H 32°, L 7° | Tomorrow: 
H 17°, L 4°Often times in Madison, talking politics can prove a frustrating affair. Frequently people so well informed as to the national and international scene remain blissfully unaware of local issues. Somewhere between the perpetual addressing of the Patriot Act and the 107th mention of Bush, hair begins to fall out. And yet, bring up the issue of TABOR and the question is met with a quizzical look.
What is that? Some city in Iraq?
It stands for the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, a name frequently lambasted for sounding conspicuously patriotic. Regardless, in a country where every proposal comes packaged in euphemism, this one delivers what it says.
Students as future taxpayers of Wisconsin — or anywhere the precedent may someday take hold — need to pay attention to the concept. In many ways, TABOR could be the most important item to cross state legislature and senate tables in decades.
The proposal is rather simple: a hard cap imposed on state, county and municipal spending, set relative to the inflation rate and growth in income levels. If a particular assembly deems it necessary to exceed the cap for an emergency or any other reason, a referendum appears before voters. TABOR protects the Wisconsin taxpayer from devil-may-care spending and forces the public sector to live within its means.
With property taxes in Wisconsin continuing to balloon, the taxpayers are all but taking up arms. Actually, it’s been argued back and forth where the state’s tax burden ranking truly lies. According to actual Tax Foundation reports, before all the number crunching and the “yeah buts”, “thises” and “that’s”, Wisconsin is the sixth most heavily taxed state in the nation.
Many students choose to reject a spending cap for what it will impose on the university system — while many of those same students are charting a course out of Wisconsin altogether.
The system will survive as all things must when faced with the real world. To seek our educational interests without regards for the well being of the state and to just scurry off, leaving Wisconsinites burning in tax-hell is a reproachable notion. Students need to understand the taxpayers’ only road to purgatory lies in drastic reform.
Let’s take a trip to the state of Colorado, where baseballs travel farther and apparently so does common sense. In 1992, after years of persistence by spending reformists, TABOR received 54 percent of the vote in referendum. This amendment, the first of its kind in the United States, paid dividends for the beleaguered Colorado taxpayer.
In just one decade, the average Colorado household surrendered $16,700 less in personal income than before TABOR. Public sector growth remained level while the private sector growth rate doubled.
Yes, the initiative originally adopted in Denver took hold during more prosperous times. Certainly those numbers cannot rest upon TABOR alone. Yet, even in the ’90s, Wisconsin couldn’t approach that type of growth. Additionally, polls in Colorado show 74 percent of residents continued to support TABOR even after the economic decline of the last few years.
Also oddly enough, while similar spending freezes regularly draw ire for originating from aristocratic origins, TABOR received the highest praise from the middle class with residents at income levels above $80,000 offering the least support.
With Colorado as the model for the TABOR movement currently gaining momentum in this state, proponents logically crafted the Wisconsin proposal nearly identical to the one passed in Denver almost 14 years ago.
Recently, Wisconsin Republicans in the state house and senate announced a 100-day plan to offer some tax relief. The agenda includes a property tax freeze (see if that gets by Emperor Doyle), an elimination of state taxes on health insurance premiums and a plan to set up tax-free savings accounts for health care purposes.
While the agenda moves toward the right goals, it’s a lot like trying to skip over a canyon. At some point a long-term solution to taxpayer woes must pass the docket.
Now what does this mean for our university and all the other schools in Badgerland?
Responsibility. A responsible party would discern between purposeful and superfluous research. This columnist is as proud as anyone of those little brown markers all over campus, but when was the last time you saw someone praising a breakthrough in television and the feminist response?
They wouldn’t hand out a six-figure pay increase to a university executive just two years before retirement and allow the taxpayer to shoulder that pension until the recipient’s death. Most importantly, they wouldn’t try to claim total administration expenditures as just one-third of the actual figure (according to a recent Legislative Audit Bureau report).
At a club in any metropolitan setting, you will see that guy. That guy rolls around in BMW 545 with 14-inch chrome wheels, wearing Armani suits and gold chains — only to return to his studio apartment furnished with a futon and a Foreman grill.
That guy would proudly boast of $662 million in research funding while the elderly are taxed into poverty. That guy would fork over money to bureaucratic pimps with no regard for the future. That guy would pretend to be California.
Wisconsin, don’t be that guy.
Patrick Klemz ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism.
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I have noticed this as well with college-aged students. I am not sure if it is because most of them do not have to pay property taxes, or if the minutia of local politics is not as romantic as high-minded global rhetoric. However, you are absolutely correct in stating that TABOR is probably the most dominant issue in Wisconsin politics right now. It’s effect (whether you believe it to be positive or negative) will be felt by virtually every Wisconsin constituent in some fashion. Yet this proposed amendment to our constitution has gone relatively unnoticed by otherwise politically-minded college students. Trent Steele
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TABOR is simply wrong. It’s already failed here once and it will continue to fail. Give it up! There are plenty of Republicans joining the Democrats who denounce it. The only way it has a chance is through John Gard’s usual underhanded, strongarm methods. Fortunately he is not going to be re-elected in November.
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Fact Check:
Wisconsin state and local govt. spending is between 17th and 19th in the nation. (Depending upon which conservative publication you believe, the Wisconsin Taxpayers alliance or the US Tax Foundation). We’re not sixth. We’ve never been sixth. It is an incredible lie that gets spewed over and over.
We already have spending caps on public schools, which account for much of the property tax burden.
Shared Revenue, the state program that sends property tax relief dollars back to counties and municipalities to keep taxes equitable a low has been UNDERFUNDED by Republican initiatives, instead spending money on reducing Wisconsin’s top income tax rate. The amount of money we send to local governments for property tax relief today is actually less than it was 10 years ago. If Wisconsin had simply increased our property tax relief spending by the rate of inflation over that decade, there would have been an additional $1.3 billion for property tax relief available.
Tabor would make it impossible to secure matches in federal funding, and to adjust the tax levy to attract businesses to area.
Tabor would actually INCREASE property taxes for average and poorer communities. Because it would force further reductions in shared revenue, communities that rely more heavily on shared revenue (lower property valued communities) will have to use more of their own property taxes to make their budgets work. Communities like Mequon get almost nothing from shared revenue and wouldn’t be impacted. Communities like Dodgeville have nearly 1/2 their budget paid for by shared revenue. They can’t cut one half their budget…that’s just not possible. Taxes will go UP.
Finally, all that is to say nothing of the impact on public health and safety, on the payments of tuition for our national guard when we are already underfunding Wisconsinites who have served at war, or the reductions to medical assistance programs that would certainly result.
Tabor is so bad, so heinously stupid as policy that even a legislature with large GOP majorities in BOTH houses couldn’t bring the thing for a vote, much less pass it. The only reason we’re talking about it is because the dolts in charge at Wisconsin’s’ GOP (John Gard, et al) won’t listen to their own Republican members and continue to think this is a political winner. As a Democrat, I’d be thrilled that they continue to pursue such a politically damned strategy if the stakes weren’t so high if they somehow managed to be successful.
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I noticed that Mr. Klemz doesn’t say a word about the state of higher education in Colorado. Maybe that’s because he knows that, if the students reading his editorial were aware of what TABOR had done in Colorado, they might not find his argument so compelling.
The fact is the Colorado has taken the “public” out of public higher education. The University of Colorado is privatized in all but name, with the state footing less than 10% of the bill. Faculty are fleeing the state in droves, as salaries remain even more stagnant than they are here. And enrollment by low-income students has dropped by over a third.
Sure, Colorado has had economic growth—but so have Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Those states don’t have TABOR. How is it that they are able to prosper? You won’t hear that from people like Mr. Klemz.
If the state has a spending problem, instead of writing a policy into the state constitution that enforces the same irresponsible boom-and-bust cycle we have now while freezing property taxes at their present inequitable levels, perhaps we ought to get rid of the legislators that gave us the problem in the first place. Seems pretty simple.
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James Block, a student, is running for 78th Assembly District.
Vote Block!
www.voteblock.com
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News Flash: James Block, a student at UW Madison, is running for the 78th Assembly District. He has qualified for public financing and will bring the message of lower tuition and increased funding for the University to the Assembly if elected. Learn more at www.voteblock.com!
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Does Patrick Klemz work for John Gard or did Gard’s office just send him the article to print? What a horrible, one-sided piece of spin!
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Mississippi has low taxes, they have possibly the worst public schools in the nation,they have very low student test scores. The U of MS does not have any ‘little brown markers’ all over their campus,since it spends comparatively little on research. It is not a place of excellence.Local goverments accept ‘gutter’as a place of existance, but not’curb and gutter’for their streets since they do not have any. Mississippi did not use one simpleton solution like Tabor to reduce their state to ‘not quite third world status’. It was done one conservative vote at time over many decades. A right wing minority restricting the growth and enlightenment of all. Do we need tax cuts in WI ? Absolutely ! The WI state legislature needs to go first and cut their operating costs back to the levels of the early 90’s. Their spending growth rate has far exceeded the other levels of goverment. For the legislature to wrap themselves in rightous indignation and propose Tabor is really hypocritical. It takes them off the hook by relieving them of their responsibility to legislate. If they are no longer going to need to pass financing legislation a companion consitutional amendment needs to be passed which limits the legislator’s time in Madison to two 45 day sessions,spring and fall with their compensation reduced to no more than 100 days of per diem, part time status.
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A vote for Block is a vote against legislative accountability to taxpayers.
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According to Block’s website, www.voteblock.com, he’s for legislative accountability to taxpayers - more than his opponent is, that’s for sure!
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According to me James Block is the next Frank Harris, no way does he get 15% of the vote
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Quit poluting the message boards with your obnoxious blockheaded messages! Nobody I know will vote for him based just on all this forum polution.
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I really look forward to an intelligent debate on TABOR. I think it’s a great idea.
One thing I’d like to clear up: TABOR doesn’t tell local communities how to spend their money. It only puts a cap on the amount they can spend.
This step is necessary to prevent “shift the blame” tax increase methodology. Right now, tax increases are obscured by mechanisms such as shared revenue. As it stands, the locals blame the state and the state blames the locals.
Taxpayers don’t want to have to parse through obscure budgets to figure out who is rifling through their wallets. TABOR allows them to say, “Look, I don’t care how you governments split up the costs - just don’t increase the bottom line without asking me.”
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TABOR is long overdue in Wisconsin. Frank Lasee and Jeff Wood will be bringing a strong version of TABOR back to the table at the beginning of the next session. Students should support this version and not the watered down version proposed by John Gard and Mary Panzer last summer. This version provided too many loopholes, especially for education spending. I’m glad to see college students catching on to this. The last state budget was balanced on the backs of students while spending continued to go up at an unprecedented rate.
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TABOR is so so bad it’s ridiculous. No way should this ALEC written piece of crap ever make into the Wisconsin constitution.
It’s identical to Colorado’s TABOR statute because it was written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-big business lobbying group that provides legislation to state legislators too lazy to come up with their own ideas, just like TABOR.
Interesting that the highest tax brackets in Colorado reject TABOR even though they pay the most….maybe it’s because they understand the impact?
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The so-called taxpayer’s bill of rights is a bad idea for a number of reasons.
First of all there is the fact that different communities have different needs. Why hold them all to the same standard for purposes of deciding how much tax money they need?
Second, there’s that whole thing about unfunded mandates. If the state passes a law that forces a municipality to do something expensive but doesn’t budget any money to do the expensive thing, the only way the municipality can comply with the law is by raising extra money through property taxes. There are also unfunded federal mandates to deal with on top of that. This problem is already huge and would be an order of magnitude worse under a TABOR like law.
Third it goes against the whole idea of local control. Local communities should be able to decide what levels of service they want, and they already do that by electing people to their local governments to make those decisions. By taking those decisions away from them we are undermining the whole idea of having elected officials represent people.
Far from solving any problems, the TABOR is mainly a way for conservatives to “score poltical points” by appealing to the public’s desire for keeping down tax burden and glossing over the potential negative effects of passing legislation like this. It goes along with the myth that Wisconsin is a high-tax state, and that state spending is out of control. Don’t get me wrong, Wisconsin has a fair share of budget problems, but the TABOR is not going to solve them or increase the quality of life in Wisconsin.
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TABOR, as you mentioned, is being used in CO … but with awful results. As the Federal government wants the state and local governments to do more with less (or nothing), we are going to tie our local government’s backs even more? Go here and read more: http://fightingbob.com/article.cfm?articleID=204