Gov. Walker signs $70 billion budget
By Tyler Lamb
Editor
Gov. Scott Walker signed a two-year, $70 billion state budget Sunday after making several dozen vetoes to it.
The budget, approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature, includes all of the governor’s priorities, including expansion of private school vouchers, a $650 million tax cut and rejection of federal Medicaid expansion.
“The new state budget is a solid budget with the right priorities for Wisconsin,” said Rep. Robin Vos, speaker of the state Assembly. “It gives middle-class taxpayers much-needed relief with their income taxes while keeping their property taxes down. We also increased funding for public schools and invested in our communities, infrastructure and tourism.”
Walker signed the budget in Pleasant Prairie, on the border with Illinois, where he favorably compared Wisconsin with its neighbor to the south.
Walker made 57 changes to the budget using a veto power, which grants him the ability to cut words from sentences to alter their meaning and remove individual digits to create new numbers. Most of the vetoes to the spending plan are technical in nature.
However, the governor did veto a provision that would have allowed bounty hunters in Wisconsin. Bounty hunters have not been permitted in the state since 1979. Walker vetoed similar bounty hunter legislation last year.
Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen publically stated his approval for vetoing the bounty hunter program, which garnered strong opposition from law enforcement officials.
The governor also vetoed a provision that would have kicked the independent Center for Investigative Journalism off of the University of Wisconsin campus and barred it from working with university professors.
“There’s a lot of hype about a veto here and a veto there,” Walker said. “They’re a tiny fraction of this entire budget. What the state Assembly and state Senate passed is so finely aligned with what I’m signing here today – it’s important to focus on that.”
The budget rejects the federal Medicaid expansion, and reduces income eligibility for the program in Wisconsin to the federal poverty level. It also removes caps on enrollment.
“Going forward, everyone living in poverty in this state will have access to health care,” Walker said.
Republican legislative leaders present at the signing downplayed the governor’s vetoes, saying the most important budgetary items remained.
One of those provisions, the income tax cut, would cut the average family’s taxes by $152 next year, according to Walker.
Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) described the budget as one that “fails the middle class.”
“Gov. Walker’s extreme budget fails the middle class and will continue to take Wisconsin down the wrong path,” he said. “Despite numerous opportunities to improve this budget, the governor and Republican legislators actually kept making it worse for public schools, property taxpayers and people who count on basic services.”
The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau said the budget plan would create a $505 million shortfall going into the 2015-17 biennium, assuming state tax revenues and expenditures don’t change. Such a shortfall is commonly referred to as the state’s structural deficit, according to the bureau.
