 As we have turned the corner on January entering February soon. It'll be nice enough to gulf We have a good program today a couple announcements in advance. A couple of other announcements as Anybody who's in the city of Sheboygan knows may 21st is the the second excuse me me Wow, how did that where did that come from? February 21st is the second installment of the mayoral recall election The the second and final Obviously as everybody knows there it's down to two people a mayor Bob Ryan and Terry Van Akron former representative Terry Van Akron So remember that date. I think they actually have a debate coming up. Is it tonight or next week sometime? The ninth okay And then the next day after that On February 22nd is the Chamber's annual dinner award celebration and That'll be a big event has been a big event is a great event Recognition is given out on various categories. So we encourage you to attend if you're able it'll be a fun fun night That's all the announcements I have our first Friday forums just to give you a kind of the review of the lineup in March We have our legislators coming here to give us an update on on what's happening in Madison Or not happening in Madison and Then in April we've got our topics, but we haven't confirmed our speakers yet But in April we're going to have a group of people a forum on our on economic development in our county so we'll obviously have people like Patrick Drain and the executive director of the Shavuilin County Economic Development Corporation and Probably some representatives from different municipalities to talk about Economic development taking place in Shavuilin County and then in May we are focusing on having a forum We're still putting the details on energy, you know kind of we hear a lot about wind power and solar power and they're not worth it and and Drilling and not drilling we're going to try to assemble a panel to talk about Some of these energy and really kind of give us some accurate information as to how much How much that you hear is true and what isn't so I think that'll be an interesting program Hopefully we can get every all the details together and then in June we have our legislators coming back again for the quarterly update So that's through through the middle of the year I Believe that said anybody have any other questions or observations? Announcements, okay. Well our speaker today is Todd Berry And we'd like to bring Todd back on an occasional basis to give us the an impartial view of the state taxes of climate in Madison Whatever else he wants to talk about and so Todd is here to do that and Todd has been executive director of the Wisconsin taxpayers Alliance for a number of years He's got a PowerPoint presentation, and I'm sure some interesting Maybe controversial comments during the long the way so Todd welcome Well, it's good to be back now the other thing I need to know do I need to is a remote or should I take them? Should I just stand there? Because I can I can run it and if you can hear me I'll talk loud I can do Obviously this is supposed to be sort of a herd of Wisconsinites wondering where we are going I'm going to talk a little bit about the economy because both sides of the aisle are doing a lot of Finances Somewhere where I don't go and that is talk But talk a little bit about the current politics of the state Promise that These are samples of our publications are this one happens to be on the state's budget and So do you want background on what I talked about? That is useful. This one is sort of a Wisconsin's finance right now in contact with other states and What you'll see is that a lot of states have Faced similar challenges in that many cases solve their problems in similar ways And then finally, there's just a little brochure about us if you would like to receive Materials About the economy Sorry, I should have taken care of this in advance Okay No, I can do it and can everybody hear me is this is this audible is it on I can't Okay This is a slide that I often share with people It's per capita income in Wisconsin compared to the nation with the nation being that line That's running along the top there and this goes back to 1929. So this is long History and we go up and we go down But if you were to try to average it out over the last 10 or 20 years, you'd probably say our per capita income is something like One to three four percent below the national average You can see that coming out of the recession of the 80s We clawed our way back to within a percentage pointer to and then came the most recent economic Era and we dropped again and now we're sort of clawing our way back and I've occasionally been accused of gloom and doom but The good news here is we're that does show we're doing a rebound and we're moving back toward the national average This next slide really is the same numbers But shown in a different way and that is annual growth in Personal income and the point I'm trying to Wisconsin's the red bars The point I'm trying to make here is that Wisconsin and and Sheboygan County in this area would be an example Wisconsin's economy is fairly manufacturing oriented and So we tend to go into recession a little before the rest of the country We also tend to come out a little before the rest of the country And if you look at those red bars, you'll see that on both ends of the timescale there We're growing faster than the country and then we tend to stabilize the country will outperform us and then In the recession and coming out. We've actually grown a little bit faster. Now that is starting to reverse You'll see the the national economy Outgrow us and accelerate and that's not unusual. That's the typical pattern and so we tend to be a leading indicator to some degree and So you'll see on both ends of that. We're outperforming the country This is an another slide that sort of tells the same story. This is monthly Employment growth compared to the prior year the blue bars are the US the red line is Wisconsin and the Dashline is Metro, Milwaukee, Washington, Ozaki Milwaukee, Waukesha County, so pretty close to you And it's in some ways the same story we tend to Outperform the country early in a recovery and then we tend to slow a little bit and you can see that that Manufacturing part of the state that Milwaukee metro area, which in a sense I'm sure you don't want to be linked with but you probably perform similarly to Was really pulling the state economy you can also see it slowing there. I As a result, there's been a lot of political finger-pointing about, you know Are our job is our job growth good enough or are we losing or gaining jobs? And I was quoted in the Milwaukee Journal probably six months ago saying I thought the whole debate was silly That monthly employment figures are of limited value They get revised the next month and they get revised five six seven months later and You know, we can debate this later, but for now I Wouldn't panic one way or the other Our employment growth has been slowing But again, that may just be the economic cycle This is the the same picture one more time. This is total employment in the state and there's that there's Essentially 2007 you can see we were really not growing employment going back to 2006 7 and I it's hard for you for you to see So I mean that shows we were slowing before the rest of the country you can see That we do our dip there and then we start clawing our way back again There was a jump in employment growth in the first half of this year and there seems to be some Backsliding now the question is does that mean anything or is it just the up and down around a gradual trend line up and and again that there's Both sides can spin this however they want and I'm just saying You know, don't let them get you to worked up Here's a bigger point that I think is more important I may have shared this with some of you in the past which is I think something that that both parties tend to ignore and it's probably what they really should be talking about and That is if you look at the rate at which new firms are created in other words new firms as a percentage of all firms the left-hand numbers are Firm creation rates over the last 20 years It's not that we're radically below the rest of the country, but we are in the bottom ten and rather than thinking about ways to lure companies from other parts of the country or Using government to create jobs, which are solutions on both, you know one side of the aisle or the other Maybe what we really should be talking about is Making it easier to get on that trajectory as a newer younger or growing firm The good news is those little numbers at the right what they tell you is Wisconsin although we don't do as good a job of creating as many new firms is We the ones we do create have staying power They're much more likely to survive five or ten twenty years down the road than than the average for the country So that's the economy obviously when you have an economy that's been buffeted Quite a bit and has an impact in the state. You're gonna have state budget problems and we have But what I'm gonna argue is nothing new that we really were our own worst enemy in terms of this We really created problems for ourselves fairly early on in fact the first point here I'm gonna argue is that Wisconsin because it doesn't do government the way other states do It tends to mean that if we have budget problems, they're they're magnified and they tend to ripple. Here's what I mean a Majority a good majority of all the tax revenue that's collected in Wisconsin is collected by state government And yet close to two-thirds of all the services money that's being spent is done So at the local level and this whole thing is held together with large state aid programs Particularly to schools but all also to counties and municipalities and technical college districts So you get into this weird sense, which is what those little pies are there you get in this weird situation where Well over half of the state budget has nothing to do with state government. You're not you're not funding state agencies you're aiding local governments and school districts and if you add in the university system and and corrections and Medicaid which I'm going to come back to and you'll hear Medicaid Medicaid Medicaid again and again You're at 80% of the state general fund budget So if the state has budget problems, you can predict two things one local governments and school districts are probably eventually if not immediately going to take it on the chin because that's where a majority of the money is spent and then You know those five programs The university corrections Medicaid and the and the various aid programs are 80% of the state budget So if you again if you've got budget problems Those are the things that are going to be hit because there just isn't enough money elsewhere To to solve any big financial problems Now as I mentioned and this is old hat. I've talked about this before to groups in the 90s the Wisconsin economy was outperforming the country was growing faster in terms of an income and employment and It was a great time to be a politician because the tax revenues were flowing in and So we could do a lot of things in the 90s. We we greatly increased aid to schools We the transportation fund raids Also spurred a lot of borrowing for highways. So we were indirectly borrowing to balance the state budget There were also some nifty little accounting tricks They could play and real stimulus dollars and we replaced State tax dollars that we didn't have with federal stimulus dollars and sent those to schools and and funded Medicaid with it This is Medicaid and this is a this is not a new slide. I some of you may have seen it before the point simply is that the Dark line that's running up there is people. It's not dollars And so there was dramatic expansion of Medicaid eligibility over the last ten years We're in we now are covering 1.2 million people on Medicaid. The last part of that is is Recessionary, but most of it was conscious decisions by governors and legislatures to keep expanding Medicaid So we're now covering about one in five people Going into this year well the 2011 now The the new governor and new legislature were told that if they did nothing They were going to have to come up with 1.8 billion dollars to continue to fund Medicaid Not to further expand it but just to fund it So right off the bat They were going to be dealt a 1.8 billion dollar challenge There were some other things that were done in the preceding years That also made it difficult Going into the 2008 910 recession Wisconsin didn't have any budget reserves virtually really none compared to other states, Arkansas and Wisconsin were the poster children Although we and despite the recession we continued to grow our budgets and the way we did that was with With federal stimulus money We also did a fairly major tax increase in that period But the federal stimulus money is and Medicaid is really the story of oh nine ten eleven And if you can see this on the slide toward the bottom, you'll see a seven billion dollar figure That's about the amount of money. We were getting from the federal government Flowing through state government every year and you'll notice that in 2010-11 that had spiked at over 12 billion dollars Now of course we're on the back side of that. Well, it's not hard to see why you've got budget problems if You have no budget reserves you've got a hungry Medicaid program and You use a lot of federal stimulus money to pay for state programs and that federal stimulus money goes away and This is a result. This is a slide. I've been using for years just because it it's the It's the slide that keeps on giving This goes back to 1997 and what it says is that in every state budget going back to 97 the state Had various things that it had done in the prior year budget That balanced the prior budget with one-time money tricks gimmicks fund raids, whatever and the press calls that a structural deficit And you can see that through this whole period going into every state budget They were going to have to find over a half a billion dollars right away to pay for the IOUs from the prior budget So why did the state have perpetual budget problems? Well, it's easy You bring in about four five six hundred million dollars in the first year of a new budget And that's about what we were having to spend to solve all the problems we had pushed off So we just it was a continual sort of budget problem to illustrate it with last year Between the structural deficit and what we owed the docks and what we owed Minnesota and Some other things we were looking at close to a one and a half billion dollar set of IOUs or the structural deficit and That's about the same amount that was being projected last year at this time that would come in in new state money This the year we're now in and the year after so to cut through all the numbers and rhetoric all the new money For the new budget was in effect going to be spent to fill all the holes from the prior budget so you put those two together and The the structural problems and Medicaid and it's pretty easy to see What happened that and and one other thing which was a choice In effect all the new money we were going to bring in was going to go to pay off the structural problems the IOUs Medicaid was hungry and We're in this strange situation Where the state budget? Called for over a billion dollars of new spending on Medicaid and yet the Headlines are reading state is cutting Medicaid and so what's really going on is they're not spending 1.8 billion They're spending 1.2 1.4 billion Well There's the budget problem right there if you've got 1.4 million billion dollars of carry over problems And you have a 1.8 million Billion excuse me demand from Medicaid you're over three billion dollars. That's pretty much the budget problem So what are your options? You have three you can increase taxes you can play more tricks and games or you can cut and You know whether you agree with this decision or not The the new governor said during the campaign that he didn't want to use tricks and he didn't want to increase the budget So the point I'm making here is the cards were dealt between the way We what we did in the past What we did during the recession what we did with Medicaid And all and then the decision being that we weren't going to increase taxes or play tricks You're left with with an austerity choice now there was there is a trick in this budget and and I think you can be critical of it and it's one that Prior budgets had used before and that is they restructured some debt In effect there were some bonds coming due and instead of paying them off They were reissued. They got a pot of cash. They used it to balance the budget But that's probably the only major one that you can be critical of This is sort of the budget that was passed last summer and the numbers really aren't Terribly important Except to say that there's two ways to look at the budget that first line there is the all funds budget Which includes not only state tax dollars, but federal money and Then the second line I'm going to show you there is the general fund budget and that's all the state tax dollars Lot of numbers, but the two circles tell the story Despite all the talk of pain and cutting and so forth the all funds budget is up about three and a half percent The general fund budget is up seven to eight percent. You're going. How can that be? I read in the paper that well Look at the the big five programs Medicaid It's up about fifty percent give or take Corrections basically frozen school aides being cut Aides to municipalities and counties being cut we tend to account for that by the way In a slightly different way than some in the legislature do so We show it as being frozen, which is why Adam may not recognize the percentage there I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure Adam isn't feeling that that the appropriation was frozen UW system will cut as well, so What's the budget in a nutshell increase Medicaid a lot and pretty much freeze and cut everything else? Which brings us to A more difficult part of this talk, which is why I have the slide up there We're now treading on thin ice What I'm what I'm going to try to say here is not who's right and who's wrong but to try to explain why what happened happened and And The important point I've already made and that is that the state budget is not a state budget It's primarily a budget to aid local governments So if you have budget problems, you're probably going to cut aides to local governments and school districts and technical colleges And indeed that's what happened. That's what governor Doyle did in 2009. That's what governor Walker did in 2011 the only difference is Walker cut a little bit more, but he had a bigger deficit to deal with as well This creates problems for local governments and school districts There's no denying that and the difference between local government and the state is local government primarily is delivering services with people teachers firefighters Sheriff's deputies and so forth and so local government is labor-intensive and if you have less revenue You're going to have to talk about personnel now When you look at Wisconsin government generally compared to other states, it's sort of a mixed picture One we're not terribly bloated in terms of public employees. We're below the national average So it's it's not a question of numbers Salaries historically, maybe we've been a little above the national average now We're depending on who's data and what you're talking about. We're floating around the national average Maybe even a little below the one point where you can say we're different is fringe benefits and In the school area, which is the best data we have Fringes for public school teachers in Wisconsin were about 40 percent higher than the national average There was there was much as 60 percent over prior years They had slid down to about 40 percent above. So here you have aid cuts to local governments that are labor-intensive and They've got to talk about either laying off people or cutting compensation and Generally speaking the decision was to try to not lay off people but to trim compensation and the way that it Tended to be done where it was possible was by looking at fringe benefits hence all the controversy now What complicates this is if the state decides to give local governments a little more flexibility in how to think about fringe benefits That isn't necessarily going to happen because Wisconsin has 3,000 units of government and local governments may have multiple union contracts and That's what led some of the folks in Madison to start talking about collective bargaining whether they needed to do that or not I'm going to leave to you And I'll run out the room and you can fight about it when I'm gone Which brings us to the political politics of all this And Let's see what we what we know while we know that some state senators were Recalled last summer Republicans and Democrats The both sides will say that their point of view Prevealed in those elections, and I'm going to argue. Maybe neither is true What can you say about elections generally you can say that people tend to vote for incumbents and They tend to vote Whatever partisan leanings they have and most people whether they admit it or not Probably do have some kind of leaning well when you get 45 million dollars of money from all sorts of People and interest groups from outside the state flowing in To Wisconsin to buy TV ads You don't have a sleepy summer election. You have a fall general election. So the turnout was large What happens when you have a large turnout election? People vote for incumbents and they tend to vote their party leanings and that's what happened this summer The seven of the nine incumbents were returned the two that weren't Tended to be sitting in districts that weren't really friend to friendly to them in a party kind of way And who knows what will happen now with this next round? I Will lay my cards on the table here just so I'm not misleading anybody and say that I Don't tend to care for recalls and I don't care who you're recalling I don't tend to care for recalls and the reason is I think that that's why you have elections And I and that's really the norm around the country there the the the norm in Roughly 30 plus states is there aren't provisions for recalls and where there are in Places like Minnesota the recall is for malfeasance for corruption for for felonious behavior and We have a different system and that's you know the way it is and people are going to use it Here's my concern, and this is strictly my own opinion What is this likely going to mean for Wisconsin internally If the governor survives the recall, and I don't know whether he will or not But if he survives the recall There's still going to be half the state angry if he doesn't survive the recall There's going to be some happy people, but there's going to be a whole nother crowd Which is roughly half the state that's going to be really crabby and probably looking for revenge so either way I See dysfunctional politics and and fairly dysfunctional government My bigger concern and and I haven't talked about this except Once on Wisconsin public radio in the last week, but here's my thinking and This comes from having been involved in consumer goods marketing for over a decade and thinking about how People think about products and brands They don't remember everything on the package Wait, you know Number of calories whatever, but they have this vague sense in their mind that if you say Hershey's they think things if you say Ford they think things and if you say Wisconsin Outside Wisconsin, they're going to probably think Packers there. They may think badgers They're going to think colder snow Maybe not true this year, but they'll think that But I think based on speaking outside the state and what I get in terms of questions from people and the press outside the state is What also is attached in people's minds now to the word Wisconsin and you can pick your own word chaos turmoil dysfunction whatever and I think this quote Here that was in the state journal recently really says it. This is from like one of the leading observers of state national politics at the University of Virginia and He says the outside image of Wisconsin is of a state in turmoil and I think that's the image of the state and Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying somebody's right or wrong I'm not saying it doesn't matter who's right or wrong It doesn't matter who's to blame here the fact of the matter is you step outside the state And I think that's the image and my concern Is that if you're an employer with an employee that you want to transfer here? They may think about it if you're a campus that is trying to recruit somebody here, particularly a campus like Madison, which is not doing battle with Michigan State as much as it's doing battle with the University of Chicago, Stanford or Yale I think there's going to be some hesitance there if you're thinking of relocating a business here I mean, you know, I don't want to deal with Wisconsin. It's just a mess right now That's my big concern So to wrap it up What can we do and the answer is probably not much but if I were emperor, which I never will be And and the first people to say they don't want me to do to be that if my wife and my children, but and even my dogs What have we had for the last 10 or 15 years? We've had a lot of political Short-term thinking and fist was real short-term fiscal consequences. Why why is that? We didn't always behave like this I mean if you go back in internet to data back in the in the 60s and before What you see is Wisconsin being a state characterized by very little public debt and When you think about it, it's not hard to think about why I'll bet if I went around the room and looked at the name tags A lot of them would be German in this part of the state My mother's family was Yankee came from New England. You go up the west part of the state. There are a lot of Norwegians What are those folks have in common? They're crusty cheap frugal people and That's the way we ran government So what changed and the only thing I can come up with and and this makes legislators uncomfortable is That as we evolved into a full-time career legislature. I think it changed the psychology of the place and so the goal now is To keep your job, which is rational and to get reelected and that means not Sticking your neck out certainly not telling people bad news and sort of kicking the can down the road and As we moved into this kind of system and by the way, we're only one of about 10 or 12 states in the country with a full-time professional career kind of legislature and Who's in there with us those? Paragons of fiscal discipline New York, California, Illinois. I mean I would suggest there may be some connection What has happened in those kinds of institutions and it certainly happened in Wisconsin is That you now have a bunch of legislators who want to be reelected and they become much more dependent on Party leaders in their respective houses. So there's a lot of power there They can decide where bills go They can decide what committees you're on or which committees you chair or don't share and if you really are bad They'll find a way to get you defeated in a party primary ask Bob Ziegelbauer in Manitouan He got sort of driven off the farm and ran as an independent ask Jeff Wood in Chippewa Falls Same thing the Republicans pretty much pushed him off the farm and he ran as an independent Not only do these leaders have a lot of power, but they're pretty tightly connected to their respective Interest group allies who control a lot of money. So there's a lot of power there beyond that and This will become clear in a minute our elections tend to reward the ends of the political spectrum rather than anything Center right center center left and the other thing is you've got media and I'm not critical of this But it used to be when I was in state government in the 70s and early 80s That the capital press corps was really good and those guys had been around there forever and at that time They were all guys I think They knew where the bodies were and They could explain just about everything and and now that just isn't the case Which is why I feel strongly that what I do and what my staff does is more important than ever because nobody else is doing it So if this issue of partisanship is a problem we might as well concede it's been a problem for a very long time and James Madison who's in the middle here? and two of his buddies wrote the Federalist papers they were trying to argue that the US Constitution should be adopted and We tend to not know this but this was not a slam dunk the country was very divided over this in one of the papers Madison wrote the following and I've I've excerpted this and I won't read it all but the stuff in yellow is I think Particularly relevant the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties Different leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence and power have in turn Divided mankind into parties and flamed them with mutual animosity and then it goes on about how they vex and oppress each other Blah blah blah well, although the language is a little flowery. I Think you could write that today So what should we do? And here I will be the first to admit that probably none of this is going to happen because it requires people to write law changes But again if I were emperor here's probably what I would do I probably would try to go back to a part-time citizen legislature because truth be told although we have Perpetual legislative sessions. They're not really on the floor very much the number of bills being Introduced and passed has been declining for years the number of days the legislature has been in session last year or this will be small So I think it's possible One way to get there again if I could wave a magic wand and and this is going to drive some people nuts I think maybe we need a larger legislature not a smaller one Why do I say that? Because if you have a larger legislature, you have smaller legislative districts if you have less populate populist legislative districts It makes it easier for the average Tom Dick or Harry to run for the legislature and Serve the district it also by the way makes it I think harder for outside money and interest groups to pour money into a local elections Because you know in the in the case of Madison for instance, which is a TV market. You're not going to have four or five state reps You're going to have You know 15 It is an efficient to buy television time Other things we might do the founders and I mean I continue to be amazed at how smart they were We decided to be populist and elect the US Senate and okay. We're stuck with that But they did want the two bodies to be different and what the Wisconsin State Senate now is well the assembly is basically a breeding ground for state senators You go from one house to the other Maybe we should just elect senators, but maybe they should only have one fairly long term So we insulate them from some of this. Maybe we should do that with the Supreme Court as well Maybe we should have in this case of Supreme Court. Maybe they shouldn't have a life term Maybe but one long 20-year term or something like that I think drawing of legislative districts contributes to this And don't let anybody tell you otherwise both parties are will lie to you about this Right now the Democrats are saying the Republicans gerrymandered the state not without some reason by the way The Republicans had complete control and they drew lines that they liked But if you run the history back a little bit What you'll find that is that in 1982 When the governor and the legislature couldn't agree on how to draw district lines the federal courts did it and they issued a Plan and Wisconsin ran elections under that plan and normally that would have been the plan for ten years Well the Democrats suddenly held all the cards in 1983 they came back and In the middle of the state budget tucked in a little amendment that threw out the federal court plan and gerrymandered the state So they're both guilty if they have the chance and I think Iowa does it right An independent group does it. I think they do a better pretty good job And and I would suggest you if you go online and look at the what Iowa legislative districts look like And then lay it next to Wisconsin. You'll go wow These districts are really logical. They're squared. They're small. They're logical They don't cut up communities all over the place. Maybe there's something to it the other thing I think about getting it out of the hands of these guys is That regardless of which parties in control they want to maximize the number of seats and that means they tend to make Seats that are already Republican or Democratic even more so and So what happens in places? Not so much maybe Shabuigan area, but what happens in Waukesha County and Dane County is Waukesha County doesn't elect Democrats Dane County shoots Republicans and so if you run for the legislature you run in a primary and in Dane County you move to the left if You live in Waukesha County you move to the right and So the people that account that are get elected from those districts are Reflecting primary voters and not general election voters. So when they come to Madison you tend to have two camps That tend to agree amongst themselves But hate each other And can't work together Other things we might do There is there is some provision in some cities around the country and even for instance, Australia Australia Alex its house this way is you don't get a ballot and vote for candidate You get a ballot and you rank your choices and then by computer fairly easily If somebody is the lowest choice they get thrown out their second choices Get votes and you keep doing this until somebody has a majority. What does that mean? Well, I would think That it would mean that if you had several Republicans running, they're probably going to be nicer to each other Rather than slash and burn each other witness You know, Florida, South Carolina, blah blah because they realize that they may it's important to be a second choice Ditto for Democrats It may also mean that if you have a fairly competitive district that is tending to elect either You know center-right Republicans or center-left Democrats that even Republicans and Democrats are going to be nice to each other because it's likely that People who don't care much about party are going to cross lines in terms of for second choice Now there are other ideas out there. Nebraska has a unicameral legislature and I'll tell you I'm not too enamored with the idea I think there's value in having two houses. I think the founders got it right again If one messes up the other maybe you'll slap them down a little bit They also don't have a nonpartisan legislature. I Don't know whether that's good or bad political scientists tend to love political parties But I will tell you that Nebraska had a billion-dollar deficit Solved it with a bunch of bills in one month almost all those bills were passed unanimously and they went home Now one final idea and this was in Illinois up until their constitutional convention in the 70s And I think some people in Illinois are missing it and that is you can write the election laws in such a way That say it's a Democratic district Probably two Democrats are going to be elected But the third that's elected is probably going to be a is going to be a Republican or an independent or something else So lo and behold you get something really interesting happening. You have Republicans getting elected from Madison you have Democrats getting elected from Brookfield and So both parties I think become a little more Big tentish and maybe that I think fosters dialogue so to wrap up and I haven't said this but there is one good piece of news about the state budget amidst all the controversy and pain and so forth and That is for the first time since the mid 90s when the governor and legislature, whoever those may be next January come back to begin work on the 2013 budget They will not have any charge card IOUs hanging over their head. No no big fund transfers No disappearing federal stimulus money That's not to say we will have solved our problems because if you look at the state's financial Statements and this is just a summary of them the way accountants look at Finances, Wisconsin still has deficits And that'll be our next charge we end the structural deficits and now we got to see if we can get our financial statements cleaned up But there's something really sort of hopeful about that for either side of the aisle and that is if you don't have to Essentially clean up somebody's old laundry Then a budget becomes something which is what it should be and that is think a tool to think about the future into plan and it might mean that for the first time in almost 20 years the state would have the ability to think about comprehensive tax reform Overhauling school finance trying to somehow rethink the state local Relationship, which is pretty messed up There was a big fight this past time budget time about the university system and how to govern and finance it We still need to have that discussion And there's division within the university on this but there has to be some realization that Madison is a little different than everybody else. It has a two billion dollar endowment. Nobody else has practically anything It has a billion dollars in federal research money. Nobody else has hardly anything and We need to govern it perhaps a little more like the people it competes against many of whom are private You can also say that whether you like it or not local government may have a few more options in terms of how it Does its finances than in the past? And I guess I would conclude for the first time in a long time that Wisconsin state government isn't totally fiscally dysfunctional because of the erasing of the structural deficit But our problem now is we're totally politically dysfunctional and we're more dysfunctional there than we ever were fiscally So I'll leave it at that Somebody accused me as I mentioned really of being a little gloomy and do me so I have this very hopeful picture at the end That there is an opportunity to do some reform and some thinking anew in the next state budget So I don't know how we're doing on time A couple and if you have to leave I'm not insulted Yes Yeah, that was going back right to nine and a half Where's it headed? Okay, yeah That's pretty much what's happening is the stimulus is being is Ending and is being backed out of it now The feds Down the road a little bit are going to become more involved in state Medicaid programs So there's probably going to be a little more federal money there Wisconsin won't share in that largesse to the same degree as other states simply because We already Expanded our Medicaid program and and are ensuring more people than all but two three four states in the country so Yeah, I mean historically we'd get about seven billion a year it did a spike and we're now Coming back down now whether we get back to seven billion or something a little above that but That nine and we're showing nine and a half. I think it was that in 1112 which would be the fiscal year we're now in so And that's sort of the tail end of the yeah, that's the the tail end of some of that Todd thank you for coming and sharing your thoughts Anybody has any questions of Todd, I'm sure he'll be here for a couple minutes afterwards Feel free to ask him and again remember our next first party forum will be our area legislators We'll be here to give their update on legislative activity Maybe some of the information today will be appeared as a question Thank you all