How did Wisconsin get to ranking in the top five in state and local taxes in the nation, while the state’s per capita income ranks around 25th?

Disrespect from the political class for the taxpayer, as demonstrated by Media Trackers:

On a per capita basis, Wisconsin taxpayers are paying more in property taxes now than they did just over 20 years ago. Numbers from the state Department of Revenue, and first touted by the office of state Rep. Michael Schraa (R), show that per capita property taxes were higher in 2010 than they were in 1990, even when adjusted for inflation. Property taxes as measured by revenues and tax bills had trended upwards under previous governors before a property tax freeze was implemented in Governor Walker’s first budget.

Walker has insisted that his second biannual budget, which is being debated by the legislature, must include an extension of the property tax freeze. Because the measure also ties in with Walker’s move to control overall public school spending, some lawmakers, particularly in the Senate, have expressed concern over plans to potentially reduce the percentage – and possibly amount – of revenue coming into local government through property taxes.

Republican Senator Luther Olsen has indicated that believes schools should get more money because many of them are strapped for cash. Asked by Gannett Wisconsin Media about what he plans to do about school funding, Olsen promised to “die trying” to secure more money for schools through changes in the state budget.

“If you look at the governor’s budget, the money he does give to schools is property tax relief,” Olsen complained. Schools just “can’t handle that,” the 62 year-old concluded in his Gannett interview.

So is property tax relief an unnecessary endeavor because the state is not generating enough revenue from property taxes?

Some of the more accessible property tax data is available in 5-year increments, making a study of property tax trends between 1990 and 2010 a reasonable way to study overall property tax revenues.

In 1990, the total value of the Wisconsin property tax base was $141.4 billion, and property taxpayers paid $4.07 billion in property taxes for that tax year. In 2010, the value of the property tax base had grown to $495.9 billion and taxpayers paid $9.34 billion in taxes.

Wisconsin’s population saw a significant increase over that same time period. It is possible to look at the per capita rate of property taxation and index it for inflation to see how the per capita property tax burden has fared in that two decade span. Not everyone in Wisconsin pays property taxes, but property taxes impact living costs and indirectly or directly affect every resident in the state.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Wisconsin’s population in 1990 was 4,891,769. In 2010, Wisconsin’s population was 5,686,986. That means that in 1990 the per capita property tax paid was $831.73. By 2010, the per capita property tax paid had risen to $1,642.83. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, the 1990 per capita tax would have been $1,387.63 in 2010 when adjusted for inflation.

The difference in inflation-adjusted 1990 per capita property tax payments and per capita property taxes in 2010 is $255.20, or a total of $1.45 billion when multiplied out across the state’s 2010 population.

Except for those living in facilities exempt from property taxes — prisoners, residents of mental institutions and college residential students come to mind — everyone pays property taxes, either directly in the case of homeowners, or indirectly in the case of renters. When adjusted for inflation, your property taxes, whether you pay directly or indirectly, increased by 18 percent from 1990 to 2010. Have the quality of state and local governmental services improved by 18 percent in the past two decades? (A suggestion that government services have deteriorated by at least that much is more likely to be accurate.) Other than gasoline (whose price has nearly tripled since 1990), has the price of anything you buy increased by nearly one-fifth without any improvement in features or quality at all in the past two decades? This comes in a state near the bottom in personal income growth over those two decades (and longer).

(Note: The numbers in the above paragraph were corrected by an alert reader. Remember, journalism is the opposite of math.)

Media Trackers goes on to say that “A variety of factors contribute to rising property values and changes in local property tax rates.” One of them is the lack of state and local spending and tax controls in the state Constitution. Unlike in most states, the only thing that restricts spending or taxes is the whim of the Legislature and local politicians. Gov. Tommy Thompson enacted the Qualified Economic Offer law to restrict teacher salary increases. Gov. James Doyle got rid of it. Thompson also enacted the school district revenue caps, but the Legislature can change that.

Some Republican legislators are proposing taking technical colleges off property taxes and increasing the state sales tax from 5 percent to 6 percent to fund technical colleges. This has been proposed before, and this is not necessarily a bad idea. (Though it really needs to be discussed separately from the state budget process.) Given the fact, however,  that every single initiative to reduce property taxes — in rough chronological order, instituting the income tax, instituting a 3-percent sales tax, increasing the sales tax to 4 percent, increasing the sales tax to 5 percent, and allowing counties to institute a 0.5-percent sales tax — has failed to reduce property taxes, you can guess how likely this proposal is to reduce property taxes.

Media  Trackers adds:

When President Barack Obama declared, “We don’t have a spending problem,” earlier this year, conservatives mocked him. “The United States has a revenue problem. Taxes at all levels of government are too low,” wrote two far-left progressive policy analysts in The American Prospect in 2012. Conservatives insist that the proper way to view the problem is as a spending problem because government expenditures are creating a perceived need for more revenue when in fact, tax collections are up.

Freezing property taxes slows the rise in per capita property tax revenues. Because property values can and are rising coming out of the housing slump, as the MacIver Institute has pointed out, property tax revenues will not stay stagnant. But under Walker’s plan, neither will they rapidly outpace inflation with property owners seen as a sort of magical ATM machine for local governments looking for more revenue. …

The problem is that if property taxpayers are protected only by Walker’s freeze, what happens when Walker is no longer governor? The 1990–2010 period had, remember, Republican Thompson and Democrat Doyle, along with Republican, Democratic and split control of the Legislature. Little happened to protect property taxpayers in the former governor’s term, and nothing happened to protect taxpayers, period, in the latter governor’s term.

If Republicans were serious about tax relief, they would introduce a Taxpayer Bill of Rights mechanism — in the state Constitution, not merely in state law that can be overturned by less taxpayer-friendly politicians — that (1) strictly limited growth in spending to some combination of  inflation and population growth, and (2) required voter approval for tax increases. I notice no such proposal in this Legislature or from this governor.

A group of first-term Democratic legislators is pushing for something guaranteed to not happen in this session of the Legislature — redistricting reform, reports WSAU.com:

Representative Mandy Wright from Wausau says the current law allowing the majority party in the Assembly and state Senate to redraw the political boundaries every ten years is flawed. “We would like to stop the finger pointing and stop the color game, and make sure that redistricting is handed over to a non-partisan agency that can objectively draw the district lines.”

Wright says the non-partisan Legislative Reference Bureau would be a good candidate to put the board together.

Iowa established more than three decades ago a non-partisan body to redraw the political lines. Wright says the Iowa model will help to reduce political bickering and save money. “To date, we have spent two million taxpayer dollars on redistricting, on the redistricting session that most recently happened. The bill that we’re proposing in Iowa cost the state approximately one thousand dollars.”

Wright says the likely outcome would be a voting district which more closely reflects the population. She says it’s likely to lead to less bickering between the parties.

Reform, however the proponents define it, is one of the oldest political themes. This country is the result of radical reform of how British colonies were governed. The Republican Party owes its existence to the desire to reform race relations by eliminating slavery. Wisconsin politics today was shaped, for better or worse, by the Progressive movement more than 100 years ago.

Today, and probably well before today, reform has been proposed first by those on the political outside. And in the dictatorship of the majority that is the state Assembly, no one is more outside than first-term representatives from the minority party. That’s not a judgment of the merits of their proposal; that is political reality. Given that the first and most important goal of a politician is to stay in office, when Democrats eventually regain control of the Assembly, this proposal to reform redistricting has at least a 50–50 chance to slip their minds.

To be potentially unfair to Wright and the other first-term Democrats, who theoretically had nothing to do with this, while their party controlled the Legislature, one year before the 2010 Census, redistricting reform was nowhere to be found on Democrats’ agenda, and for an obvious reason — Democrats wanted the ability to draw the maps themselves after the 2010 Census and 2010 election.

I support redistricting reform because of which party the redistricting process benefits — not the Republican Party or Democratic Party, whichever is in power in a Legislature in a year ending with the number one, but the incumbent party, which is always in power. Given the reelection rate of incumbents in an era when trust is in our elected officials is at an all-time low, the process obviously favors the incumbents.

In fact, I support many political reforms, although the reforms I support aren’t necessarily the same that Wright and her fellow freshman Democrats support. Dave Zweifel, editor emeritus of The Capital Times, may have supported returning to a part-time Legislature when Democrats controlled the Legislature, but I highly doubt it. Nevertheless, Zweifel is right, but in addition the state should be employing half or fewer the number of staffers of legislators the state currently employs.

Gov. Scott Walker claims, as did his predecessors, that the state budget is balanced. State law requires the budget be balanced, but only on a cash basis, not upon Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which (1) is more appropriate for an enterprise that spends $35 billion a year, and (2) is what the state requires of every other municipality.

Wisconsin has the fifth highest state and local taxes in the nation, and has been in the top 10 every year for the past three decades. One reason is that the state constitution includes no limits on taxing or spending for state government or any other unit of government other than the uniformity clause. Having limits on spending and/or taxes would force fiscal responsibility on Democrats and Republicans of any amount of legislative experience.

Redistricting reform, GAAP budget balancing, and restrictions on spending and taxation need to be part of the state Constitution. All of those initiatives can be classified as protections of citizens from government, whether that’s government taking too much of their money, or legislators creating for themselves or their parties lifetime roles as state legislators.

The U.S. Constitution, you see, is a document full of what the federal government cannot do to its citizens. The Wisconsin Constitution contains similar restrictions on government (in the case of gun ownership rights, the Wisconsin Constitution is superior to the U.S. Constitution). You’d never know that, though, from looking at not merely levels of taxation in this state, but from looking at what  government does that government should not be doing.

I’d suggest the first-term Democrats in the Legislature — for that matter, every legislator, present and future — commit to memory article 1, section 22 of the state Constitution: “The blessings of a free government can only be maintained by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”