Understanding Government

School voucher programs — which assign taxpayer money for students to attend area schools of their choice, including some private schools — have “no clear academic benefit for their users.” This is according to a Center on Education Policy report that looked at 27 studies of voucher programs since 2000. Erin Richards writes up the study for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as Milwaukee was one of the first cities to implement vouchers. (more…)

When Scott Walker used a balanced budget bill to strip the collective bargaining rights of public employees, it was defensible if you believed — as the Wisconsin governor did — that unionized public employees had destroyed Wisconsin’s finances. Walker’s rejection last November of U.S. Dept. of Transportation money for a high-speed train between Milwaukee and Madison, however, cannot be defended. Not after the governor pushed — and the state legislature will soon approve — an upgrade of the Chicago-to-Milwaukee “Hiawatha” rail line.

As Jason Stein and Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel make clear, the $31.6 million upgrade could have been covered by the $810 million offered by the Obama administration to build the Madison-to-Milwaukee line.

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Sean Duffy

Ron Nixon of the New York Times looks at several U.S. House Republicans who were elected on a platform of spending cuts but who are also pushing for spending projects of questionable merit in their districts. This is a timely report as House Republicans have taken a “No, more cuts!” position during deficit-reduction negotiations. These Republicans are hypocritical, effective, or both.

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The Wisconsin Republican state legislature will lend a helping hand to about 4,000 residents who have been unemployed for at least a year and seen all their federal and state benefits exhausted. Erin Toner of Milwaukee Public Radio reports that the fiscally conservative legislature is OK with helping the unemployed in large part because the money will come from the federal government. The money comes from the grand compromise Barack Obama made with the GOP last December: let the Bush tax cuts continue in exchange for extended unemployment benefits.

Eventually, Wisconsin, like many other states, must repay past money it has borrowed from the federal government for unemployment benefits. The state now owes the U.S. Dept. of Labor $1.3 billion.

A “Waste, Fraud and Abuse” commission created by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has identified $267 million in wasteful state government spending, reports Jason Stein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The news here is partly that the Wisconsin government can take specific steps to modestly reduce spending. But the bigger story is that $267 million is not that much for a state that has a $66 billion spending plan over the next two years — especially when much of that $267 million comes from federal taxpayers. Wisconsin, like most other state governments, does not have the significant instances of waste, fraud and abuse that can be identified at the federal level. (more…)