David Michael Miller
If you have young children, Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature are trying to buy your vote this November. They’re hoping that a wave of green in August will help them stave off a wave of blue in November.
Walker signed legislation on April 18 offering a $100-per-child tax rebate and a weeklong sales tax holiday on school supplies. Rebates can be claimed between May 15 and July 2 and will be paid out by late summer. The tax holiday is the first week in August.
It’s interesting timing as approximately 600,000 Wisconsin families will be getting payments and experiencing glad tidings at the check-out counter barely two months before the fall elections. Democrats, cynics and people who weren’t born yesterday suspect that this is not an accident.
You can bet that campaign ads for Walker and legislative Republicans will make more than passing reference to their concern for Wisconsin families and the callousness of their Democratic opponents. It’s not hard to imagine grainy black and white images of a scowling Democrat with a voice-over that says something like, “Why does Democrat John Smith want to tax your child’s crayons? Call John Smith and tell him to keep his big government hands off our kids’ burnt sienna and cadet blue!”
But if majority Republicans really cared about kids, would this be the best way to invest $137 million, which is the estimated cost of the two tax breaks combined?
Jon Peacock doesn’t think so. Peacock is research director for Kids Forward, formerly the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families. In an email he suggested three ways that the Legislature and governor could have made better investments in children and in economic development at the same time.
Peacock suggested increasing aid for public schools to prevent increases in class sizes and to attract and retain the best teachers; reversing a Walker-led cut to the Earned Income Tax Credit that meant increased taxes for families with two or more children; and restoring and expanding the Wisconsin Shares child-care subsidy program.
Peacock’s colleague, research analyst Tamarine Cornelius, recently wrote a blog about Wisconsin Shares for the Wisconsin Budget Project. Cornelius pointed out that a bipartisan bill that was signed into law by Walker earlier this month restored only $8 million of a $62-million cut that Walker and the Republican majority inflicted on the program over the previous six years.
Cornelius reported that in 2011, 54,000 Wisconsin children were in low-income families that benefited from the child-care subsidy. But by 2017, only 38,000 kids were benefiting, a whopping 28 percent reduction. And even the meager $8 million-dollar increase in funding won’t happen until next year.
Cornelius pointed out that there is a double benefit for this program. Not only does it provide more kids with better care, but it frees up parents to go to work. “Improving access to child care is an effective means of expanding Wisconsin’s workforce,” she wrote.
And she contrasted Wisconsin Shares with Republican policies, which have all but eliminated state income taxes for manufacturers and agricultural products and shelled out a huge subsidy to Foxconn, the foreign manufacturer of flat screens. The manufacturing and agricultural tax break will cost $276 million this year and there is no job creation requirement tied to that tax break at all. She also noted that $1.6 billion of the massive $4.5-billion payout to Foxconn has no job creation requirement whatsoever.
At a time when the biggest economic development problem for our state is a labor shortage, it seems that any policy that would increase the labor pool, whether that’s workforce transportation, addressing dysfunctional households and neighborhoods, or providing more quality child care, should be a top priority.
But it isn’t for Walker and the Republicans. Their priorities are to keep giving huge senseless tax breaks to those who don’t need them and small, senseless tax rebates to families in an effort to buy votes in the fall elections.
It’s not likely to work. Republican candidates already barely mention the federal tax cuts pushed through by President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan. There’s no reason to think that the ploy will work any better here at the state level.
So, if you have kids, by all means claim your $100 per head and enjoy the sales tax holiday in August. Then, do what’s best for your family. Vote for a Democrat.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.
