In signing Wisconsin’s new two-year spending plan Wednesday, Democrat Governor Tony Evers liberally applied his veto pen to the Republican-crafted biennial budget, gutting a $3.5 billion tax cut proposal that had reduced the state’s tax brackets and delivered relief for all taxpayers.
Republicans blasted the governor for his 51 partial vetoes, including a particularly sneaky one that changed the meaning of funding for schools to a four-century commitment.
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The Delafield-based Institute for Reforming Government (IRG) on Tuesday issued a report listing ways the free-market research group believes Wisconsin’s state government can become leaner and more responsive.
Titled “Reimagining Wisconsin Government for the 21st Century,” the document is the product of a year and half of research. It proposes the kind of decentralization that Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has suggested for the federal government by moving some of the public workforce out of Washington, D.C. so it can more closely work with local communities.
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The nonprofit Institute for Reforming Government (IRG) on Friday issued a comprehensive analysis of Democratic Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’s 2023-25 state budget and bemoaned the proposal’s likely impact on job creators and the middle class.
Evers’s spending plan totals $104 billion, $16 billion more than the budget on which the Badger State now operates. If enacted, the new proposal would be the first state budget exceeding $100 billion. It includes massive spending increases in such areas as public education, childcare assistance, “affordable housing” and broadband expansion. Republican lawmakers, who object to the extent of the spending hikes and the governor’s refusal to devote more of the state’s $7.1 billion surplus to tax cuts, promised last week to thoroughly rewrite the plan.
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Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (D) on Thursday announced several budget items for Fiscal Years 2023-25 that would expand aid to Badger State veterans.
Priorities Evers mentioned included programs to assist ex-military personnel with employment, education, mental health and housing security. He said the proposal builds on earlier expenditures the governor and legislature made last year, spurred by recommendations of his Blue Ribbon Commission on Veteran Opportunity.
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