“I love to eat dessert first,” the Prescott man said as he munched on cake. He smiled and said, “The problem is you don’t have room for the good things you need to eat.”

The first course of dessert in the state budget is a tax cut for about seventy five percent of tax filers. For a taxpayer making $30,000 a year the tax cut would be about $50 a year and for someone making over $300,000 about $1,500.

Tax rates would be collapsed - income at the $14 an hour range would be taxed at the same rate as income made at the $150 an hour range.

“It’s hard to be against a tax cut,” my colleague told me. “But the rest of the budget suffers because of this cut.”

Religious Law in Fitzwalkerstan

The post-coup quasi-military Sharia-like governance of Fitzwalkerstan continues to move the former independent State of Wisconsin into a third world economy and society. Fitzwalkerstan is a case study of the damage that the intersection of greed and ignorance can cause when a once progressive state is sold to the highest bidder.

Wisconsin's largest rightwing talkshow host, Jerry Bader, told his listeners that President Obama was a Muslim that "won't admit to it" in a recently discovered audio from 2010 where Bader was talking about the feasability of an open Muslim ever getting elected President:

"And, by the way, there are Muslims in public, in America today, by the way, none... well... none that admit to it as being President, although 28% percent believe that he is" 

Free Markets do not Mean Free People

Starting in the 1970, with the Heritage Foundation a series of “free market” think tanks have developed to create “studies” and reports relative to the economy and the value of free markets. The code phrase '”free market” is an indication that that think tank, political organization or “grass (AstroTurf) roots” organization is purposely, or in some cases unwittingly, actively involved in moving the nations wealth from the many to the few.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis) is righteously upset over revelations regarding the National Security Agency's domestic information-gathering program that has collected data on phone calls made by tens of milliions of Americans. Here's the problem:

Sensenbrenner voted for the law enabling this activity. Oh, and he also authored it. He says now Congress never meant for the law to allow such sweeping intelligence agency actions. But:

1. George W. Bush used that power, like Obama but without criticism on Capitol Hill, despite continuing vocal concerns from progressive forces, not to mention Justice Department audits that revealed problems years ago. You wouldn't know it to read the mainstream media so far, but as The Atlantic magazine and other media have pointed out how, several times before (twice during the Bush administration in 2006 an d'07, and once during Obama's first term, in 2010), troubling indications surfaced that the Patriot Act's relaxed surveillance standards had resulted in the FBI running amok. Sensenbrenner insisted before the first of those revelations that the act had sufficient safeguards in it. So this is our third go-around, and Sensenbrenner is still expressing shock at the law he proclaimed had those safeguards.

2. Congress not only authorized the law, but oversees it! Hmmm. Is Sensenbrenner now saying that he and his fellow lawmakers who approved this law only paid lip service to oversight, or agreed to ineffectual oversight rules? To whom should either of those "our lack of oversight was an oversight" screw-ups be assigned? This latest Sensenbrenner reaction, arguably, is his own version of the famous comment by Bush's secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, regarding the 9/11 attacks. "No one could have predicted" it, to borrow her words. Except, as you'll see below, someone did predict it.

Get rid of tax credits for dairy farmers? No tax breaks for meat or food processing plants? Get rid of credits for ethanol? Cut beginning farmer credits?

You’ve got to give Representative Dale Kooyenga credit. The Brookfield Republican isn’t afraid to take on the dairy state’s sacred cows.

Just as the state’s budget writing committee is wrapping up their work and Legislative leaders are about to broker a deal on public education and health, Rep. Kooyenga announces a proposal to rewrite the income tax code.

He seems to start with agriculture in mind. I bet there aren’t many cows in Brookfield.

Last summer, Representative Kooyenga and I served on a committee studying changes to the state’s income tax code. So it didn’t surprise me to see he was working on income tax reform.

But his timing in unveiling the proposal and what seem to be big changes for farmers and ag-related businesses almost ensure its demise.

That’s too bad because Wisconsin’s complex tax system needs reform.

The complexity is the product of tax loopholes, not tax rates. The State Legislature rarely meets a tax credit it doesn’t like. The result is a cumbersome tax code that hasn’t been seriously evaluated since 1999 and then the Legislature ended work without repealing a single tax credit.

There are 73 possible state adjustments after you file your federal taxes and there are dozens of credits to modify those adjustments. In the 2013 Department of Revenue report, I counted 37 credits that totaled $1.5 billion in lost revenue. My friends at the Revenue Department will remind me that the credits interact with each other and can’t always be added together: more complexity.

Messing around with state income tax is frightening for anyone who runs an operation dependent on the state. That’s because so much of what the state buys is paid for by income taxes. State income tax makes up over half of the general fund – the source of state money for health, education, local government, corrections and universities. Wisconsin is more dependent on income taxes than all but 11 other states.

While I commend the Brookfield Republican for getting this conversation started, I don’t agree with details of his proposal. For example, the proposed lowering of tax rates for high income earners - over $300,000. I don’t support his plan to allow millionaires to offset high off-farm earnings with (part-time?) farm losses. Currently no farm loss is allowed if it exceeds $600,000.

The plan favors the wealthy and doesn’t include serious reform of property tax – the part of our tax system most out of line with the national average. Start-up companies are most burdened by property tax which impacts job creation.

In the interest of advancing reform, I’d offer to be a bipartisan partner in the discussion.

It's called Wal-Mart.

Unfortunately, you plan to do nothing to punish Wal-Mart for its reliance on corporate welfare at the expense of Wisconsin and federal taxpayers. Instead, you plan to punish the poor, underpaid, undernourished Wal-Mart workers who can't make a living on the firm's non-family wages. Way to go, bud. What's next? Tax cuts for napalm? Because, Governor, that could hardly do more damage than your own set of misguided ideas.

Instead, why not take up the example of California, whose fed-up legislators are considering a law that would fine Medicaid-abusing firms like Wal-Mart for every full-time employee on the medical assistance program.

Check out the attached graphic, courtesy of Democraticunderground.com and linkable at:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017122796