Murphy’s Law

Republican leaders have been increasingly vocal in their claims that the state Government Accountability Board is “partisan,” and Gov. Scott Walker recently succeeded in getting a bill passed that will undercut the GAB’s power. The irony is that it was Republicans who were most supportive of the board when it was created. So why have they changed their tune? The GAB was created to replace the old state elections and ethics boards. These were paper tigers, toothless wonders that did little to prevent corruption in government. The classic example was the caucus scandal: Reporting by the Wisconsin State Journal showed…

We are rapidly on course to create a dual-level school system for Wisconsin students. In smaller cities and rural and suburban areas, school systems will continue to spend about $10,000 per pupil. That is a bit less than the national average of $10,499, as a recent Census Bureau report found. But in big cities such as Milwaukee and Racine, and perhaps in Green Bay and Beloit, more and more students will be educated at choice schools that spend about $6,400 per pupil.  These school systems tend to have students who are poorer, more likely to have learning disabilities, and they are…

  Illustration by Adrian Palomo. The controversy over the proposed Jobs Now Fund is beginning to turn into high comedy. The bill is essentially a huge giveaway to certified capital companies, or CAPCOs, which go from state to state and repeatedly hire lobbyists to sell gullible legislators on a plan that creates few jobs and mostly provides handouts to CAPCOs. As a Sunday Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story noted, “it would be like having the banker keep your principal – and three quarters of the money it earns. You would receive just 25% of the profit on the money you gave away.”…

  Illustration by Adrian Palomo. Two weeks ago I wrote a column blasting a proposed bill to fund certified capital companies, or CAPCOs, as a complete scam that claims to help raise venture capital but is actually a huge handout to lobbyists and the companies who hire them. I’m happy to say the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has followed up with a strong story on the proposed program by Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Kathleen Gallagher. The story repeated my central point, that the law allows the CAPCOs to keep all the money invested in them by the state, plus 80 percent of the profits…

  Senator Herb Kohl. For some time after his election to the U.S. Senate in 1988, Herb Kohl would give a speech with a droll, self-deprecating anecdote. The story was that he had asked for advice from his predecessor, longtime Democratic Sen. William Proxmire, and Prox told him he was doing fine and repeatedly called Kohl a “model” senator. That sounded great until Kohl looked up the definition of “model,” and the dictionary said “a small replica of the real thing.” The story always got laughs but was almost too revealing: It went right to the heart of how underwhelming…

  Tax calculator. Back in the 1990s, a bipartisan movement decided to end “welfare as we know it” and put more emphasis on work. Wisconsin Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson led the way for states, and President Bill Clinton was the key architect nationally. The approach recognized that the available jobs often paid poorly and didn’t provide enough to support a family. Rather than interfere with the free market and the low level of wages paid, the approach emphasized increasing the earned income tax credit, both in terms of the amount of the credit and the number participating in the program.…

In these highly partisan times in Madison, is there anything that liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, can agree upon? I submit there is. We should all be united in opposition to a new bill that allegedly will help raise venture capital in Wisconsin but is actually a huge handout to lobbyists and the companies who hire them.   Critics of CAPCOs initiatives say states rarely recoup taxpayers’ investments. Illustration by Adrian Palomo. The last time a version of this bill was introduced in 2003, it was a bipartisan effort uniting the administration of former governor and Democrat Jim Doyle and…

  Photo illustration by Adrian Palomo. Led by Republican Paul Ryan (with rising party star Scott Walker), Wisconsin may be the leading state when it comes to presenting a conservative alternative to the philosophy of President Barack Obama. But weirdly enough, we may be getting fewer details of the debate than if we lived elsewhere. The release of Ryan’s plan to reduce the federal deficit got front page treatment in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the coverage was all about Ryan and his ideas, and it was mostly quite flattering. As the story’s second graph put it: “‘This is not…

  David Prosser and JoAnne Kloppenburg Ironically, it was Charlie Sykes who first started casting doubt on election results in the race for Supreme Court between incumbent David Prosser and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg. The day after the election he was darkly intimating the possibility of widespread voter fraud and busloads of people who might have crossed the border to vote illegally. The accusation that sneaky Illinois residents cross the border to vote illegally, and only for liberals, has been an oft-repeated urban legend – with never a shred of proof presented – among certain conservatives going back to 2004. Sykes…

  I got my start as a journalist freelancing stories for the old Milwaukee Sentinel about problems with achievement test results at Milwaukee Public Schools. Throughout the 1980s, the media’s increasing focus on problems at MPS helped to lay the groundwork for a radically different alternative – a voucher system where low-income families could choose to send their children to private schools. The case for school choice could not have been made without years of achievement test data showing the below-average performance of MPS schools. So it is highly ironic – and quite alarming – that Gov. Scott Walker is…