Home      Login

Abstract: 

Immediately after his inauguration in January 2010, Governor Walker and his fellow Republicans in the Wisconsin State Senate and Assembly began pursuing an agenda that seemed designed to quickly dismantle Wisconsin’s long-standing legacy as a progressive or moralistic state. The budgetary data contained in this paper reveal some, but by no means all, of the important policy and budgetary changes Walker and Republican legislators pursued in the three biennial budgets approved between 2012 and 2016. The changes included substantial income tax cuts and substantial reductions in funding for Wisconsin’s K-12 public schools, the University of Wisconsin system, and municipal and county governments. At the same time that Walker and the Republican majorities in the legislature were cutting state taxes and cutting funding for state-wide programs that provided important benefits to Wisconsin’s citizens, they committed an estimated $3.7 to $4.5 billion of Wisconsin state tax revenue to “corporate welfare” payments for a Taiwanese company.

Keywords: Wisconsin, Great Recession, tax cuts, expenditure cuts, collective bargaining, corporate welfare, Progressive legacy, Governor Scott Walker

Affiliations:  1: George Mason University.