On Friday Charlie Sykes said nice things about this blog, specifically what I wrote Thursday about the proposed $330 million state tax cut, which, at 27 cents per day, is too small for anyone to notice.

Sykes pointed out that a larger tax cut would be demagogued by the Democrats. He is correct, and as proof my work inbox had a press release from the Wisconsin Democratic Party needling Gov. Scott Walker for claiming the state surplus of $419.7 million that, by the standard upon which Walker criticized Gov. James Doyle, wasn’t in balance either.

That would be the legal standard of cash-balance instead of the actual standard of balance by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. The Democrats’ statement, while correct, is wildly disingenuous, proving that Wisconsin Democrats believe in fiscal sanity only when it’s politically convenient. Democrats cannot point to one single budget during the Doyle administration that was GAAP-balanced. While during the 2000s one-third of the states had GAAP deficits in any budget year during that decade, Wisconsin is one of the few that had GAAP deficits every year of that decade.

Doyle, remember, managed the fiscal feat (if you want to call it that) of budget-cycle and structural deficits despite his $2.2-billion tax increase. Sykes passed on the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute‘s painstaking, and painful, listing of all the Doyle tax increases.

When Walker inherited an immediate deficit of nearly $150 million and a $3.6 billion structural deficit as he took office in January 2011, Democrats denied the deficits’ very existence. Not a single Democrat — not Doyle, not Tom Barrett, not Jon Erpenbach, not Tim Cullen, not Kathleen Vinehout, not Peter Barca — admitted the state’s fiscal trainwreck, let alone advancing an alternative approach to fixing it. So if I were a Republican I would not give a damn what Democrats have to say about state finances.

The proposed $330 million tax cut, however, remains insufficient. A tax cut of any size, which means more money in your pocket instead of Govzilla’s, is better than the alternative, of course. But a 27-cent-a-day tax cut will not provide any incentive to create jobs, invest, or even increase consumer spending. What will someone invest in with an additional $2 per week in take-home pay?

That size tax cut doesn’t come close to making up for Barack Obama’s Social Security tax increase enacted at the start of this year. (Which will directly lead to the next U.S. recession this year.) And then there’s the proposed $600 million in annual tax and fee increases to fund the state Department of Transportation’s wish list.

Republicans will not be able to legitimately claim they cut your taxes if government takes more money out of your pockets, whether that’s by higher gas taxes, the odious proposed per-mile GPS-measured fee, or any other function. At an absolute minimum, any tax cut needs to exceed whatever WisDOT is able to get through the Legislature.

The better goal is the aforementioned $2.2 billion, the Doyle tax increases. The fastest way to do that is to eliminate the corporate income tax, which in 2010 was estimated to bring in $1.63 billion. Whatever businesses in this state choose to do with that $1.63 billion — increase employee pay, hire more employees, increase owner dividends, or invest back into the business — will be preferable to $1.63 billion for state and local governments to waste. (People with brains know that businesses don’t pay taxes anyway; their customers do, so a business tax cut is a consumer tax cut.)

The remainder should go into personal income tax cuts, enough to substantially reduce Wisconsin’s ranking as number four in state and local taxes. How should this be “paid for”? How about this radical thought: Create a 2013–15 state budget that is smaller than the 2011–13 state budget. A tax cut that people do notice should be able to generate more economic activity, with the added benefit of helping to Obama-proof the state’s economy as much as doable.

There is another issue, which fuels the cynicism of those who claim that Republicans aren’t really interested in reducing the size and scope of government. Had legislative Republicans done the right thing and passed permanent constitutional limits on year-to-year spending for all levels of government early in the 2011–12 Legislature, the Legislature could be voting on those constitutional spending limits in this session of the Legislature, and then sending it to referendum. Given that voters voted to have Republicans represent them in 2010 and 2012, there is a good chance a Taxpayer Bill of Rights-like mechanism would then become law, preventing legislators of any party from stoking the fires of our state’s tax hell.

Wisconsin is one of the few states with no spending or taxation controls in its Constitution. Some spending controls have been included in state budgets, but since one Legislature cannot bind a future Legislature, those controls go away at the whim of someone like Doyle, who eliminated the Qualified Economic Offer control on teacher contracts, which eliminated school boards’ ability to control the largest part of school budgets. (Of course, given Walker’s replacing Doyle and Act 10, eliminating the QEO turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for public employee unions. In fact, Act 10 turned out to be the last victory for municipal public employee unions, many of which no longer exist outside of law enforcement unions.) Nor did Republicans change state law to require GAAP-balanced state budgets, when every unit of government other than state government is required to have GAAP-balanced budgets.

Voters voted to have Republicans represent them in 2010 and 2012. There is no guarantee that voters will vote to have Republicans represent them in 2014 if they simply act like Democrats who spend and tax slightly less.