Progressive Thinking

In every quarter since the first Walker Budget took effect, Wisconsin has trailed the nation in total private job creation. The Republican plan is not working.

ASHLAND - Quarterly numbers released Wednesday show that Wisconsin lost 509 manufacturing jobs. For 19 straight quarters Wisconsin has trailed the nation in total private job creation. That’s every quarter since the first Walker Budget took effect in 2011.

My Republican colleagues keep saying that they have a plan for growing Wisconsin’s economy. They’ve been saying it for 6 years, but simply saying something doesn’t make it true.

Take the Manufacturing & Agriculture Tax Credit, which took effect in 2013. “What we’re trying to do is grow jobs, so it’s very much in keeping with that,” budget committee chair Senator Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) said. “Come to Wisconsin. Make things here,” said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington).

Earlier this summer I released a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo exposing that 20,527 fewer manufacturing jobs were created in the three years after the Manufacturing Tax Credit took effect than in the three years before.

This week’s news is even worse for defenders of this shameless giveaway. We didn’t just create fewer jobs, we lost manufacturing jobs. And the credit is going to take $209 million of working taxpayers’ money next year and put it in the pockets of wealthy individuals who aren’t using it to create new jobs. 11 people earning more than $35 million will be handed $21.5 million of your money.

The plan isn’t working. It’s time to stop picking working taxpayers’ pockets for this entitlement for the already entitled. Handouts like the Manufacturing Tax Credit are preventing us from making investments in our roads and schools. Those investments would actually grow our economy.

We see ourselves stuck with two choices, and not just in presidential elections. But we have more power than we know, more choices than we realize.

ALTOONA, WI - Henry Ford famously said his customers could get one of his cars in any color they wanted as long as it was black. American consumers have come a long way since the days of the Model T.

American voters haven’t. Ford’s “they can have what I say they can have” philosophy is nowhere to be seen anymore in commerce but it still looms large in elections. Some 150 years ago Boss Tweed quipped “I don’t care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.” It’s not so very different today.

As Daily Show host Trevor Noah recently wisecracked: “When it comes to everything except presidential candidates, Americans have the most choices for more things that anyone else in the world. Like, I can walk into a supermarket — any supermarket in America — and choose from literally 400 different kinds of yogurt…. And yet, when it comes to selecting America’s leader for the next four years, you’re stuck with two choices: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Or to put that in yogurt terms: vanilla and Sriracha baboon anus.”

This is the truth, but not the whole truth. We see ourselves stuck with two choices alright, and not just in presidential elections but all partisan elections. We can vote for major party nominees who occasionally win but rarely do what we want once elected and regularly sell us out. Or we can vote for minor party candidates who seem less compromised and more likely to act in our interests but never win. An inadequate and profoundly unsatisfying choice, to say the least.

Here’s what’s amazing. As demanding as we are as consumers, that’s just how passively accepting we are as citizens.

We don’t have to be passive. We don’t have to be accepting. We have more power than we know. And we have more choices than we realize.

When major party establishments offer us bleak and bleaker, our choices are not limited to either holding our noses and selecting what we consider the lesser of evils or saying the hell with it and casting a protest vote for someone with no chance of winning. There is another option.

Almost exactly a century ago, farmers in North Dakota were at wit’s end about the insensitivity of elected officials to their economic plight. A couple of socialists organized tens of thousands of disgruntled North Dakotans and lined up reform candidates to run for office all across the state. But they didn’t run under the Socialist Party banner. Their movement and their candidates were embedded in North Dakota’s ruling Republican Party and in a few short years they took it over.

Almost exactly a century later, at the beginning of this decade, anti-government feelings smoldered in poor, recession-ravaged communities and was fanned by rich right-wing ideologues, exploding into a prairie fire that swept the country. It was dubbed the Tea Party, but it was not a party at all. Its organizers took cues from those North Dakota socialists and embedded their insurgency within the Republican Party, and in a few short years lightning struck again in the same place. The GOP was pretty much taken over.

Now go all the way back to the 19th Century. The Progressives of the late 1800s tried for a time to establish a separate party, but did not truly gain traction until their kind were embedded in both major parties. Once you had Teddy Roosevelt successfully running for president as a Progressive on the Republican ticket and some years later Woodrow Wilson winning the presidency as a Progressive on the Democratic ticket, the major parties had no choice but to embrace the Progressive agenda and enact Progressive reforms. America was radically transformed.

Consider what was done by Wisconsin’s legislature in 1911 alone. Child labor laws and protections for women in the workplace were put in place. Workers’ compensation was established to help injured laborers. And so much more. Railroad regulation. Insurance reform. The first state life insurance program anywhere in the country. The nation’s first system of taxation based on ability to pay, namely the progressive income tax. America’s first vocational, technical and adult education system. All done by a legislature made up almost entirely of Republicans and Democrats. All done by Progressives embedded in those major parties.

All done by people who refused to accept the dismal choice we assume we are stuck with today.

MADISON - I applaud the efforts by the University of Wisconsin-Madison to make their campus more inclusive. They are taking the appropriate steps to ensure every student, regardless of the color of their skin, is treated fairly at UW-Madison.

As our flagship university, it speaks volumes that UW-Madison's leadership is listening to the student body's call to create an environment that reflects and respects the backgrounds of everyone. I applaud the university leadership, the student leadership, and activists for working together to improve and strengthen UW-Madison.

We live in a world made of people from all walks of life and backgrounds. It is important that students' educational climate reflects the multicultural and diverse world they will join after leaving collegiate life. The investment UW-Madison is making better prepares our young students for this transition.

As a mother who has a child attending UW-Madison, I am grateful the school is taking the appropriate steps to ensure she receives an education in the most inclusive environment possible.

Spending on Wisconsin’s Medicaid Program, which provides health care for low-income families, is going up. Where is the money going? Is health care really costing that much more?

MADISON - Medicaid is the joint federal-state program that pays hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other health professionals to provide care for low-income families, including frail elderly persons and individuals with disabilities. It has been the fastest growing part of the state budget.

What’s going on with Medicaid spending? Where is the money going? Is health care really costing that much more?

We pondered these questions at a recent gathering of regional health administrators in La Crosse. I shared budget numbers from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

The state budget is growing – it’s $7.5 billion more than a half-dozen years ago – with health accounting for about $3 billion of the increase.

But the number of people served by the state’s programs grew by only 20,000. Did each new person really cost the state $12,500 a month?

Why are costs increasing so fast at a time when the number served by the state has slowed?

After the presentation, a local health administrator said to me, “I wonder what happened to all the money. The hospitals haven’t seen a raise in a long time. I don’t think the doctors have either.” I can add from many conversations with local administrators, nursing homes haven’t seen much of a raise either.

Just where did the money go?

In 2011, an audit by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB) shed some light on the Medicaid program. Auditors found the Department of Health Services (DHS) spent 40% of administration on contracts with private companies to manage the state’s programs. In four years, those contract dollars increased 73%. Almost 1,100 full-time private company employees are working under just one of those contracts.

Auditors reported contract amendments to private companies running Medicaid were made without legislative authorization and without budgeted appropriations. The contracts were no bid and were not reported to DHS’ own purchasers, accountants or procurement managers.

Contract dollars have also increased over the years. For example, in fiscal years 2016-17, private companies getting paid to administer Medicaid reaped a 30% increase or $120 million more than the prior budget.

Most astounding, auditors found DHS could not answer basic questions about how much each “subprogram” (i.e., BadgerCare, SeniorCare, Family Care) cost taxpayers.

“If my CFO [chief financial officer] couldn’t tell me how much we were spending, he would be fired on the spot,” one hospital administrator told our group.

Others had similar reactions. “What you are asking from DHS is what we do every day,” one told me. “We are constantly doing the math to see how to deliver better service at a lower cost.”

Getting health programs running properly benefits all of us. Money going directly to well-run health service means people stay healthy and are more productive. Money spent on no bid health contracts to companies who can’t help the state answer basic management questions – like what are we spending the money on – is money that can’t buy roads, teachers or nurses.

Wise management means looking at all options for funding. Using federal money to cover health costs frees up state dollars for other investments.

For example, expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would cover an additional 83,000 people and save almost $400 million state dollars in the next budget.

This is money that could be spent on roads, teachers, or nurses.

Lawmakers need to ask detailed questions about health care – just like every other program. The department needs to start providing detailed answers. Let’s begin with “Where did the money go?”

Today’s Republican Party seems bound and determined to implode. For you Democrats, there is no shortage of opportunity. Are you up for it?

ALTOONA, WI - Now here’s a telling measure of how weird our political system has gotten. The Republican Party is more unpopular than it’s been in nearly 25 years and is turning more people off with each passing day, yet the GOP is undeniably the majority party in this country.

Republicans control Congress. They control two-thirds of statehouses across America. Here in Wisconsin, they control a majority of congressional seats, both houses of the state legislature, the governor’s office and the state Supreme Court.

Elections don’t lie. As much as voters dislike the Republicans, they’ve repeatedly shown they’d rather have Republicans running the government than Democrats.

The Democratic establishment shows little willingness to change and little openness to outside advice. In all likelihood this will fall on deaf ears, but here goes anyway. Democrats, you won’t likely find your way out of the political wilderness unless you:

• Stop trying to shame voters into backing candidates that wide swaths of the population find unappealing with scare tactics about what disaster will befall us if the latest ever-more-extreme Republican wins and how the catastrophe will be all their fault if they don’t vote Democratic. Only saying the other side is worse is an admission that your side is bad. Aspire to thrill voters instead.
• Stop blaming voters for your defeats with the lame excuse that they are voting against their own best interests. Figure out how they see their interests and make them a better offer. Voters can be persuaded to realign. FDR turned a whole bunch of Republicans into Democrats, and Reagan turned a bunch of Democrats into Republicans. If you are consistently falling short of 50% in elections, that’s not the voters’ fault. It’s on the losing party to do something different to become more appealing to more people.
• Stop using the vast Republican spin machine as an excuse for repeated losses. Of course opponents go to great lengths to badmouth you. Always have and always will. You can’t control that. Focus on what you can control.
• Focus less on policies that benefit a particular constituency and more on programs with universal reach where everyone pays and everyone benefits. Wisconsin Democrats staked the last several elections on bargaining rights for a small minority of the state’s workers in just one sector of the economy, and lost decisively. This kind of strategy reinforces the image of a party devoted to benefiting favored interests and also makes the party vulnerable to divide-and-conquer tactics that were indeed successfully employed by Republican opponents.
• Think long and hard about the fact that lower-income white working-class voters, especially those living in small towns and rural areas, used to support Democrats but most no longer do. There’s no shortage of clues about why they now prefer the Republicans. In those clues is a call to think bigger, to start doing things for blue-collar workers the Republicans won’t. Rebuilding governing majorities depends on it.
• Try to become more than a confederation of interest groups, confined to their own issue silos, operating largely in isolation and sometimes even working at cross purposes. Doing this requires agreeing on and then expressing overarching values that knit these interests together. Republicans do a far better job staying focused on bedrock values while Democrats concentrate on issues and try to persuade people with a torrent of facts while not being willing or able to confidently describe a coherent underlying world view.

And then if and when voters decide to trust Democrats with power, you need to actually do what you say you believe in. No more hand-wringing about how acting boldly could cost you the next election. Doing little or nothing when given the opportunity to steer the ship of state has cost you way more elections than decisive action ever has.

Today’s Republican Party seems bound and determined to implode. Democrats, there is no shortage of opportunity for your party. There also is no shortage of doubt that you will take advantage of the opening.