Sign the Damn Budget

Tony Evers has put himself into a corner.

This is his third budget process and it has produced the best one so far from his perspective. The budget includes a billion dollars more for education, not as much as he proposed, but a big increase for his top priority. It also includes an historic change in how local governments get help from the state for police, fire and other basic services. That aid program would now be tied to a portion of the state’s sales tax, guaranteeing that it would increase each year after it had been frozen for decades. There is also a much needed increase in wages for prosecutors and public defenders and new money for smaller programs that Evers supports.

On the other hand, he didn’t get a lot of what he proposed, like legalizing recreational marijuana for example, but those things never had any chance of getting by the Republicans. Evers puts them in his budgets simply to lay down a marker or to placate a liberal interest group here or there.

Evers got himself into a corner by threatening to veto the entire budget over $32 million in the UW budget — out of a $99 billion total state spending plan. The issue is diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI programs have become a hot button culture wars issue. Vos insisted the money be cut and the UW shut down these programs. The specific language allows the UW to come back to the legislature to get the money back, but only if they can show that it would be redirected to workforce development programs. That’s ironic since the Republicans cut the biggest piece of workforce development in the budget — the UW’s new engineering building.

Republicans are playing culture wars games with DEI, but on the other hand these programs haven’t done much good either. The percentage of Black students on the UW Madison campus is little better than it was 30 years ago. I don’t think Vos was wrong to raise the issue, but I do think he was wrong to just take an axe to the programs. Better to have a Legislative Audit Bureau study to get clear on what these varied programs actually do and then proceed in a more orderly, informed way.

In any event, for his part, this wasn’t worth a veto threat out of Evers. And if he did veto the budget over this the public would be overwhelmingly with Vos on this question.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good reasons for a veto. The Republican tax cut moves us closer to a less fair flat tax. It would deliver less than $700 for those of us making between $100,000 and $125,000 while those making over a million dollars would get more than $30,000. Now, if Evers were to veto the budget over that I could get behind him and the public might as well.

But Evers has already signed two budgets that delivered disproportionate benefits to the rich, so why would he veto this one that just does more of the same?

Evers hoped Vos would back off, but he didn’t. Vos will send him a budget this week which includes the UW cut. So, now what does Evers do? If he vetoes it he’ll incur the wrath of the public, which mostly doesn’t care about this DEI issue. If he doesn’t veto it he’ll incur the wrath of liberal identity politics activists. What’s worse, he’ll further weaken himself vis a vis Vos. It’s not quite like Putin and Prigozhin, but it’s a lighter version of that. Okay, a much lighter version of that.

Tony Evers should have vetoed the first budget back in 2019. He could have held out for at least two things that, unlike DEI, were worth the fight: a nonpartisan redistricting commission and taking the federal Medicaid money. Each of those issues had about 70% support among voters and they were backed by every editorial board in the state.

When he didn’t veto that budget he missed his only real chance to gain an equal footing with Vos. Now he’s finally got a budget where his top priority — spending on education — has been at least partially achieved. It’d be senseless to trash the whole thing over a small slice of the budget spent on programs of questionable value.