 back to the Donahue group. I hope you're ready for another fun half hour of lively discussion and interesting insights on behalf of our panel members. I'm going to start with the man in black, Ken Risto. Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, also known as, well he, or he at least tries to. Jump into a few burning rings of fire. And we're going to move right on, so we don't get too bogged down just in the introductions, much less the content. Yes. Tom Paneski, our guy in orange today is Sam. Peach, or whatever Sam is. I'm going to say something. I deliver meals on wheels and one of my, one of the people I deliver to always watches the program. So, hi Ruth. Very nice. That's very nice. One of our ten loyal listeners. That's how we're building an audience. I'll get through these introductions yet. And Cal Potter, who's, and if there's anyone that you would care to greet. No, not really. All right. Very good. I'm Mary Lynn Donahue and going to try to hold on to these guys here. And as we launch into our discussion, talking about state issues, and we didn't get to a state program last month, but there's lots and lots happening. Right now, the assembly is working on the ethics package that was defeated, or wasn't defeated, was never brought up for a final vote in the legislature last session. A proposal to combine the ethics board and the state elections board. Not a bad idea. As I understand, it passed the assembly judiciary and ethics committee by a 8-1 vote. But there are some rumblings. One is the non-severability clause, which says that if one part is bad, the whole part is bad. I think that's to avoid the McCain Feingold issue where the court was able to say, part of the law is okay, part of the law isn't. Severability clauses from a legal perspective are pretty standard. It's certainly not an unusual concept at all, so it would be kind of sad to see things go down on that basis. I think this is going to pass in any way that is going to be an improvement. Well, I think the concept and the structure of eliminating the two boards, the ethics board and the elections board, is, I think, popularly accepted both amongst Democrats and Republicans. The bill that's before the assembly is a sit-down meeting product between these Republicans and Democrats, because the Democrats control the governorship as well as the Senate, but don't control the House, the assembly. So I think the 8-1 vote is saying that, well, if they got an agreement, let's advance it, but there are groups like Common Cause and others who are looking at the details and the trouble is in the details. Whether the floor amendments will sufficiently change it is another thing, but since the governor was involved in the original drafting of it, if it ends up on his desk in a very similar form, of course, he's going to sign it, now whether the details that are being criticized are true to form to be problematic, well, that's going to be what the courts and others will decide down the pike. But I think, yeah, it's going to pass. There's been enough hoopla for them not doing anything last session, both in the gubernatorial race and legislative races, and there's a bill before them. So why not pass it? At least you can say, well, we've done something and we did it expeditiously. It may be a flawed product, but at least we did our thing. And I think that's what's going to drive this whole thing. And whether the critics are going to get any traction or not, I don't know. I was just trying to think about the whole process, political process of putting a bill together. And if you allow pieces to be knocked out because they're unconstitutional, I think you could get more people on the bill to sign on to the bill because, you know, okay, I know this piece is going to get knocked out. I got my part that I want. But if you say one piece is unconstitutional, the whole thing is unconstitutional, then you really want to craft a bill so that nothing is unconstitutional. Or you want to craft a bill so one thing is. Or one thing is, that's the other. And you could vote for it and then. You could vote for it and it still gets thrown out. Thank you. Yeah, a poison bill. So I don't know how I feel about it. I mean, it could be unconstitutional two years later and you had this board going for two years and all of a sudden they have to disband and go back to the previous election board and accountability board. What aspects of the legislation are being discussed as possibly running a fall of the Constitution? I don't know. I'm assuming are we talking about the Constitution or the Federal? Well, it could be either. You know, I mean, those rights under both constitutions. There isn't much discussion. One of the sticking points, which to me is as odd as can be is if you were a legislator or any elected official who is caught doing something wrong, where will your trial be? Who would have thought that that would be a major issue, but it appears to be something that is at least dividing the parties. I suppose the thought is that if I'm popular in my home district, even though I have been doing something wrong, my chances of being convicted are substantially less than if I'm being tried in Dane County, where everyone is aware of how bad I am. We should double back a little bit for our 10 loyal listeners and viewers. The current law legislation, correct me if I'm wrong, states that if there is evidence of wrongdoing, the material or evidence is turned over to the local district attorney of the legislator's home district. And that's what's causing some discussion about whether that's got enough teeth in it because there's a concern that the local district attorney might be beholden to this lawmaker and less likely to prosecute? Well, the Constitution, it doesn't require, but it states that the typically the venue or where you would hold the case would be in the county where the crime occurred. Correct. So Blanchert has been the lead person in Madison. And he's fairly aggressive. So where we've had violations of campaign finance laws, etc., etc., by several legislatures, where were all those trials held? In Dane County. They were all in Dane County, so now they want to go back to the local district. Right. Where everybody knows you and the guy who sells your car and the dry cleaner, those are going to be the people who are on the jury. It seems to me to be a relatively silly thing to fight about because wouldn't it be good if we aren't having people tried for various crimes and misdemeanors about finance? If you fix the system of financing or the ethics prohibitions, beef them up so that people aren't taking free this or that and getting caught doing it or using staff, for example, in campaigns. Well, obviously we wouldn't have this argument over. So it's actually treating a symptom and not the disease. Exactly. And I think it gets back to this whole issue of campaign financing and how we're going to run our campaigns. And that's the other bill that needs to be taken up. That's getting not a lot of press. I don't even know if there's something been introduced such as the Ellis Bill that was in last session. And I mean, that's really, you're exactly right. I mean, that's where the disease is. And that's the hard part to cure. And there isn't a whole lot of talk about that. I expect the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Common Cause folks are concerned that if a bill like this passes, kind of like McCain-Feingold passing, and well, now all of our troubles are over. And well, clearly that's not the case. And so they're looking for more and real and significant changes. Political change is slow. And particularly when the actors- Pocketbook issues. They're not talking about pocketbook issues. They're not talking about application issues. How we police ourselves. Yes, yes. The proposal before the legislature also creates, which I think is just interesting, a six-member panel of retired judges to oversee secret investigations of potential ethics lobbying and election law violations. Now, will there be a suspension of habeas corpus? Is what I'm wondering. Will the Military Powers Commission act somehow? Take away. Will we have a star chamber? If you're bringing stuff from Canada, you know, that's out of the country, you never know. I don't know. I just, I like this concept of secret investigations. Although it is the case that at a certain point in an investigation of anything, it certainly is helpful if not everybody knows what's going on. I'll grant you that, but in any event. So I think that's interesting. What I like about this panel is that it replaces a body that's citizen appointees that are equally divided between both parties. And so when a decision is made about whether something ought to be, candidate ought to be prosecuted in some way for an issue that's brought the elections board, it often is very closely voted upon by partisan politics. Hopefully with a panel of judges, people who played hardball for much of their career in legal profession and can smell out of law violation when they see it, they will be in a better position. You'll have better confidence that they're going to proceed against somebody who truly did violate the law or did something unethical. So I think the mechanism for screening and proceeding is one that has a lot more validity than the old election board panel of citizens made up on partisan politics basis. Right. And the way that judges get appointed at the very beginning, the Senate confirms three of the first six board members. The assembly confirms the other three. And then after that, future appointees would need confirmation from two-thirds of the Senate. So there would still be that element of politics, I think, in terms of who gets appointed and who doesn't. But I think you're exactly right, is that for the most part, I think judges in the state of Wisconsin are held in fairly high esteem. Who nominates the retired judges? I was just about saying that two-thirds requirement would really require, unless politics changes dramatically in Wisconsin, will require at least some compromise between the parties and candidates that will be at least perceived as somewhat fair. You know, and I'm looking at the Journal-Central article and it doesn't say, I presume it would be the governor who would nominate. He would think so. Yeah. Because, I mean, that's typically, you know. You wouldn't have the body that has two-thirds majority in the Senate appointing the people in the first place. It comes from some other source and then you disconfirm, like you do on the national level as well, president appoints judges and then you get a vote of the Senate. I would think that's the mechanism here. Yeah. But we'll have to watch, watch and wait and see how things develop. I note that the U.S. House of Representatives did its 100-hour trade. New minimum wage bills, you know, just those silly little things that are meaningless. But in any event, it does not appear that the Wisconsin legislature will be on a 100-hour and maybe not a 100-day, but at least, at least we could, we could hope for something. Let me claim to agree with you about something. Let the record reflect that there is agreement. Other things that are going on in the state these days, and we've touched on it a little bit in our, in our last show, and I just wanted to follow up a little bit on the, on a possible reversal of the qualified economic offer, the QEO, which teachers have complained about bitterly. And it is true that there has been no other body that has had to bear that particular financial structure. It has been only teachers, not the janitors or custodial staff or secretaries in the school or firefighters or police. I mean, it really has been just strictly limited to teachers, which I think has been a little unfair to, to put it mildly. I'm a teacher. I don't belong to a union. I'm at the whim of the legislature. Some years I get zero rate. Some years I get a percent, you know. When it gets bad enough, you guys will organize. Yeah, the universities aren't organized. Yeah, we have no union worth. I didn't know that time, really. Yeah. I wasn't aware of that. They have repeatedly, some of the people in the university have repeatedly asked for collective bargaining rights, but when I chaired the education community, I probably held at least eight to ten hearings on that topic over the years. And we'd have generally some very rank and file people from particularly outstate campuses. And then all of a sudden then came the law faculty or the medical school faculty, the upper echelon. Oh, we don't need this. We have self-governance. We'll take care of ourselves. So when the house is divided, it doesn't pass. And that's basically it. But TAs and a few, they have, they have gotten the right to organize. But my, where I think one of the huge public policy challenges for the state is, and we touched on it a little bit, and it's the whole taxation system, of course, which is a fairly large thing to put your arms around, but just how we are funding school districts. Some school districts get 65% from the state. Some get 70. Some get 51. All depending on odd formulas, where they were at, where a particular district was at when the law was enacted, whether they're growing enrollment, whether they're diminishing enrollment. There's a three-year averaging, as I understand. Types of the student population. To a certain degree. It's exceptionally, it's exceptionally complicated. And different rural areas have different issues than highly urbanized areas, suburban areas, and so forth. So I think, from my perspective, that's a huge issue that if we had, if we could just step, there's nothing wrong with partisan politics, but if we could just have a couple steps up above the scrapping and say, this is a big issue. Well, how should we deal with this? And get people to the table. And it's an issue of eventually recruiting good people to be teachers. Before we had Binding Arbitration, which was enacted under the Marty Schreiber administration, it was a very, after the Hortonville teacher strike. Hortonville, here's a who. In the early 70s, we enacted Binding Arbitration and that did bring teacher salaries up to respectability. And to the extent that teachers in Wisconsin were usually in the top 10 in compensation. What you have seen now after a decade or so of the QEO is that we are no longer in the top 10. I don't know. We're in the middle of the pack. 30th actually for starting salaries in about 25. And that does not say very much about recruiting of good people in a state that prides itself on having good teachers and good institutions that prepare teachers. Kids are savvy enough to know that if they can make a buck more in California or Texas or somewhere else, eventually ranking 30th is not going to be a very good selling point for people to stay in their home state to teach. So you can play this game of saying the QEOs makes it easy for school boards and school boards love it. And it's nice to control property tax. But there is a public policy issue here is how long do you screw teachers and then have difficulty getting good the best and brightest of your young people to go into teaching. Why would you want to do that? I mean, when you can find other professions that pay a lot more. So what I'm saying is the state probably can't afford another five years of a QEO without addressing the issue of where we're headed in compensating teachers. Well, and where the whole system is going and how do we fund it? And is the property tax anachronistic? Should we be just looking at it? I mean, the university system, the issues with the university system, administrators, some of our chancellors and the president compared to other big 10 states or other states, they tend to be low. And that's because we've been very stingy with dollars, even though they we pride ourselves in the university. We've been the university is we've the last two budgets we've been on the chopping block as far as dollars. But there was a whole that was just most recent, but it's been that way for a while. So we pride ourselves with our university education, but we're in the same situation. You want to fund quality teachers, you want teachers, university professors to come, contribute their expertise to the state, they'll go elsewhere. I mean, these are just huge issues and we're not a poor state. And it's difficult to say we are out of there are some politicians who do say, well, let's just take education completely off the property tax. Well, there are other avenues that that are looked at, but they're not always easily the resolvable item either. Going totally to the sales tax might be a little less pressure on the property tax, but the property tax is still deductible. Well, Governor, two years ago, a year ago or so had a commission of people. I know Mark Hanna here from Sheboygan was a part of that commission made a variety of recommendations and tried to move some of the funding of schools, public schools. I don't believe the university was part of that package more toward increase in the sales tax. If I'm not mistaken, that commission report pretty much is gathering dust someplace in Madison to raise another tax. But what I guess what I was just going to say also is that the property tax, while it's regressive and onerous, it is also federally deductible. So if you're in a 25% tax bracket and your property tax bill is $4,000, the feds are in essence are paying $1,000 of your property tax bill. I mean, it's not something you see right off the top, but there is a relief to it where the sales tax is not deductible, nor is your income tax deductible. So it's one of these things where the property tax is a bad tax, but it does have some redeeming quality in the sense that it's deductible. Just to segue into a totally different area, and I don't think any of us at this point know a whole lot, but it seems to me that the discussion of universal health insurance and health care coverage is moving closer and closer to reality at the national level to some extent, but really at the state level. I mean, there are some interesting proposals out there which are going to cost a ton of dough, but that will work with employers and small employers and the large ones like Walmart and really make universal health care available to citizens in the state. To me, the discussion is much more concrete and focused. There are plans out there that are being discussed. Bush is going to give a plan tonight. Well, it's Bob Dole's old plan. Don't get sick. Sorry. That's your payback for the charade. Now we're even. Well, I don't want to get sick. Thank you. It's not fun. Yeah, you're right. As well, we're taping the State of the Union will be tonight and one of the things that's been leaked in a way to the media is the president's going to start speaking about the proposal that I read was after $15,000 of health care benefits, if you receive it from your employer, that amount will be taxed. I assume it's your tax bracket, which is for most of us around 25% as Cal was saying, at least around this table anyway, I think. He was also encouraging the purchase of your own insurance to get a tax write-off. Right. In the reverse side, the monies there would be offset by if you got your own health care plan, the HSAs. Yeah, you'd end up being able to tax right off the cost of those health care plans. So there'd be some tax savings to the individual. So he's trying to make it, why I understand, he's trying to make it more of a free market enterprise that health insurance, instead of being government operated, thrives in a free market and costs will be held in check a little bit. Well, health care has certainly been thriving in a free market environment to the tune of 18, 20, 25% increases per year. And there's always been that tension between having a highly regulated government system, although the Medicare system, as I understand it, is extremely efficient. Only 4% of Medicare costs are related to administrative costs. So in terms of actual administration, if other health insurance plans were as effective and as efficient as Medicare, things would be better. But there seems to be a built-in escalation factor for sure, at least there has been. Plus, so you have a complete government side and then the free market side where I see people in my office on a regular basis, and it's the kind of work I do, but who literally do not have health insurance. And although they can go to an emergency room, to get health care, that's really not accessible care for them. They shouldn't be there. And they shouldn't be there. It's very expensive care and it's a mismanagement of our resources. But I think the models that are coming up seem to have some nice interaction. More people are buying into it. For years, it was always sort of liberal or labor pushing these things. And business kind of sat back, even though they were biting and biting the bullet of higher premiums and not being able to provide insurance for their employees, they're getting hit so hard now that they're finally starting to say, well, I'd like to come to the table too and let's talk about this. So I don't know if the pot is boiled sufficiently yet to have this porridge be made into law, but I think some of the states are being very creative in suggestions. And I think the role of the feds ought to be let's encourage the states, let's provide a framework for the states to do some good things. Hawaii's done something. Massachusetts has done something. Oregon, I guess. Oregon. And I think through the whole experiment and maybe we're going to find some really good ideas and some good ways of delivering a service at a reasonable cost. I just hope that in this state, both houses of legislature and the governor take the lead in trying to say, let's see if we can put together a plan. And I hope the feds don't stand in the way and screw it up is what I'm saying because I think states can be creative. There's one model that's patterned after workers comp, which is a very reasonable way of providing insurance to people, both for the employee and the employer. And I think the state ought to be looking at some of these options. Well, I think it's an economic imperative. The QEO wouldn't be such a bad deal if out of the 3.8% you get, 3.6% is going for increased health insurance costs, and you get 0.2% of a raise, for example. So I think those are some of the issues. We only have a couple of minutes left. It's a new era in Wisconsin state politics. As we talked about, I was stunned that the Democrats took over the Senate. And really, there are just a couple of races in the assembly that were determined by 100 votes or fewer that could have flipped that. Any prognostications about what the governor and the legislature are going to accomplish, say, in the next year or two? Not a Galderan thing, huh? I think you're going to see a lot of things come out of the Senate because the Democrats feel that they've got to deliver now that they've gotten their majority. And the assembly, I don't know with new leadership there. There's been some changes in leadership, whether they're going to be amenable to sit down and put their version together and go into a conference committee, or they're just going to be obstructionists and say, we don't want that stuff that's coming from the Senate. We're just going to kill it. So I think there's a lot to do with the issue of cooperation between the two houses. And do you think Doyle? Yeah, the assembly could put up a nice package and the Senate could kill it. I just want to play the other side. I guess it would be my hope that Doyle would play a real leadership role now that he is not in that same bunker-like mentality that I think was certainly a fair way to describe the first term. And I guess it would be my hope that, because I think he is a talented leader, I think he's had some clear ups and downs. And it would be my hope that he'd be able to work with the legislature and kind of move things forward. But we'll see. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again.