The Janesville Gazette:

The 1st Congressional District race is a story about Randy Bryce’s shortcomings as much as Bryan Steil’s qualifications.

With a lengthy arrest record and a history of falling behind on child-support payments, Bryce is in no way congressional material. How Bryce managed to defeat Cathy Myers, a school teacher and Janesville resident, in the Democratic primary would be a mystery except that Bryce benefited from a much larger campaign war chest.

A candidate’s character matters less today than it once did, but Bryce’s personal failings are extraordinary, even by today’s crumbling standards for our nation’s leaders. The problem is not so much Bryce’s past mistakes but that he showed an inability to learn from them. He didn’t rack up merely one OWI in 1998 (plenty of voters can identify with this). He was then picked up three times for driving with a suspended license and was arrested on a warrant for failure to appear.

And lest there be any doubt as to whether Bryce is a “changed man,” the state of Wisconsin placed a lien on Bryce’s property in 2015 for delinquent child-support payments to his ex-wife. Bryce paid off the debt only after announcing his candidacy last year.

His background more closely resembles the kind routinely encountered by probation officers, not 1st Congressional District voters. To attempt to twist his arrest record into a symbol of the everyday working man, as Bryce’s campaign has done, is perhaps one of the most cynical and offensive ploys we’ve ever witnessed.

While we’re not fans of negative campaigning and believe every candidate must make a case for himself, Bryce’s personal failings are too egregious to ignore. The stakes are too high for someone of Bryce’s caliber to slip into office.

The Gazette could have mentioned, but may have run out of space to additionally mention Bryce’s odious self-comparison to those who worked, and died, for civil rights in the South in the 1960s. “Civil rights” do not include skipping out on child support obligations.

John Graber:

When it comes to the Wisconsin economy, there’s very little to attack Governor Scott Walker on. The unemployment rate is at three percent. Wages are rising above the national average. International investments from companies like Foxconn are transforming Wisconsin into a modern, 21st century economy. Even a writer in the New York Times admits the economy is a “hurdle” for Wisconsin Democrats.

Let’s make no mistake about what caused the recent economic boom in Wisconsin. It’s from pro-growth policies like deregulation, right-to-work, and balanced budgets. Most importantly, it’s from $8 billion in tax relief that has been implemented by Walker and the Republicans in the state legislature since they were given power in 2010.

Cutting taxes is all about incentives. Businesses don’t want to expand, increase salaries, and hire more workers when there’s a heavy tax burden. People are going to spend less money when they have to pay higher taxes on income, property, and gas. Even with all the other pro-growth policies that have been passed, it is unlikely the state’s economic growth would have been as strong without the tax cuts.

Wisconsinites wants to keep more money in their pockets, so campaigning on tax increases remains very unpopular. Tony Evers didn’t seem to realize that in September when he said all options, including the gas tax, were “on the table” if he became governor. Walker and his allies pounced on the statement, releasing a series of new television ads hitting Evers on the tax increases.

The recent ad blitz has proved to be effective. The Marquette Law School poll in September revealed that Evers was leading Walker, 49 percent to 44 percent. This month’s poll showed that the governor is turning things around. Walker now has a narrow lead over Evers, 47 percent to 46 percent.

Since the poll was released, Evers has decided to reverse course. He announced a new campaign pledge to cut income taxes for the middle class by 10 percent. Whether he follows through with it is a different story. Evers and his campaign advisors understand calling for raising taxes would be massive blunder. That’s why the middle class tax cut is the only detail they’ve made public about his tax plan.

Even if Evers does cut taxes for the middle class, it will likely be swamped by a mountain of tax hikes that will return Wisconsin to the years of former Governor Jim Doyle. Evers has already made it clear tax credits for manufacturers and farmers will be reduced. These are the kinds of tax credits that brought companies like Foxconn into Wisconsin. It’s still unclear what’s going to happen to other taxes, but we can only expect them to go up with the $1.4 billion spending increase Evers wants.

Evers might think he has dodged a bullet on taxes by laying out a plan for one tax cut, but he has actually backed himself into a corner. While attempting to win over middle class voters, he is alienating farmers and manufacturers. Evers obviously wants to avoid discussion over any tax hikes because he knows they can sink his campaign. The more he runs away from the topic, the more vulnerable he appears.

Expect taxes to become a bigger issue as the election gets closer. Pressure is going to be on Evers to explain how taxes will change under him. Whatever he says, it’s important to remember two things. Walker has proven to be a tax cutter and will continue to do so if re-elected. Evers might say he wants to cut taxes too, but don’t be fooled. He and the members of his party will make the tax burden far worse than it is now. Every voter in Wisconsin should consider how their wallet will be affected if the Democrats take back power in November.

I estimated $4.5 billion in tax increases merely on schools if Evers is elected and his more stupid ideas get enacted into law with a pliant Democrat-run Legislature. Maybe I am short, though, because, as RightWisconsin reports …

Governor Scott Walker’s re-election campaign released a memo on Wednesday that claims his Democratic opponent, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, could raise taxes more than $7.2 Billion.

“While Evers refuses to tell taxpayers how much money he plans to take out of their pockets,” the memo said. “Even the most basic questions by media have revealed upwards of $7.2 billion in tax increases that are possible under his plans, based on proposals he has cited or the best examples available of the policies he’s pushing.”

The vast majority of the tax increases, $6.7 billion, would come from raising the gas tax by $1 per gallon. In August, Evers was asked about raising the gas tax by that amount.

“I would support looking at anything,” Evers said. “Whether it’s removing tax credits, whether it’s slimming down state government, whether it’s gas taxes. Everything is on the table.”

Evers has since backed away from the statement, accusing Republicans of making things up. However, Evers later told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “I have no range.”

“My answer has consistently been all issues (are) on the table, whether it’s cutting spending, whether it’s gas tax, tolls — whatever,” Evers said.

The Evers campaign did not respond to a request for a response to the Walker campaign memo.

In addition to raising the gas tax, the memo criticized Evers for supporting the repeal of the Manufacturing & Agriculture Tax Credit. Ostensibly to finance a “middle class tax cut” of a 10 percent reduction in the state income tax for those earning less than $100,000 annually, eliminating that credit would raise taxes by $590 million over two years. The tax shift would hurt family farms and manufacturers which in turn would reduce the economic opportunities for the middle class.

Evers has also supported removing the caps on spending by local school districts which would raise property taxes. While the memo noted that the cost of this tax increase “has infinite possibilities,” just one exemption to the cap for green energy projects cost taxpayers $217 million.

Dan O’Donnell:

To hear Democrats tell it, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is so anti-education that all his state budgets will fund are one-room schoolhouses full of barefoot children huddled around a single burning ember for warmth.

So carefully crafted a narrative is this fiction that Walker was predictably met with howls of derisive laughter when he called himself an “education governor” this past summer.

This week, he quite literally put his money where his mouth is.

“We’re going to fund two-thirds of school costs in our next state budget,” the Governor told News/Talk 1130 WISN’s Jay Weber, “and that’s really because we’ve had good fiscal management, positive reforms, plus a strong economy.”

The howls of derisive laughter have subsided into squirming disbelief.

“The things we did to help the people of this state create more jobs, higher wages, and just better opportunities have allowed us in this last budget to make the largest actual-dollar investment in schools in our state’s history,” he added, reiterating that in his next budget “we will be able to restore the two-thirds commitment made famous by former Gov. Tommy Thompson.”

All in all, not a bad few budgets for those one-room schoolhouses; and a closer look at both school funding and student performance in Wisconsin reveals Walker’s governorship to have in fact created something of a golden era of education.

His most recent budget—which added $636 million in new funding on top of the staggering $10.5 billion in existing state money earmarked for education—was hailed as “an important step forward” and “a pro-kid budget”…by none other than State Superintendent Tony Evers.

Gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers is naturally singing a different tune (even going so far as to repeat the noxious lie that Walker has somehow stolen $1 billion from schoolchildren), but when Walker’s budget proposal was released in early 2017, Evers noted that it included the same priorities as his own budget request and that “overall, his definition of ‘significant’ [funding increases] and mine are really close.”

Those significant increases included proposals to more than double and then triple the $250 per-student average that schools received from the state—raising funding levels to $450 per pupil in the 2017-2018 schoolyear and to $654 per pupil in 2018-2019.

This is a far cry from the last biennial budget of his predecessor, Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. Faced with massive budget deficits, he ended Thompson’s two-thirds funding tradition and cut education spending by $284 million (while simultaneously raising the tax burden on Wisconsinites by nearly $2 billion).

This cut in education funding didn’t look quite as bad, however, in light of a one-time influx of $717 million in federal stimulus money. When this is factored in, total education spending from the state and federal governments hit $5.26 billion in the 2010-2011 fiscal year. Without it, education spending would have been $4.54 billion.

That, believe it or not, is significantly less than the $4.85 billion earmarked for education in the first fiscal year of Gov. Walker’s first budget. In the second year of that budget, education spending rose to $4.91 billion—roughly $400 million more than Gov. Doyle had spent if the one-time federal stimulus grant is removed.

While Doyle essentially got lucky that his education cuts were masked by a gift from the federal government, Walker took matters into Wisconsin’s own hands by recognizing that the single biggest drag on getting money from the state into the classroom was excessive spending on lavish teacher and school administrator benefits.

His 2011 budget repair bill was in that sense a remarkable bit of foresight. Walker knew—as any reasonable person should—that reliance on federal largesse to make up for wasteful state spending is no way to run a government, and through the bill now known as Act 10, he gave individual school districts the flexibility to better control their own budgets. Essentially, Act 10 was an acknowledgement that reliance on state largesse to make up for wasteful district spending is no way to run a school system.

In the eight years since Act 10 was signed into law, school districts have flourished. The Department of Administration estimates that this newfound budget flexibility has saved them a whopping $3.2 billion—an average of about $400 million per year.

That, incidentally, almost totally covers the initial cut of $426.5 million in state aid that Governor Walker was forced to make…a cut that Democrats are still hammering him for even though he has increased the amount of money the state spends on education in every succeeding year.

And despite Democrats’ ridiculous insistence that student performance would suffer if the state no longer shouldered nearly the entire burden of teachers’ insurance costs, statewide graduation rates have steadily risen, from 87 percent in 2011 to 88.6 percent last year.

Last year, incidentally, also saw the single largest state expenditure in education in Wisconsin’s history at $5.58 billion. In the 2018-2019 fiscal year it’s another record at $5.84 billion on top of the $400 million individual school districts can expect to save because of Walker’s Act 10 reforms.

By giving districts that financial flexibility and also pumping more state money into their coffers, while simultaneously holding the line on state taxes through what Walker calls the “prosperity dividend” of his restoration of fiscal sanity in Wisconsin, the state’s education budget is healthier than ever…and it no longer needs to rely on federal handouts.