got more funding for local governments and school choice, Republican lawmakers made the deliberate decision not to talk to Evers about the tax cuts. MacIver news questioned the logic of this at a press conference last month. “Doesn’t that just increase the risk that he’s just going to veto them?” “That’s always a possibility. We made tax cuts last time and the governor approved them, signed them into law, and he ran on those tax cuts last fall,” Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green) replied. Well, the governor’s not up for reelection this time around. Did anyone really believe the big government building, prolific waster of taxpayer money Tony Evers was going to sign the tax cut into law when it wasn’t part of the negotiations…or was it all just a P.R. stunt? Either way, the Wisconsin taxpayer is apparently the only special interest who didn’t come out ahead in this historically bad state budget.