 Before we get into our speaker, let me give you a couple of announcements that are important. Some of these are at your table. Everybody has at your table probably this brochure on deep dive. There's a new deep dive class or program starting, so if you're interested, look at that brochure. This has been a hugely successful effort. I think this might be the fourth iteration of the deep dive, so it's really taken off. Also, at your tables, you'll see the announcements on the various focal points that are coming up, so I won't go over all those except any focal point is until where can I find the money. It must be interesting, so that probably will get a lot of attention. The first Friday forms that are coming up, in June we're going to have the three CEOs of the local secondary educational facilities, Lakeland College, LTC, and UW-Shabuigan. We're going to come here to talk about what each of their facilities are doing to prepare our workforce for tomorrow and today. I think you're going to see there's a lot of interesting things happening, probably things that you didn't even realize were happening and changing, so that's a good program. In July we take the month off. We come back in August and we've invited Senator Johnson to come here and speak, and they've tentatively approved it, although with any public officials, especially at that level, something can happen and their schedule gets changed and they have to cancel. That's our goal for August and then in September we've confirmed re-haul of the new Secretary of the CEO of Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. That should be very interesting and by that time you'll have had three or four months in office and can tell us how he's dealing with all the challenges facing their office. You also have a brochure on the safety conference that's coming up, and I would encourage you to look at that brochure. It's a good program, a good conference. Also at your tables, there's a little postcard on making their mark. There's a little postcard there. Well then, this was a timely announcement. All of you, I think, are probably aware of cultural connections. It's the Young Professionals Organization, and they've instituted this program every year where they acknowledge 10 young professionals who are making a difference in the community, and this is their annual awards banquet, and that takes place on Tuesday, May 14 from 5.30 to 7.30. So if you're interested, you can go to the Chamber website and you can sign up at the Chamber website for this program, but that'll be a good program. And then finally, before I kind of get close to announcing our speaker today, there's also the Leadership Institute that the Chamber has been running every year for 25 years, and they're looking for candidates for at the time where we take candidates. So in your businesses, if you have someone you'd like to have participate in this program, it's a great program, everybody who's gone through it really enjoys it, so we encourage you to look at that and either yourself or someone in your business participate. A couple of other announcements I'd like to make. I think all of you know that our committee has been working, the advocacy committee has been working on the fact that Sheboyga County is a non-attainment zone for the only county that's non-attainment in the whole state of Wisconsin. Half of Kenosha County is non-attainment. Really unfair, grossly unfair, defies common sense, but to change it is difficult, and we're starting to work on that. We had a meeting about a month ago or so with almost of federal officials and DNR and EPA, and we decided one of the things we're going to try to do early on is see whether we can file an application. We being, that's be determined, might be to the county because that file an application with the EPA to at least have a portion of Sheboyga County taken out of this non-attainment. And we had to have the DNR prepared for detailed information. They have now completed that and we're looking to look at the final application and get that approved and hopefully within 30 days we'll be able to submit that and at least see whether we can get half of the county or a portion of the county accepted out from this ridiculous non-attainment set that's been given to us. So we haven't given up on getting the whole county out. That's going to take a little larger effort than there's other efforts going in their way to do that. So that just brings you up to speed a little bit on what we're doing there. And then the last thing, our committee, if any of you are just enjoying having this committee, that's the committee that organized our first party forum that's working on this non-attainment. We encourage you to join our committee. In the last couple of months we've had two new members join us, Dan Plopper and Kelly Bell. So we welcome them and we encourage anybody else to join our committee and help us conduct some of these efforts. Thank you for that, everybody, that introduced our speaker. Our speaker today is someone who we've had on sort of on an annual basis. Always give us a good update and good program. And Todd Barry is with the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. And the purpose or the mission of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance is to help the public, help the public and press understand how Wisconsin government work, government's work, tax and spend for informed citizens can promote responsible policy making. And Todd himself has been, he has been president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance since 1994. His experience spans the public, private and non-profit sectors. And in the late 1970s and early 1980s he was assistant secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Revenue and he was executive director of the governor's tax return reform commission. From 1983 to 19, this is really small. He was a marketing executive with one of Wisconsin's oldest family firms. And Todd served as a member of the non-partisan incoming board, the Jefferson School Board and CISA number two board of patrol. And he's also served 14 years on the North Central College Board of Trustees. I think with that, I'll introduce Todd to give his sort of annual updates to us on how Wisconsin governments work and how we should feel about Wisconsin government. It's good to be back and it's a good thing. I'm getting to even know names here, so I have to come back. I'll try to put at least some amount of humor into it, but it's sort of dry boring stuff. What's going on with the economy and say government in particular. Obviously this talk is about Wisconsin. The reason I have Dorothy and Todor out here is sort of the metaphor I have used is to suggest that Wisconsin really needs to have a crossroad. We don't know whether we're at Kansas or Wisconsin or as I posited here whether we're going to need more Oz, Wisconsin or Wiss, Wisconsin. That's okay. I sort of look at the last 10 years as it's been more Oz-like than anything at times. So that's sort of the theme here. Where are we now? We do seem to be at some kind of crossroads and what kind of decisions might we make going forward? What kind of choices do we have? And just to briefly outline what I'm going to talk about. There's the theme. Are we going to be more like Wisconsin and be grounded in reality or more like Oz, Wisconsin and return to fantasy? I want to talk just very briefly about sort of some backdrops to the state government a little bit about Washington and the pheromone about the economy. A really quick run through some ancient history that I shared with you in the past talked about the current state budget and some sticking points. When you have one party in control and it doesn't matter whether it's Democrats or Republicans what you find is suddenly the happy family has issues. And you will see that start to emerge and it already has. And then sort of close with some questions. At your table there's a copy of our monthly magazine. One was sort of a blue box up in the corner. And that one is on school enrollment kinds of options and choices of Wisconsin which is an issue with this budget. This doesn't take a stand and just sort of reviews how we got there. And then inside there are two of our bi-weekly newsletters that cover some of the material I'm going to talk about here. And then there's also one there that's just a brochure that's about us. And there are a number of Shibuya area individuals with firms and foundations that support our work but if you don't want to the brochure comes you have to do that too. So to get started Wisconsin has been flowing to it from Washington even though we tend to rank low compared to other states it's a fair amount of money and this is going to be one of the things the legislature is going to be struggling with in this new state budget is what do we do with all the federal Medicaid money with the advent of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. The reason people are somewhat uncertain is this picture and that is the federal debt has been around 35, 40, 50% of the output of the country up until fairly recently and now it's up in the 70% range and the forecasts within the last year were that by 2030, 20, 40 it was going to get up there. I mean we were going to be pushing 200% of the national output and if that happens and I'm not going to read this whole thing to you but the Congressional Budget Office did a really interesting report two or three years ago when it basically said if things get this bad nobody's going to buy U.S. bonds and when nobody buys U.S. bonds from a government that is borrowing to run itself you've got problems and you get the bond market collapsing and interest rates rising and inflation accelerating and if you thought the 2007, 2009 recession looked bad that would be far worse. So this is the backdrop and why people are a little bit nervous in state government about what's going on in Washington. A little bit about the state economy this summarizes more or less the past decade in terms of our growth, our output per person GDP compared to other states and a lot of numbers but the yellow shows Wisconsin and what it says is we ranked 22nd in the country at the beginning of the decade and 29th at the end and what that circle says is we grew, our growth rate was 35th in the country so the last decade was sort of a modestly slow one for us if you're wondering what one secret to success is just jump down a couple lines there to the corner of the table with the box where there's a one that's North Dakota fastest-growing state in the country over the past decade and you can spell it OIL. Another way to look at the Wisconsin economy is just jobs. There are a lot of partisans in Madison that flap their guns over this and frankly they all get it wrong but I'll come back to that in a minute. One thing that I think we need to understand as the partisans go at each other over what's happening with employment in Wisconsin is to realize that the story goes back a long ways. It goes back into the mid to late 80s and the red line is Wisconsin, the blue is the U.S. and what this shows is that up into the 90s, well into the 90s Wisconsin was outperforming the U.S. in terms of monthly employment growth every single month for 87 consecutive months into the 90s and through the 90s we were more or less matching them we were outpacing them about 35% of the time but the last decade you can see that red line isn't doing quite as well so this slowing of job growth in Wisconsin is not a new event and in fact if you look at all those lines going up and down the peaks you can see the peaks are getting smaller and that means both nationally and in Wisconsin monthly employment growth isn't bouncing the way it did say 20, 30 years ago. I did mention the partisan wrangling that goes on. To be honest there are multiple ways to look at employment and depending on where you're sitting on which side of the partisan aisle you'll pick and choose the numbers you want to use to make the point you want to make and both sides do it and I would argue they're both sort of wrong and also that neither of them really totally get employment and employment creation and I think this quote and I may have shared it with you in the past from the Klothman Foundation is really pretty telling. They study entrepreneurial activity and what they're saying is in the last 30 years and that in this country all are virtually all jobs have been created by relatively new firms, startups and so rather than all the political rhetoric we hear from both sides of the aisle what we need is a pretty sane mature discussion about firm creation because we don't do that very well and I'm going to share some numbers with you and try to tell you a little bit of what's behind these job numbers. One thing is just population. Wisconsin is an older state. It's not growing as fast as the rest of the country. You can see over the past decade our population growth was something like two-thirds of what the country was and you can see it that red part is flattening and we don't need to look very far around our own communities to get that because two-thirds of the school districts in Wisconsin are losing enrollment in any one year and the reason that's so significant is if you have a fairly stagnant student population eventually you're going to have a fairly stagnant labor pool and that is what's coming in Wisconsin is fairly stagnant labor pool in terms of size. That's important because what the baby boomers did of course was there were a lot of them, they got married, they had kids, they bought houses, they bought cars, they bought refrigerators, they bought, bought, bought and there was a lot of income and sales tax revenue generated from that so it's a little bit different economy coming than in the past. Here are the firm creation rates. Wisconsin over the last 20 years we were ranked in the bottom 10 states on the left, the good news is on the right and I think this reflects in part some of the heritage and ethnicity of the state certainly the German-Dutch kind of character of this part of the state and that is we may be a little conservative with our money in terms of putting it at risk to start new firms but when we do we work our tails off and what these figures also show is that Wisconsin does a better job of keeping young firms alive than the rest of the country. So that's sort of the economic backdrop to all this. Obviously if the economy isn't growing quite as fast the tax revenues aren't going to grow quite as fast. During the 90s and those of you that have heard me speak know that this story, during the 90s Wisconsin economy was really performing at a pretty good clip we were cranking out tax revenues and frankly we got a little bit ahead of ourselves. We committed ourselves both in terms of tax law changes and spending changes that created problems when the recession came in 2001 and so we spent the net after a year of sort of boom and partying then we spent the next 10 years in state government playing all sorts of games and tricks to try to balance the budget or make it look that way. So two years ago at this time we were inheriting let's call it a $3 billion surplus. Part of that was just due to having to fill a bunch of temporary holes from the prior budget and part of it was due to the fact that the federal government had been backfilling Medicaid programs across the country with federal stimulus money. When that money went away Wisconsin had to put money into Medicaid and they ended up putting over a billion dollars of new money into Medicaid in this budget. So that last budget was a really pretty painful one. The way I like to describe the last 10 years and the whole digging there is the metaphor is really what we did to balance the budget at least on paper is we had a hole so we dug a new hole and took the dirt from the new hole and put it in the old hole and said we balanced the budget and then we had a new hole so the next budget came along we dug a hole we took the dirt from that hole and put it in the hole we already had and we kept doing that. Things are a little different now. Going into the state budget that will pass in the next month or two for the next two years we don't have that carryover of IOUs or past sins that's good. The forecasts are that the state may run a surplus of something close to a half billion dollars by summer whenever you say surplus in medicine it doesn't matter which side of the aisle they all lose it. They all have ideas for it and of course I've spent the last 10 years saying would you guys just sort of sit down and fold your hands and shut up for a while and have a little bit of money around so you don't lurch from crisis to crisis but I think as you'll see we probably are going to lurch from crisis to crisis. So the question now with the state budget is we've done all this pretty hard lifting the last two years the fiscal situation is a little bit better are we going to build on that or are we going to forget the last 10 years and go right back there. Now so to look at the new budget the tax revenues aren't exactly setting the world on fire what these blue bars show is the state tax revenue growth year by year over a long period of time and all you need to see is that the blue bars on the left are higher than the blue bars on the right and you know three or four percent revenue growth for the state in this period of time is less than half of what we were seeing in the 90s so it's not like we're setting the world on fire. In terms of spending the line is the amount the state will spend from its general fund every year and the two points at this side show what the governor's proposed so by mid-2015 about 15 plus billion a year if you look at the bars on the bottom there that just shows how much the spending was growing on average and you can see all that vibration in the middle but on either side the conclusion is pretty much the same given how fast the economy was growing the state would increase its spending about three plus percent a year and sure enough that's what's proposed in this budget the one thing that's different about this budget though there's the amount of spending that's going up $730 million the thing that's different about it is how narrow the new money is being spread around and so here are the main things that are getting new money and you'll see that most of those bars are pretty small shared revenue over there on the right is state money that goes to localities and counties and municipalities and that's really not going up and hasn't gone up for a long time the bars that are going up are the health service bar which is Medicaid and the public instruction bar which is various kinds of money for K-12 education when you put those two together you get over $700 million which is what spending is going up in this budget in other words all the new money is going to two places Medicaid, just as it ate the last budget is coming close to eating this one now when you put the money and the spending together of course you know whether you were running a surplus or a deficit by law we have to at least on paper say we have a surplus and that's a history of those going back over the last decade and the bottom line is on the left side those numbers are all pretty small in terms of millions of dollars what those two circled numbers say is that in terms of what we spend per year we had reserves of only about a half of one percent that is really low how low? lower than any state in the country going into the last recession except Arkansas one of the things that raises questions about whether we're moving forward with sort of a frugal Wisconsin approach to budgeting or whether we're going to return to the land of Oz is those bars on the right are getting smaller in other words the state would be drawing down its surplus again over the next two years to the point where relative to what it spends we'd be about in 2015 where we were in 2008 which should give us some pause this is the state and through this whole period we've been running deficits on our financial statements and I have a better picture of that later let's just talk about a few of the things that legislators will be debating in the coming few weeks and sometimes they'll agree with the executive branch and sometimes they won't one that I know concerns some legislators is the amount of borrowing that the governor's proposing it's over two billion dollars of new borrowing and the reason for some concern is that those bars have been continually going up are we debt-ridden like the federal government? no do we need to pay attention to this a little bit more than the past? yeah I mean if you're borrowing two and a half three times more than you did ten years ago it's probably time to look about half of that money by the way is for transportation and much of that would go to southeast Wisconsin the other way this is the IOUs and this is an old favorite of mine I know you've seen it this is the state's structural deficits or these tricks in any budget that get inherited and carried over to the next and going way back into the 90s we would put on the charge card over a half a billion dollars going into every new budget and that got up to 1.4 billion dollars two years ago at this time the good news where that arrow is pointing on the right is there is no structural deficit at the moment the problem is that the proposed budget might return us in that direction now is 300 plus million dollars a lot of money compared to the past? no but if we worked so hard and with such political pain to sort of get things back and even kill I think some folks are stopping and wondering whether we should be a little cautious another sticking point are these what are called gap deficits the deficit says an accountant would see them on the financial statements I've shared this with you many times the bad news was that over the last decade those numbers just kept getting worse the good news is last year they improved by about 7-800 million dollars and they're going to improve again going into the summer so the gap deficit will be the smallest it's been really in a number of years that's that bar that's coming down the problem is that this budget would start moving those numbers in the wrong direction again would they be as bad as 3 billion? no but they're not getting smaller they're getting a little larger another sticking point in the budget is what to do about taxes it's always the governor's proposing a tax cut of about 170 million dollars a year on the state income tax accomplished by cutting the bottom three tax rates and everybody in Madison has a different opinion on this some people think the tax cut is too small some people think it's too large and that we should maybe hang on to that some of that money as a cushion against the next recession some people say well maybe instead of the income tax we should look at cutting the property tax and some people remember the 2009 budget when the state increased the top income tax rate and are wondering whether maybe we should pull that down so there's all sorts of different ideas my concern I sort of let them debate but my one concern is that I think whatever we do looks like it's going to be a missed opportunity because the problem with the Wisconsin state income tax is that it's a mess and the legislature and governors passed for the last 15 years have really been sort of junking it up with a lot of stuff that nobody uses the instructions and forms have gotten 25% larger the differences with federal law have tripled on and on and on so I wish they would have used this opportunity to take some of that money to clean up and streamline the income tax because I think if you stop and think about it you could make an argument that tax law is probably the most difficult law that people face in businesses or in their own lives in terms of regulation so if you care about regulation you would want a fairly simple income tax there are a couple of people in the assembly that are talking about that including Bill Markline's dad and so I think we're going to see more on that another sticking point is school finance we have a little new money we're putting some into school finance where should it go is the big debate just some key facts to know school aides remain the biggest part of the state budget Medicaid however is growing the fastest it's also for the typical school district their largest share of revenue larger than the property tax because the state has had budget problems for a number of years it used to be that the state school aid appropriation would go up at a fairly good clip every year and for the last 10 years the increases have been going like this and in the 2009 budget Governor Doyle cut school aides in the 2011 budget Governor Walker cut school aides and combine that with the revenue limit law which even if you increase school aides the revenue limit in the last couple of years has said you can't spend the money revenue limits are a real problem particularly in the rural declining enrollment in Wisconsin and we found that there were about 50 school districts out of 425 in the state whose actual revenues in today's dollars are less than they were 10 years ago I mean think about that in terms of your business that means they pretty much been flat for a very long time the politics of this if you look at the gray shapes there two thirds of those school districts are in Republican Senators district and that's why you see a lot of Republican Senators saying I think we need to talk about this and maybe tweak what the Governor wants to do the other Republican Senate districts are in gray, light gray and some of those by the way have some declining enrollment districts so to wrap it up it's sort of a question of are we sort of going to be careful and be characteristically cautious conservative Wisconsin or are we going to forget where we had been the last 10 years and sort of go back to the land of Oz in terms of the way we did our finances what people tend to forget is that the land of Oz had consequences like state bond ratings dropping 10 years ago and never rising and in the last four to six years some really hard spending cuts and some pretty big tax increases so regardless of your political philosophy our mischief made a lot of people unhappy questions how soon do we want to use our surplus and how do we want to use it a sort of instant or delayed gratification some people would like to use it to increase spending others to cut taxes others to maintain a reserve so that's one common question another is just whether we're going to respect the integrity of these funds we have in Wisconsin and why that I mean there's a big general fund and then there's a transportation fund we spent the last 10 years rating the transportation fund and borrowing money to do transportation projects so the transportation fund is not in very good shape and we pretty much we're dishonest with the public when we said you pay gas taxes for your car use we're going to take those gas taxes and we're going to maintain roads we took the money to balance the state budget so whether we're going to put the firewall between those two things again is a question Governor Doyle spent a lot of time moving the money from the transportation fund to the general fund Governor Walker is now moving money from the transportation fund to the transportation fund and I would say that maybe both have some reason for concern we talked about debt already and that is whether to the degree that you're building roads or buildings do you try to do as much of it as you can on a pay as you go basis or are we going to return to an era of increased borrowing and then finally are we really solving any problems or are we just kicking them down the road we've had about 10 years of a lot of kicking down the road the state really needs to have some discussions about how to clean up and streamline its tax system so it's friendlier to people and businesses it needs to find a way to pay for transportation because we don't have a system that does it so what we've been doing is borrowing and that'll come back to haunt us and we really haven't finished having the discussion about how we're going to pay for higher ed in this state all sorts of issues of tuition levels financial aid levels and how much the legislature should micromanage the university or the university should be able to make its own decisions and there's a lot of suspicion on both sides of that one so that's sort of where I'm at there's Toto Dorothy has skipped out Toto's exhausted from all the numbers charts graphs and is not only bored he fell asleep but I'd be happy to answer any questions if we have any time or if you think I said something that's just totally off the wall tell me I'm totally wet I'm about to be a systems sitting on a surplus my underlying understanding is that that's another kind of off balance sheet set of books or it's not part of the state budget so what I'm reading is that they were afraid that somebody was going to cut their income stream so they started talking in a way not telling anybody and so now where do you think this is going? somewhat humorously I have to say that I find it amusing and I'm not trying to make excuses for the university here that the folks that managed to run two to three billion dollar deficits on our financial statements for ten years and still are somehow concerned that somebody else was running a surplus but this is a hard one and what you find is well the university's funding has basically been flat to down for a decade so inflationary terms it's been going like that so what have they been doing? they've been increasing tuition and Madison has been fundraising like crazy and so they've kept the ship afloat with other sources of money other than state tax dollars Madison now probably 15 to 18% funded by the state which gets into this question about how much should the governor and the legislature particularly be telling Madison what to do if Madison this is controversial has sort of become a quasi private university but anyway so I think it's true that the university got very wary about what the legislature and governor were going to do to them over the years and so they kept money on hand and it's gotten probably bigger than it should but I mean I think it was a defensive posture that by the way is no different than what you're seeing going on in municipalities and school districts and counties because they haven't never known what the state would do from budget to budget either so you know it's a defensive move now having said that I think the university system central administration has handled this terribly the best thing to do with politicians is tell them the truth all the truth as soon as you can and you know I don't know how much the Board of Regents actually knew but apparently some of the regents knew things weeks before this became public I would have immediately grabbed the president of the system in several regions and started knocking on you know legislative leaders doors and having discussions with them trying to you know before this thing got all blown out of shape and now it's become totally political but there you know there are consequences of a totally unpredictable state budget for the last ten years people try to protect themselves and that's what the university sort of did and that's what local governments and school districts are doing I hope that's somewhat responsive I think there's enough blame to go around here I think at this point they should just decide what kind of money the university is going to get and what kind of balances are appropriate they weren't really hiding anything it's just that they put out their own annual financial reports and you know nobody looks at a lot of stuff so other questions I read an article that Wisconsin criminal justice cost is twice that of Minnesota and it's billions of dollars well yeah we did a study on that a couple years ago because it really intrigued us too because it's true we're spending a lot more on incarcerating people than Minnesota step back however what you find is what the two states are spending on the criminal justice system are about the same what's happening is Minnesota is spending its money differently than Wisconsin and may be smarter because they're not throwing as many people in the slammer they're using more locally based community corrections kind of programs where you're out, you're electronically monitored you're more in touch with your parole agent whatever and Minnesota thinks that's maybe a better more cost effective way to go I think both sides of the aisle in Wisconsin recognize that and know that there are probably some people that are in pretty serious jails that could be in some kind of other punishment that would punish them and maybe save some money it's not an easy issue and the problem in terms of trying to attack it is every politician is afraid that if they do something and then we have some horrendous killing scandal that then the whole world will blow up the reason we started building prisons and putting so many people in jail in Wisconsin goes back to the Dahmer crimes there was a time in the early 90s when the state polling showed that the average Wisconsinite cared more about crime than high taxes education, health care and that just isn't the case in polling usually so you could see that the people were talking to their electorate but yeah I think that it's a tough issue we're spending over a billion dollars a year on corrections and it's pretty much under control now it hasn't been growing the way it did during the 90s for a while it was like zero to one percent of our budget and over the 90s it went to like seven or eight percent of our budget and now it's sort of flattened out percentage-wise but it's a... yeah, yeah, yeah other countries have a lot easier time of it for various cultural and religious reasons and my daughter spent some time in Japan and she said she felt like she was an animal and the zoo the whole time because everybody in Japan from far away looks the same color hair same texture hair same color eyes, etc, etc, etc and she was this blonde Wisconsin kid and she said she felt like she really stood out but that's, you know, we have lots of different ethnic backgrounds yeah you're familiar with the CJAC committee it's a criminal justice advisory commission in Shibuiden and there are many communities as Shibuiden County is doing trying to come up with alternative remedies versus the incarceration they are costly though trying to get people in the community to buy into the idea that maybe some type of treatment plan would be better than having the person incarcerated for a mental illness or alcohol or things like that but you have to also get the communities to buy into it but there are definitely other counties where these things are going through and they are on the table here as well another thing, and I say this just from personal experience my wife and I have been involved in mentoring teen boys of various colors over the last 10 years and there have been, you know, brushes with the law and the one thing that I came away struck with is that once you've even been in a county jail they just sort of let you out onto the street and there isn't always a place to live can't find a job, et cetera, et cetera and so then it just sort of comes back on itself and I'm thinking of one of our little charges in particular who eventually died of a heroin overdose you know, so any other? Yeah What's your take on the proposed federal legislation about collecting sales tax on children? Yeah, that's an oldie but goodie I'll just give you my own view and some people will really disagree with this I think there was a time when the internet was relatively young and internet sales were relatively young that people didn't want to dampen a growing part of the economy I think it's more mature now I think it's a valid question to ask if I go downtown and buy a book at Grace's Book Shop and pay sales tax but don't pay sales taxes by buy online or, you know, pick your product because you can buy pretty much anything online now I have a hard time explaining why that makes sense and the reason that sales taxes aren't being collected other than Congress said they couldn't and the US Supreme Court says you can't we sort of needed time to get used to this new economy but I think you can see this happening on both sides of the aisle that the perspective is changing and they're starting to think about this and there are a number of states now and certainly not a majority that are moving in this direction it's fraught with all sorts of legal controversy and it really would be best solved if Congress would do something because it gets around some US Supreme Court decisions and so forth I view it as a level of a playing field but some people really disagree I think they've been way overplayed in fact we have done some estimates in the House and nationally for Wisconsin there were some people at the University of Tennessee that were throwing numbers like 200, 300 million and we, an economist in our staff did a really good job of literally getting down to company by company, the big internet company and there are a fair number of them that because they have stores and online operations in Wisconsin they're already paying sales tax so when you cut through all that it looks to us like it's more like 40, 50, 60 million a year than 200, 300 million a year so I don't think it's the biggie that people think it is