TGFSW

By Jeff Simpson

Tweet of the Day - 7/27/15

Scott Walker Has Himself To Thank

By Jeff Simpson - Cross posted at Purple WI.

 In the wierd world of Wisconsin Politics. Governor Scott Walker took to social media, to slap himself on the back.   

"My property taxes went down largely because my technical college portion went down 35.5% because of the money we put in at state."
— Scott Walker on Friday, December 12th, 2014 in a tweet

In what has also become commonplace in Wisconsin Media, Politifact rushed to give him cover.   

In a tweet, Walker said: "My property taxes went down largely because my technical college portion went down 35.5% because of the money we put in at state."

He’s right. We rate his claim True.

A deeper look at the numbers, and we see why the Wisconsin Budget is in such a mess.  Scott Walker's property taxes did go down this year $118.
 

The governor owns and lives in a $360,000 home on a busy street in suburban Wauwatosa in Milwaukee County. An online database shows his total bill fell $118 or 1.4 percent this year.

His total bill: $8,364.

Of course last year, not so much - up $1100.  

Walker had less to brag about last year at this time, when his property tax bill jumped more than $1,100. It coincided with the 2013 citywide property revaluation in Wauwatosa. Walker’s property assessment rose 11 percent that year. 

OUCH.  By the way, in the four years Walker has been Governor - his property taxes(even after the massive$118 deducation) have went up $1300!  
 

Our Mathmatically challenged Governor consider taxes going up $1300/yr as a win.   he has himself (and maybe a really poor math teacher in high school) to thank for this.   

I know that the "amen chorus" will attack because the tax increase came from the city of Wauwatosa.  Of course it did, when the State Government starves municpalities and school districts as a way to pretend they cut taxes, the money has to be come from somewhere.  The streets of wauwatosa do not plow themselves.   

Cutting these payments is not saving taxpayers money, it is passing the buck. 

By the way while Scott Walker has his self to blame for his own MASSIVE tax increase, there have been a couple other things in the news that he also has himself to thank -  or blame.  

Thanks to massive cuts to the UW System our friends to the north are paying a steep price:

University of Wisconsin-Superior announced on Friday that it’s suspending five academic programs.

The following programs will no longer be offered at the school as of this Monday:

Educational Specialist Degree
Applied Discrete Mathematics concentration
French minor
French education minor
German education minor

Thanks Scott, now the students at UW Superior will be less prepared to tackle our world economy when they graduate.    

Then of course there is Wisconsin falling further in debt than we already are:

Over the next two years, the state's costs to keep up its current services will outstrip its expected tax collections by more than $800 million, according to the Legislature's nonpartisan budget office.

The brief analysis by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau provides the sharpest picture yet of the challenge that Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers face as they try to keep the state's main account balanced while weighing competing concerns such as schools, health care and the pocketbooks of taxpayers.

Thanks Scott, sorry I missed your tweet on this piece of "great" news or I could have congratulated you sooner.   

Buckle up, I have a feeling there will be many many more things like this that we get to "thank" Scott Walker for in the next four years.   

It's Still Not Working For The Third Straight Year

Last year about this time, I did a comparison of how Scott Walkers tax cuts for property owners was working out by seeing how much of a tax break I got.  As one might have guessed, the results weren't pretty:

Taxing Jurisdiction	2011 - % tax change	2012 - %tax change
State	4.4%	-0.6%
County	9%	1.5%
Town	1.1%	2.8%
School District	-0.9%	4.5%
Tech School	5.1%	9.2%
Net property tax	4.5%	3.5%

In the fall of this year, just days after Mary Burke announced that she was running for governor, Walker came out with a $100 million tax break pledge.  But even that turned out not to be as good a deal as he was trying to pretend it was.

Today, I received our 2013 property tax statement.

Again, for the third year in a row, it shows that the Walker agenda is not working:

Taxing authority	2011 -  % tax change	2012 - % tax change	2013 - % tax change	2010 to 2013 % tax change
State	4.4%	- 0.6%	2.5%	6.4%
County	9%	1.5%	4.7%	15.9%
Town	1.1%	2.5%	- 0.7%	2.1%
School District	-.0.9%	4.5%	6.2%	10.0%
Tech School	5.1%	9.2%	2.7%	12.2%
Net property tax	4.5%	3.5%	3.4%	11.8%

As the gentle reader can see, all the taxes, except for the town, went up again.   I also included an extra column to show the percentage increase for the three years that Walker has been in office.

And as I mentioned last year, thanks to Act 10, as well as the zeal of his fellow austerity acolyte, Chris Abele (the Mitt Romney of Milwaukee County), I have taken about a 12% cut in pay.

But it's not the higher taxes that bothers me.  I understand that there are no magic pixies that spread their dust around that plows the snow, fights fires, preserves public safety, teaches our children or provide any of the other necessary services that too many of us take for granted.

What I find most egregious is that even though our taxes are going up and our pay is going down, we are getting less jobs and what jobs we have pay less and too many of them are poverty level wages.  I also find it egregious that we are getting polluted drinking water, crumbling infrastructure, less public safety and less rights.  And that doesn't even go into the level of corruption, including an inept governor that had a legal defense fund and two John Doe investigations.

No, no matter how much Walker and the right wing propagandists might try to claim otherwise, it's not working.

Never has and never will.

Walker's Favorite Dessert - Pants Flambé

Just days after Mary Burke announced her candidacy for governor, Scott Walker and his Teapublican allies in the state legislature gathered to announce a $100 million tax cut for property owners - despite the fact that they didn't even draw up the bill yet.

It was quickly pointed out that mean average saving would be about $13.  Big whoop.  And for that, our
schools will suffer even the more.

But Walker wasn't done there.  Making it even more painfully obvious that this was nothing more than a campaign stunt, Walker has been running around making the rather brash claim that it would save taxpayers $680.

PolitiFact jumped on that claim quickly and easily pointed out that Walker again was caught in yet another "Pants on Fire:" level lie:

Walker said that with a bill bringing $100 million in property tax relief, "the typical Wisconsin homeowner will save approximately $680 over four years."

The claim in an e-newsletter strongly suggests $680 in hard savings from that tax relief bill, or at the very least during Walker’s four years, but we found nothing to back up that number or anything close to it.

You can only get to it using a rough hypothetical scenario based on some big assumptions, and can make a case for $239 in four-year savings compared to the four years prior to his term.

But Walker’s newsletter doesn’t disclose that his number is hypothetical, misleading the reader into thinking that the median tax bill actually has dropped by $680.

We rate his claim Pants on Fire.

And they are actually being generous with their findings.

While on vacation, I had a chance to follow up on our personal tax situation. Even with Walker's "tax cut," it looks like our taxes will be going up for the third straight year, although by five dollars less than it would have otherwise. I hope I don't spend that money all in one place.

It's not the first time Walker made such grandiose claims.  Earlier this year, Walker was trying to make similar claims regarding the income tax.  The best advise regarding that was not to back up the Brinks truck, since the savings people were told they'd see were not going to happen.

In case you haven't yet seen one of the many databases going around showing the gentle reader how many cents they will save, here it is for your convenience:

school districts tax cuts 2013.pdf

Walker's Presidential Hopes Hinge On His Act 10 Charade

Long time readers of Cog Dis are well aware that every decision Scott Walker makes is weighed on its impact of his next political campaign.  The minute Walker took office as Milwaukee County Executive, he started running for governor.  Every action he took was calculated to further his aspirations to be governor.

And even before he was sworn in (and sworn at) as governor, he was already laying out the groundwork for his presidential campaign.  The biggest part of his presidential campaign is Act 10, the union busting law that he had in the works even as he was still campaigning for governor.

In recent days and months, there has been a coordinated effort between Walker's campaign and his supporters to put the "benefits" of Act 10 in the spotlight, even though these claims are easily proven to be false.

One such move is his soon to be released book, which should really be called "Unmitigated."  As parts of the book are being leaked, we find that he is trying to glamorize his decision to drop the Act 10 bomb.  But even in his embellished version, he cannot tell the truth and is called out by friend and foe alike for his unmitigated gall.

The MacIver Institute proves themselves to still be anything but a news service when they made exaggerated claims that Act 10 was supposedly saving taxpayers almost $3 billion dollars.  This is not the first time that MacIver has trotted out their figures.  And each time they do this, their numbers become even more exaggerated.

The first time that they tried to claim that Act 10 was saving taxpayers money, even the pro-Walker Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the corporate media giant, had to point out that these numbers were not to be believed (emphasis mine):

Gov. Scott Walker said Monday that his policies had saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $1 billion so far - savings largely achieved by the Republican governor and lawmakers repealing most public workers' union bargaining and effectively lowering their compensation.

Much of those savings - more than three-quarters of a billion dollars - could be verified, such as state and local workers picking up more of the tab for their health care and pension. But the figures also included a significant amount of savings for local governments that could not be verified.

I also pointed out that our taxes, like those of many others, actually went up significant amounts. If taxes went down or even just stayed the same, they were due to a drastic drop in property values. In the Milwaukee area, some properties dropped by as much as 30% in value.

The disproving of Walker's claims continued when it was shown that the supposed savings in the Kaukauna School District - the one that Walker held up as a shining example - was a complete and utter lie.  Over a year later, it was shown to be still a lie.

As a side note, it should also be pointed out that Walker's claims of cutting income tax are just as fraudulent as his claims of cutting property taxes.

We already know the real truth behind Act 10.  It has nothing to do with saving taxpayers any money.  It has to do with redirecting the money taken from public sector workers to the bank accounts of the CEOs and the corporations that have supported his previous campaigns and are supporting his current ones - both the one for reelection as governor and the presidential one.

But it's not only the public sector workers who are paying for the greed of Walker's supporters.  It is all Wisconsinites who are feeling the brunt of this folly.  As Walker pulled the money out of circulation, the ramifications on private sector jobs couldn't be any clearer:

Walker's Act 10 not only failed to save any money, it actually cost tens of thousands of Wisconsinites their jobs.  And many more that did manage to keep their jobs saw drastic pay cuts themselves as the economy went back into a downward spiral.  The loss of money from this downward spiral is exponentially larger than the amount of savings that Walker and his allies are fraudulently claiming.

But even has Walker and his extended campaign is rolling out their propaganda of how "wonderful" Act 10 has been, their carefully laid out script has taken a serious blow.

They forgot about a little detail - the Constitution.  The Honorable Juan Colas has now ruled twice that parts of Act 10 are unconstitutional and had to go so far as finding two of Walker's handpicked people to be in contempt of court to get him to start following the law.

And even then, Walker will not do that and has filed petitions in any and every court he can find, asking to get these orders stayed, if not overturned.*

The reason for this is that if Judge Colas' ruling stands, it will knock down the false fronts that Walker and company have erected to disguise the truth of the matter - Act 10 is a greater failure than most people recognize. And when and if the truth of Act 10's failure is revealed, that will be the last nail in the coffin for Walker's presidential hopes.


*If there was any doubt about where the corporate media stands, the article regarding the petitions filed asking the orders to be overturned now has the headline "Van Hollen asks two courts to overturn judge's rulings on Act 10."

However, when the article first appeared, it read that Walker made the requests, as evidenced by this screen capture off of my feedly reader:

click on image to embiggen it

Do you suppose that this was just a Freudian slip or were they finally telling the truth?

Walker's Tax Relief For the Wealthy Campaign Tour

In his most recent e-newsletter, Scott Walker proudly announced yet another campaign tour of the state, this time promoting his tax cut for the wealthy - y'know, so that they have more to donate to his campaign. His talking points are:

This week, we kicked off the “Tax Relief for Wisconsin” tour at Northcentral Technical College in Wausau and at the Boys & Girls Club of Greater La Crosse and called on members of the Assembly and Senate to support the 2013–15 Biennial Budget’s tax relief package totaling nearly $1 billion.

Everyone in Wisconsin who pays income taxes, will receive a tax rate cut under this package, and the largest rate cuts will be for those making between $15,000 and $50,000 per year. Middle-class families deserve a break, which is why I'm calling on members of the Assembly and Senate to pass a budget providing nearly $1 billion in tax relief for the hardworking taxpayers of our state.
Highlights of the tax package, which passed the Joint Finance Committee last week, include:

• A total income tax cut of $650 million over two years and total tax cuts in the budget approaching nearly $1 billion.
• Every Wisconsinite, who pays income taxes, will receive an income tax rate cut.
• A typical family of four with an income of $80,607 will receive a tax cut of $345 for tax years 2013 and 2014.
• The largest income tax cut in 14 years.
• Hardworking Wisconsin families should be able to keep more of the money they earn, so they can build a brighter future of their choosing for their children and grandchildren.

Our tough, but prudent, decisions resulted in a surplus of over half a billion dollars, and I believe the surplus should be returned to taxpayers. We've accomplished a great deal to improve Wisconsin's business climate and providing this relief will continue to make our state more competitive.

I still find his last bullet point a most annoying lie. I know of tens of thousands of public employees who wish they were allowed to keep more of they money they earn. And given the way the state's economy has tanked since the passage of Act 10, I bet there are tens of thousands more private sector employees who wish that too, so that they could have kept their jobs.

And we all already know all about his "improved" business climate, which dropped the state to 49th in the nation.

But like everything else Walker, the tax cut is a bunch of hooey.

The reality of the situation is that the tax cut is designed to help the top earners of the state while the lowest tax brackets literally gets pennies:

Here is how the tax cut would be distributed among income groups:

- The top 5% of earners alone, a group with an average income of $392,000, would receive more than 1/3 of the benefit of the income tax cuts.

- The top 20% of earners, a group with an average income of $183,000, would receive more than 2/3 of the benefit.

- The bottom 60% of earners – those making $60,000 a year or less – would only receive 11% of the benefit of the income tax cuts.

- The 20% of the Wisconsinites with the lowest incomes would receive just two cents out of every $100 in individual income tax cuts under this proposal.

Even worse, the reason that Walker is giving for this giveaway to the wealthy - job creation and economic stimulation - is also so much poppycock:

"The governor has argued that by putting more money in people's hands, the tax cuts will spur economic growth in Wisconsin," said Andrew Reschovsky, a UW-Madison professor of public affairs and applied economics. "There is no evidence that the tax cut will do much to encourage growth and job creation."

Mark Schug, a UW-Milwaukee professor emeritus who now consults in the area of economic education, agreed that such a cut is not likely to be an economic boost.

"I do tend to think that the income tax reduction is not sufficient," Schug said.

Representative Dale Kooyenga, who authored this monstrosity, admits it's top heavy, but falsely claims that there is nothing that could be done to make it fairer to low income families:

Earlier this year, Governor Scott Walker proposed his own income tax cut ,which was slammed for mostly benefiting the wealthy (in large part because an Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) analysis showed that it was tilted that way). The Governor’s proposed income tax rate cuts were expected to cost the state $343 million over two years; Representative Kooyenga’s would cost $760 million in the upcoming budget and $914 million in the 2015 budget.

And it’s not just costly, it’s regressive. As the lawmaker himself concedes, “[i]t is nearly impossible to create a tax reform or tax cut that is not going to disproportionately lower taxes for upper-middle-class and rich taxpayers,” and a new ITEP analysis of Kooyenga’s plan shows his is no different. ITEP ran the numbers for the Wisconsin Budget Project (WBP) the impact of the Kooyenga income tax plan was shown to be even more skewed to the wealthy that Governor Walker’s...

Actually, there are ways to make it more balanced and fairer - as well as more beneficial to the economy. One could start by simply restoring the cuts made to the Earned Income Credit and Homestead Act, which had raised taxes on the poorest of the poor in this current budget.

It should also be noted that this budget will jack up property taxes. Given how many people's property taxes went up when it Walker claimed to cut them, this could be devastating now that they are admitting to raising them.

Furthermore, it is projected by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau that this "tax cut" will be the driving force behind a $677 million drop in state revenue. Rest assured that Walker and his Teapublican allies will used this self-created fiscal crisis to cut more jobs and more services.

Sadly, all of this is the rosy outlook. Because, as Democurmudgeon points out, Kooyegna, the accounting super dud, is counting on pixie dust and unicorn's rainbows for it to be even this "good" (emphasis his):

Thank you Rep. Dale Kooyenga. He's an accounting wiz. Aside from the $92 million in taxes currently not collected, would you bank on that? Forget about the nation’s economic growth projections by the Federal Reserve (negative growth) and the World Bank’s new projection (1.9%). Kooyenga assumes growth will be at 3.3%. “We’re in real trouble” says GOP Sen. Dale Schultz. No kidding.

Is it any wonder that Walker's campaign tour is not open to the public. The vast majority of us who are going to be hurt by the Teapublicans' maleficence would have some things to say to him which wouldn't fit in at all with the image that his campaign is trying to spin.

Don't Back Up That Brinks Truck For Walker's Tax Cuts

Ever since Scott Walker gave his campaign speech disguised as a budget address, the right wing squawkers, blarghers and other propagandists have been faithfully been echoing the talking point that Walker put in an income tax cut in his 2011-13 budget.

But don't back up that Brinks armored truck to haul off your share of the wealth.* You won't even need your kid's piggy bank for it:

For example, a family of four with taxable income of $25,000 would see their state income tax bill go down by $6. At $50,000, the savings is $54; at $100,000 it’s $138; and at $200,000 the savings is $270.

"At first blush, the proposed tax cuts sound like they will help moderate-income families but the primary effect is to help the wealthy,” says Jon Peacock of the Wisconsin Budget Project.

Peacock notes that more than half of the projected $172 million in income tax cuts annually would go to the upper 20 percent of state residents.

“This just exacerbates the problem that the rich pay a much lower percent of their income for state and local taxes than lower-income Wisconsin families,” he says, noting a recent national report on that issue.

That really pales in comparison to what Walker did for his corporate sponsors in the current budget:

Actually, Walker’s 2011-2013 budget did use tax credits to target a specific group: factory owners and their investors. A domestic production tax credit that kicks in this year will deliver an estimated $360 million in tax savings to manufacturers over the next four years and some $130 million each year thereafter, according to the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

Considering that the median household income is about $50,000, that means most of us might save a buck a week. Hoard up those savings for a full month and you might, just might, be able to buy a gallon of gas. I say might, because under Walker's reign of economic terror, incomes keep dropping.

It should be pointed out that Walker's tax cuts are so lopsided it does next to nothing to help the poorest of the poor, who were punished for their poverty in Walker's first budget:

Last summer, the state Legislature reduced the amount of money low- income families can receive in tax credits by $56.2 million.

That places Wisconsin among only a handful of states that will effectively raise taxes on their poorest residents in 2012, according to a recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit think tank.

"At a time when low-wage workers are already struggling, this makes it that much more difficult (for them) to feed their families and pay their utility bills," said Jon Peacock with the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, an advocacy group that opposed the changes

Likewise, it offers no relief for the fees that Walker raised through the roof in the last budget and wants to rise even higher in this budget.

Another thing that the Walker apologists are touting his that Walker is proposing a freeze on property tax rates. That should scare the bejeebers out of you.

In Walker's current budget, he touted he cut property taxes. But like the majority of Wisconsinites, our property taxes had actually gone up. They would have probably gone up even higher, but Walker's policy of lowering our quality of life included lowering our property values.

Since my taxes went up by some 9% with Walker's tax cuts, I can't even imagine how much they'll go up with a freeze - 20%? 25%?

I wouldn't mind my taxes going up so much if we had something to show for it, like a decent education system, public safety, assistance for our neediest and most vulnerable citizens or even some creation.

Instead we have nothing to show but some of the most generous corporate welfare giveaway that do nothing to help our state.

But no one should be surprised. This is just a remake of his failures in his last budget, for which we didn't need that armored car either.


*Since Walker's make-believe surplus, which is actually a deficit he's not admitting too, which he is using for these tax cuts come from the money he took from public sector workers, isn't that socialism - forced sharing of the wealth?

The Walker Agenda Is Still Working! Part CLXI

We got our property tax statement today.

Surprise, surprise, it went up again, despite Scott Walker's claims that his agenda is working and he did it all without raising taxes.

Of course, I, along with all of you, knew his agenda was a failure from the get go.  No matter how much Walker and the Teapublicans might wish it so, there is no pixie dust that does the things we take for granted.  Pixies don't plow the roads, teach our children, maintain our buildings - including schools or maintain public safety.

Here's how it went since Walker took office:

Taxing Jurisdiction	2011 - % tax change	2012 - %tax change
State	4.4%	-0.6%
County	9%	1.5%
Town	1.1%	2.8%
School District	-0.9%	4.5%
Tech School	5.1%	9.2%
Net property tax	4.5%	3.5%

The "savings" from the state's part of the tax amounted to a whopping six cents.

Overall, from the time Walker took office, our taxes went up 8.1%.

Our taxes probably would have gone higher, but our property value dropped by several hundred dollars.

Of course, I should also mention that thanks to Walker and his cohort in austerity, Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, my pay dropped by 10%, which does not include the additional gouging to come in 2013.*

And what do we get for our paying more money?

Less jobs, worse schools, an infrastructure that is crumbling, a stagnant economy, less rights, a corrupt government and a governor with a legal defense fund.

Tell me again how it's working.  I keep forgetting.

*Has anyone else noticed that Walker's and Abele's claims of surplus tends to be almost exactly the same amount that they took from the workers?  That means not only were the cuts unnecessary, but they have put their respective jurisdictions in economic harm's way for nothing but a political sound bite.

The Kaukauna Is Still A Lie!

When Scott Walker budget was enacted last year, he loved pointing to the Kaukauna School District has an example of how his budget was so "successful" in saving taxpayers money and not harming the quality of education.

I pointed out a post by Jake, who pointed out that the Walker's Kaukauna story was a lie:

So this wasn't a "union costs exploded for 2011-2012" problem. This was a "budget cuts from Scott Walker and WisGOP in Madison are screwing us on the local level" problem. In fact, the original budget proposal from the guv resulted in a drop of Kaukauna's available revenues of $2.16 million (a bit under 5% of their total), and $2.75 million from the state (check out your favorite district's cut here, Kaukauna's on Page 5). The unions responded by proposing $1.8 million in concessions, which combined with the district $345,000 in surplus funds from 2010-11, would have taken care off all of the state cuts put into Kaukauna's budget. The Kaukauna School Board turned them down and asked for layoffs of 14.5 full-time positions instead, and decided to wait on the Legislature and State Supreme Court to do the dirty work of putting the screws on the teachers, and hope for large numbers of teacher retirements.

Which is exactly what happened. The Kaukauna teachers will now have to chip in over 18% of their pay in health care and pension contributions, with no corresponding increase in salary. And for all the talk about "Kaukauna class sizes going down," even Kaukauna School Board President Todd Arnoldussen admits it's projected class sizes being reduced, and those are reductions from huge INCREASES THAT WERE PREVIOUSLY PROJECTED. In other words, little to no change will result from what students would have seen this year. Class sizes DID NOT GO DOWN, as much as the deceptive press releases may indicate.

And I'm not even bringing up the fact that I wish Kaukauna good luck in attracting and retaining quality teachers when they're getting a huge cut in their take-home pay. Strangely, those "free-market" types that are always bashing public educators leaves out the free market reality of lower pay = lower quality. (But when has consistency and reality ever been part of the equation for those haters, anyway?)

The lie was picked up on nationally and made even clearer:

But here’s the thing: The collective bargaining ban, in and of itself, was not responsible for achieving these savings and this surplus. As the Appleton Post Crescent reports, the teachers union had already offered up financial concessions that would have produced almost identical savings and an almost identical surplus.

What’s more, the use of this one district to declare Walker’s policies a success is almost comical in its cherry-picking. There are 424 school districts in Wisconsin, and as the AP recently noted, Walker’s policies mean draconian budget cuts to 410 of them, with labor officials and school districts predicting increased class sizes and layoffs.

Walker’s premature declaration of victory — and the right wing echo chamber’s flacking of it — could look awfully silly when the full bill for his policies really comes due. And the notion that this one school district’s fiscal success is in any way a referendum on the most controversial aspect of Walker’s union busting proposal is laughable. This fight has never been about public employees’ unwillingness to make fiscal concessions — and always about stripping them of their rights.

When the recalls came, Walker and company tried to point at Kaukauna again as their flagship on how the budget was working. Meanwhile, those of us on the left repeatedly pointed out that any savings were one time deals and the long term costs would far exceed any savings, real or pretend, that Walker might tout.

Guess who was correct.

Well, let's just say thatKaukauna is still a lie:

The owner of a $150,000 home within the Kaukauna and Little Chute school districts will see annual costs jump $80 and $61, respectively, if the home’s value increases or decreases at the same rate as the school district’s projections.

After several years of cutting spending, the Kaukauna Area School District no longer had any fat to trim and will have to increase the tax levy for revenue, said Bob Schafer, business manager for Kaukauna. Because the district spent less than it budgeted, state aid was reduced by more than $850,000, according to figures from the Department of Public Instruction.

“Our biggest dilemma was No. 1, the dropping property values, and No. 2, the amount of state aid,” Schafer said. “We lost a lot of state aid this year.”

Kaukauna also underspent their budget last year by about $1.5 million due to healthcare and retirement adjustments, which meant a smaller state aid payment for the 2012-13 year.

“That does have a ripple effect in your aid payment for the following year,” Schafer said. “That was a big factor for us.”

Still, the situation could have been much worse, he said. Kaukauna had the option of taxing homeowners up to $10.13 per $1,000 of home valuation, but the Board of Education voted instead to take money out of a different fund and set the tax rate at $9.33.

“Yes, it does raise property taxes, but everybody feels that this is what’s best for the kids and the community,” Schafer said.

So those of you in the Kaukauna School District who voted for Walker, not just once, but twice, congratulations to you. You won the Walker Booby Prize of higher taxes and a poor education for your children.

Ah, ah, ah! No complaining now! You're getting exactly what you wanted. It's just too bad you had to ruin everything for the rest of us in your headlong rush to prove yourselves fools.

The Walker Budget Keeps On Working! Part CXLIII

Remember during the recalls how Scott Walker and the Koch News Network affiliates kept telling us how Walker balanced the budget without raising property taxes?

Me neither.

Not only was the claim a lie at the time, with it being proven that Walker not only raised property taxes, but did so on the poorest of the poor.

Now we are seeing the real economic climate that Walker has created with his ALEC-based policies and budget:

In a disturbing sign the state economy remains in crisis, property values in Wisconsin have fallen for the fourth year in a row and showed the largest one-year drop in decades.

This news accompanies a surprising jump in the state unemployment rate announced on Thursday. The jobless rate rose in July to 7.3 percent, up from 7 percent in June, with the state losing an estimated 6,000 private-sector jobs for the month.

Meanwhile, figures released this week by the Department of Revenue showed total property values in Wisconsin down 3.2 percent for 2012, the largest drop in 50 years. That includes a 4 percent drop in residential property and a 1.5 percent decline in commercial property values.

The roughly $2 billion in new residential construction was more than offset by a $15.3 billion erosion in the value of existing homes. (See attached report.)

Overall property values in the state -- which includes residential, commercial, manufacturing and agricultural uses -- are now down 8.4 percent from their peak in 2008. Total values are estimated at $471 billion, down from a peak of $514 billion four years ago.

Todd Berry of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance says the drop again in values, especially on the residential side, came as a surprise since most observers thought the real estate market had bottomed out last year.

They're saying that the reason for this continuing bottoming out is due to personal income levels not rising as fast as real estate values. Now, who was it that "dropped a bomb" in the form of Act 10, slashing the salaries of tens of thousands of Wisconsinites immediately and causing a ripple effect throughout the state?

It should also be noted that the only area of the state that is doing well with real estate values are the ones in western Wisconsin. You know, the ones that are close enough to Minnesota to ride their economic coattails.

I can just hear the Walker apologists now, "But capper, property taxes went down!"

Did they? Not really:

Falling property values do not mean that property taxes will go down, however. Local units of government may have to increase tax rates to make up for the difference in property values, Berry says.

What can happen, Berry says, is that taxpayers whose property has risen in value may end up paying a larger percentage of a community’s taxes than an owner whose home value has fallen.

“That is where you can see a shift in the levy,” he says.

It's working, my ass!