 Well, good afternoon everybody Hope you've had a lovely lunch Welcome to first Friday forum and and also welcome to May 2nd. This is a beautiful month, isn't it? We should be starting February any moment So my name is Lynn podium and I am the facilitator for the business advocacy committee We have some of our members of business advocacy who are here today. Could you raise your hand, please? We'd like to show people who are here Julie's not gonna raise your hand. She's looking around. There we go We are a group of people who get together once a month We look over some situations that are going on either in our government or in our businesses Locally or at large and we create Programming that we think you would be interested in so if you are interested in joining the business advocacy team Feel free to address any of the people that you see here that raised their hands Betsy and myself and George are also members of the team. So if you have any questions, you can also reach the chamber We'd love to have you join us Got a few announcements first off We'd like to thank the bull and Praveya for being our sponsors for the meal here today On Monday, May 5th from 930 to 1130 Barbara Wald from is going to be here for a customer service Seminar at the Blue Harbor at Blue Harbor, right? And she's from Denver. This is going to be a free seminar. It's really really going to be a wonderful Program so if you can make it that'd be good making their mark Tuesday on the 6th is the top 10 young Professionals that's going to be here at the bull and that's an awards and order of evening Then on Thursday, May 15th, we have the leadership Institute with their 25th reunion and graduation And that's going to be at the new spaceport shaboy gun from 430 to 7 It's featuring a leader Norris of the living as a leader with seven mistakes leaders make Today we are lucky and thankful enough that we have Todd Barry He has been the president of the Wisconsin tax payers alliance since 1994 Wis tax and Todd believe that voters and taxpayers need objective factual information about their government Barry has served on a number of gubernatorial and legislative commissions and task force He also served on the Dane County Board the Jefferson School Board and the North Central College Board of Trustees in Newville, Illinois With the bachelor's and doctor's degree from UW Madison Todd is a loyal and committed bachelor We would like to welcome Todd Barry With the computer back here, I guess I need to be here too so Apologize my wander around It's good to be back here. There are a couple of Chambers and Rotary clubs and so forth around the state that I tend to do pretty much once a year or every other year and this is one of them and so I Particularly like these because I actually started know, you know faces and and people and Maybe who's going to ask me the tough question, I don't know Anyway, before I get started at your table is something that looks like this and To show you This may not seem big to you, but to show you how much I love you This hasn't been released. In fact, it's embargoed to the press Because there's going to be several large Newspaper stories on it. It's starting in the next couple days. But so you're you've got it I'm not going to talk about this, but it'll be in the papers on Sunday and Monday and basically what this is about is We have a baby boom generation that is starting to leave the workforce and we have a baby bust generation that is coming into the workforce and That's sort of like having the drain letting out more of Bathwater than the faucet is putting in and there's all sorts of implications to that so I commend that to you the other thing that's in here is our our newsletter and I will be talking a little bit about this and I Probably is also maybe a brochure. Maybe not Anyway, if if you happen to underwrite our work, I thank you for it I noticed for instance associated Bank here and I saw US Bank somewhere and I should probably mention BMO because it might be somebody here and I know all those three banks underwriter work and I know a lot of other Enterprises and organizations do as well. I'm going to go a little bit differently than I usually go I'll weave some of the usual stuff in but We had some things happen this fall and winter and spring that got people All various lobbyists and organizations talking about state tax reform Which is a conversation that I haven't seen in Decades, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about that and throw out some options And maybe just as as background This is a subject that is sort of near and dear to my heart because back in the dark ages. I was the director of a gubernatorial tax reform commission back before most of you were born in 1979 or something and So I it was one of the first things I cut my teeth on and I've always enjoyed it The we really haven't had any of those conversations for 20 30 years because There's a couple things that have to happen in order to have tax reform One you have to have money. You have to have a budget process that's working It takes some pretty courageous people which we don't always have The but their planets might be aligning so that's why I've decided to talk about it today There's also some reasons that might not come to pass and I'll talk about those as well When I talk about tax reform, what do I mean? I don't mean, you know Occasional tax cut are a little tinkering here and there. That's what Legislators love to do because they like to put out press releases. What I'm talking about is something fundamental and comprehensive and sweeping The timing right now may be good It would mean looking at a wide variety of state and even local taxes There would have to be some kind of overarching Plan or vision which is not something Madison does very well And it may involve tax cuts, but it wouldn't necessarily have to and I'll talk about it in both ways Some reasons why we should talk about it now We maybe in a period where we have some money We haven't had that Before because the tax revenues have been so volatile Another reason to talk about is we don't really have a very balanced tax system We use some taxes way too much and others too little and I'll show you that in a second You know economists think about bigger things like do taxes cause people to do good things or bad things and That's something to think about one thing that I think is that's interesting is that for as much as policymakers talk about regulation and Wanting to ease the regulatory burden. I never hear them mention the tax System and yet I would argue that there's probably nothing more Far-reaching and intrusive Into people's personal and business lives than the tax system and and it is Regulation there was one study out of the Stanford Law School that Suggested that the cost of complying with federal tax Code Represented about 10% of the federal tax take so I mean that would be many many billions The other thing is we have sort of a an unusual approach to government here, and I'll talk about that as well To get there I'm going to share sort of two big concepts the first I sort of use the metaphor of a funnel And I think I've probably shared this with some of you before we don't get federal money I've wiped that out where we do but we don't compete well for it We don't tend to charge for things. We don't have toll roads here We've always had a low sales tax and even coming to the sales tax game in Wisconsin We came very late and when you start taking most of those Sources of money off the table You're not left with much and that's why we have two taxes in Wisconsin that are rather high both are about 25% above the national average the income tax at the state level and the property tax at the local level the other Concept and this isn't so relevant to tax reform, but it's useful to understand history and that is The property tax was the only tax in Wisconsin really when the state was founded other than some cats and dogs And The way to get tax relief back in the 1800s was just to exempt things from the property tax And we've continued to do that over 150 years So in some areas the property tax base is a little like Swiss cheese In 1911 The the call was for property tax relief. That's how we got a state income tax it was the first in the country and The idea was they were going to take 90% of that money and send it back to the individual Communities municipalities and counties to relieve the property tax That worked for a while except that people in state government wanted to use some of that money and so over time one of the reasons we Had subsequent income tax increases and later a sales tax was to continue to return that money The budget that I grew up with the state budget that I grew up with really wasn't a state budget The the driving force in it was state aid to counties and municipalities and technical colleges and school districts And it still is a very significant part of the budget but there has definitely been an evolution in the way that Governors and legislators think about it in the last 10 to 20 years really the last time that there was any big Increase in state aid to local governments was the billion dollar buy-down of school property taxes in the mid 90s So that's sort of the backdrop oops Here's just a quick picture of how the state gets its money and this is last year We've always been about half income taxes about a third sales taxes and then the rest is sort of all over the map The other two major ones being the corporate income tax and the excise taxes mainly tobacco taxes So it's it's not you know if you're if you're a stockbroker type and you're into portfolio theory It's not a very balanced portfolio if you were to take all the state taxes State and local and fees and everything and put them together the pie would look like this and sure enough There's the property tax which is the largest tax in the state state or local and income and sales are the others and then it Scatters all over the place So that's sort of the background now some quick history This is just a picture of all the state and local taxes as a share of Income in other words relative to the size of the Wisconsin economy, and I've probably shared this with you in the past Wisconsin's the red line, but the the story here is that the red line is has been ratcheting down over the last 20 years and that the gap between the US the rest of the states in Wisconsin has been narrowing to some degree if you take those numbers and Look at the detail, and I promise I won't bore you with this because I've probably shared this before There's the income and property taxes and in the yellow saying they're more than 25 percent above the average and they're both in The top 10 12 states in the country, which is why our tax burden is top 10 in the country But if you look down you'll see the sales tax we ranked 35th And the corporate income tax it's hard to generalize because it's so valid and we'll rank 14th one year 25th the next But there again is the story of the sales tax those user charges in the federal money that we don't do as well with it As a result we have high income and property taxes which sort of gets starts to get us to now Past speeches I've given here. I've talked about how state government for the last 15 20 years sort of lurched from budget crisis to budget crisis and Kept the state budget ostensibly in balance with various tricks and gimmicks and so forth Obviously you're not going to have any kind of major tax reform When you don't have any money to make it possible and I call this sort of my grease rule in that in Madison a Little bit of extra money is the political grease that makes big things happen and makes compromise possible Because it buys off losers and gives opponents a way to save face Excuse me The last state budget period that ended last summer was a tough one Basically the story was we inherit this large Multi-billion dollar deficit Particularly because of Medicaid Most of that is being sustained by federal stimulus money for a while that goes away big deficit opens up and we pretty much cut everything two or three years ago and spent it on Medicaid and That will become a theme here What has been happening more recently is That we ended that budget period with about an 800 million dollar surplus So going into this budget period the one we're showing here We had some room to maneuver But the results weren't much different in that if you look to the left in that yellow box You'll see that the total state budget is rising almost a billion dollars and Almost all of the growth is going into Medicaid into health There is some money for school aides But then everything else that's big in state government and the only other things are prisons the university and aides the counties and Municipalities shared revenue all of those were Pretty much frozen or cut and that is the new reality in Wisconsin state government, which is Medicaid is driving everything and if there's a little money left over they'll Throw it the way of schools and that'll probably be it But because they had that extra money We started Getting some talk about tax cuts The point I want to make before I detail those though is that why did they have money and This will not go over well with the folks in Madison because it's not because of the Wisconsin economy suddenly gave them a lot of extra money It's because the folks in Madison can't estimate tax revenues So this goes back to 2000 and the blue bars pointing down mean that the state Overestimated revenue and came up short and over on the right. You'll see those little bars moving up That's when we underestimated revenues and had a little bit of extra This is not surprising. This is the way it's always been when the economy is moving up Folks that predict tax collections will expect continued growth And if the economy turns will overestimate and just the opposite on the downside when we're turning I I Explained this to somebody maybe it was on public radio or TV not too long ago that if you don't get this chart Think of the Roadrunner and Wiley coyote You know in the Roadrunner speeding along and the coyote is always after him with some kind of contraption and The Roadrunner will just stop And the coyote will speed by him, you know riding a rocket or whatever he's on that day Well, that's sort of what happens when the state goes into a Recession they expect things to continue to go and the economy stops But as a result of that We had three or four times in the last couple years when the news to the governor and the legislature was we've got some extra money started in May of 11 and then it happened again in January of 13 and May of 13 and October of 13 and most recently in this January And so as a result we got three or four kinds of tax cuts the May 2011 surprise gave us the beginning of a fairly large phased-in corporate income tax cut the surprise last year at this time The governor had proposed about a 300 million dollar income tax increase Suddenly there was more money and so the legislature doubled down and doubled the size of the tax cut The one good thing about that the legislature did that gave me some small hope That there might be some kind of comprehensive look at the tax system is that last March or April we Published a long list of tax breaks credits and so forth that virtually no taxpayer used and they were just junking up the law and junking up the forms and One legislator in particular said okay. Well, let's just get rid of them and to the degree they generated any money They had some extra money to lower tax rates and more and that is the way Theoretically tax reform should work you should Broaden the base so that the rates are lower For everybody Well, then along in October the state found it had another hundred million It wasn't expecting the governor quickly called a special session And we have a two-year buy-down of the school property tax Now I say buy-down and this is hard for people to understand because it's sold as a tax cut and It and it is your property tax will go down or will not go up as much But the way it's being accomplished is the state's giving over two years a hundred million to schools But because of state revenue limits, they're telling local school districts. They cannot spend it So they have no other choice than to reduce their levy with it, which is why I call it a buy-down And that has come back This year with the legislature just ending With a about a four hundred million dollar buy-down of the technical college levy for the same reason and that January February March Session did two other things. There was about a hundred million dollar income tax cut And there was a change in the state income tax withholding tables Because I've been such a pain about the withholding tables for the last ten years. I have to give credit where credit's due The state had was way over withholding on income taxes for a very long time Republicans and Democrats and the reason was they had perpetual budget problems And they essentially borrowed money from the public in order to manage their cash flow And then they'd return it the following spring as an income tax refund And I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that if I ask you to go pull out your 2009-10-11 12 tax returns Every one of you With maybe a exception or two will have got would have gotten a state Tax refund while you may have very well been paying the federal government So by changing those tax tables We're not going to be loaning the state a billion dollars interest free every year. I just thought it was a matter of Transparency and honesty But it took them a long time to get there So That now we're sort of going forward What are the prospects for tax reform? What are the the hurdles? We don't we're not going to open the coming budget period next January with a huge surplus Unless the economy surprises again Because they used a good part of that surplus to do the tax cuts And in fact as the budget stands now we're spending more than we're bringing in in revenue in both this year and next now that's Not fatal as long as the economy continues to grow those School and technical college property tax buy-downs Are spending so they come there's about a 500 million dollar in a sense I owe you That's going to come back because we're going to have to fund that again But here's how I sort of think The the options that may be before the governor in the legislature And the reason this whole conversation got going Was that the governor before Christmas mused about getting rid of the state income tax and Then as I mentioned in the last couple months the state did a fairly significant Buy-down of the technical college levy So those are two possible options a third one would be just to rebalance the tax system So we don't have this really high income and property tax and this low sales tax Let me talk a little bit about the tech college option first The tech college property tax is somewhere around 600 million a year for operations and they in effect have Now funded about 400 million of that so it's not impossible that the governor and legislature could decide to fund tech colleges in the coming budget with state money rather than local property taxes and That from my perspective would be a good thing for the transparency of the tax system Because right now when you get a tax bill There's the municipal levy the county levy the school levy the tech college levy the state small state levy and any other cats and dogs and The poor taxpayer doesn't know What's going on? There's just too many lines on the tax form and as a result when Government a blames government B for raising property taxes and then government B blames government C The taxpayer is hopelessly confused so that you know that would I think would be a clean up to the tax system The other reason it might make sense and I know this is going to make people who work in technical colleges squeamish but we did have this discussion 200 plus years ago about governments that collected taxes that weren't elected and Generally speaking the county board the city council the school board the legislature when they decide to tax they have to vote and their elected representatives the one exception is the tech colleges I I've long said I don't think it matters whether we elect the tech college boards or whether the we get rid of the tech college property tax but in the interest of Shall we say 200 300 year consistency? It might make sense There are some problems that with this one tech colleges have debt Which is going to get carried over and would not be picked up by the state From a Political sex appeal standpoint this is sort of boring for people that are trying to put out press releases and make Splashes either in the state or outside the state if you follow my drift and the other problem is it's going to Create anxiety down at the local level if the state decides to fund tech colleges So that's One of the options. Here's the other the governor talked about and that was to get rid of the state income tax And this is a lot harder to think about then I think The folks in the executive office realized the first problem is they were only talking about getting rid of the personal income tax and If there's no personal income tax, but there's a corporate income tax Then those of you in the room that our LLCs Are home free, but if you're a Schedule C corporation You're going to be treated differently and that's a matter of equity So I think if they're going to talk about this they really need to talk about both taxes and we're talking eight to nine billion dollars Now, what does that mean if the state is only spending 15 billion a year? Well One you have to scale back what you're spending in the where where do we spend our money at the state level schools? The university Medicaid prisons and AIDS to counties and municipal governments There's a you know going to be some limit to what you can do with that So then you have to look at some other source of revenue and the only one that has the potential to generate a ton of money That isn't being overused is the sales tax but The math here gets pretty forbidding and that is in order to find eight point four billion dollars You need about a fourteen and a half percent sales tax 15 if you're in a county with a county tax Now there are ways to get around that so if you look around the country and see how's everybody else doing it there aren't a lot of states that don't have an income tax seven or eight and oh My we're getting ahead of ourselves Wash and most of those just have state governments that aren't Spending as much money and if well, we'll ignore this if this The one exception is Washington Washington state and when you look at what they're doing they have a higher sale sales tax rate But where they're really reeling in the box is they're taxing a lot of things that Wisconsin doesn't tax So you have to have discussions about Taxing a few things that I've listed here under those bullet points The Department of Revenue says that they could do this with a six point three percent Sales tax, but what they don't tell you and it really would be seven point three Is that what I've underlined there are various things that are exempt from the Wisconsin sales tax food drugs medical services? motor fuel home heating government non-profit organizations and all sorts of things that businesses buy Inputs into businesses both goods and service construction labor real estate commissions Repairs to property. I mean this list goes on and on but the point simply is this is not a walk in the park If you exempt the items that I've underlined there You end up with about eleven percent sales tax now. I don't know. Maybe that would go over in Sheboygan Probably not, but it might but I'll tell you it would be a hard-selling Kenosha Beloit Platteville La Crosse Hudson Marinette because suddenly you'd have a fairly large differential in sales tax rates and And You know incidental expenditures that might not matter but cars boats things like that it starts to matter So Now what's my take on all this? I? Think that the state could have done something fairly major if it had planned ahead and had some kind of vision of What it wanted to do, but we went through a whole range of tax cuts in the last couple years That were popular, but did they hold together in in some kind of strategy? probably not I Also, don't think that push come to shove that the governor and the legislature Have the stomach politically for getting rid of the income tax because of What I showed you earlier When you start taxing things that aren't taxed The the individual group that's affected by that one item rises up and you get into real trench war politically, so the only way it happens is if Frankly, the only time big things happen in Wisconsin is when a governor makes it a bottom line and Pretty much drags the legislature kicking and screaming. That's how we got University merger for instance in the 70s The other option and I'll just mention this in passing is you could do something that was sort of halfway You could finish buying down the tech college levy and get that off the property tax you could Add a penny or two to the sales tax and you would get a fairly Significant reduction in the state income tax so what you would end up with is those two big boys the property tax and income Tax coming down and the sales tax coming up So what we would have across the board would be a tax system where every tax was within range of being average for the country rather than being way out of whack like we are we are now and That's it Either either I put you to sleep or was interesting. I you know having cut my teeth on this 30 40 years ago I think it's sort of fun to talk about Yes Yeah, yeah, it has If you look at national data and we put we've put out a couple things on this If you go back to 2000 maybe 1% of retail sales were internet based Now at least nationally the best estimate is 6% so that doesn't seem big but growth-wise. It's huge and Wisconsin cannot use its sales tax to tax internet sales unless those firms have a physical presence in the state Some people have thought that that means Wisconsin was losing something like a hundred and fifty million dollars a year in sales tax Revital In our looking at this in some detail literally going retailer by retailer What we discovered was that this whole internet sales thing has matured and a lot of the big retailers Walmart best buy You know Sears you name it you can buy online or you can buy through their store They have physical presence in the state. They have to pay sales tax The other big development was Amazon Amazon didn't decide to put a distribution center in Kenosha out of the goodness of their heart And I buy from Amazon a lot but By doing that they Put a physical presence in the state so they're now paying state sales tax and there are about 15% of all internet purchases So the ground has really been shifting in the last couple of years to the point now where We think the state is probably losing As little as 25 million a year Maybe up as high as 50 million a year, but it isn't a hundred a hundred and fifty million a year anymore So that's the that's the full answer to the question So yeah, I mean if if you're in a sector that doesn't have a lot of in-state presence from internet retailers You're not gonna be happy. You know that there you're still gonna think the playing field isn't very level But it's gotten more level than it was Other other questions Yes Yeah, well first it should be said that State government has been in denial For about 10 years or even 20 on how to pay for transportation They the gas tax hasn't been increased for almost a decade our vehicle registration fees have been increased once But they're pretty low compared to other states Meanwhile, there's a big list of transportation projects and Asphalt is petroleum derivative So you can see where this is going On top of that we have an aging population That isn't going to drive as much We have vehicles that are becoming far more energy efficient and the feds are forcing that So our main way to pay for transportation in the state the gas tax the revenues are going like this and The budget is going like this and the only what what they've done is They've stopped gapped the the current governor is taking Half a billion dollars from the general fund from schools the university shared revenue Medicaid and putting it in the transportation fund to keep the transportation fund afloat and They're and they're borrowing in this two-year period about a billion dollars for transportation. Well There's been so much borrowing for Transportation that we're to the point now where of every seven dollars or so that we spend on transportation in this State one of those dollars is spent on debt service to them on those bonds. So That problem is starting to mount and the predictions are able to get to 25% within then I think the next decade so We've got we're going to have to have a major conversation either we're going to decide we don't want as much as we Say we want in terms of transportation or we're going to have to confront paying for it now the easiest thing to do politically Administratively and so forth would be to raise the gas tax. I mean it hasn't been raised in 10 years Yeah, it's high compared to other states But other states Tax motor fuel with the sales tax too, and we don't So Well, I guess it's stay tuned and see I think in the long run The technology is About here. There are experiments going on in other states There is actual use of the technology in other countries and that we have the Ability or will soon to essentially meet our transportation in other words, we won't we won't need Toe booths. We won't even need to go through an eye pass, you know sensor It'll it'll be metered through some technology and we'll get a bill monthly so I I think it's just a matter of time Before we are doing some kind of tolling whether we like it or not it there's a look the alternative really is the gas tax and Ours is pretty high that the feds Are on the verge of starting to step back and let states that took federal money For interstates to think about doing more tolling on there. They could we could be doing that now on new construction So I think it's coming I play a game with audiences around the state just one quick question. I don't get you How many of you have an eye pass? I always find it interesting I've even asked this question in wasa and a third of the audience went up You get south of here if you were to ask this in Milwaukee or Madison You get half the audience or more so that I think that I think in some ways the public is a mentally ahead of the Politicians on this but I there was a question back there and then I'll take yours Yeah Yeah, yeah, no, it's a very Yeah, it's a very legitimate question because what this says in a nutshell is There is not going to be any labor force grows in Wisconsin for 30 years And the reason is our school populations have looked like this for the last 15 or 20 I mean add 15 years to those kids and that's the workforce so I Guess when I start to think of alternatives The first would be we have got to graduate Every possible body from a Wisconsin high school then that we can't we can't afford To sort of look the other way and lose 10% or 20% or in some cases 40% or 50% We we need those bodies We also are going to have to get flexible about Seniors wanting to continue to work in you know hourly fashions that are somewhat unusual We're also going to have to have in this state and this is going to cause some people to Shutter we're going to have to have a conversation about immigration because if if we just put aside the federal government If I were governor I would be knocking on doors of Indian and Chinese and Japanese and German Universities looking for engineers and scientists and computer programmers and so forth because we're going to need We're just going to need bodies And and the other place that we can get them is we bleed people I mean we don't in we do import them from Illinois but most states we send them to and Those are the people that are most likely to come back because they know the place and by all evidence they still are rather fond of it so The combination of emotion and a little money as you suggest might Do the trick We also can't afford to bleed college graduates with degrees in business and finance and Computer science and engineering and so we need to find ways to entice them to stay and if that's loan forgiveness Maybe we have to have that conversation too but The time to have this conversation was 10 years ago at least we put out a study in 2004 titled Wisconsin 2015 and it presented these kinds of numbers and Suggested we might want to start thinking about 2015 Do the math? We're here you had a question Yeah Well, yeah Well, Colorado has a new Expressway around greater Denver and when we were last there a year or two ago We saw signs that said that this was a toll highway No toll booths. No Scanners nothing and about two weeks later we get a bill in the mail from Colorado saying you drove this section By the way, you owe us $17 and they were quite aggressive about it Because we didn't pay it right away and we immediately got a second reminder and then because I pay my bills electronically I authorized a check to be paid but in the meantime it already had gone to a collection agency, so There's nothing wrong with it Yeah, the big the big problem for some people is how do you balance? treating transportation as we use natural gas or electricity or water and Also take into account that people don't particularly like to be known for Going from point A to point B to point C Now there's lots of technology to get around that there was one question young there Yeah, the federal code You know every year about this time they put out something showing how many more pages have been added It really is ridiculous you know Not maybe not so much at the federal level, but certainly at the state level there are ways to put the income tax on a postcard and Have it be more or less politically acceptable I I'm not very optimistic about federal tax simplification because what you need for it to happen is you well you need adults and President Reagan and Senator Bradley Republican Democrat In 1986 and before there were a lot of people on both sides of the aisle that just decided they really wanted to do some major tax simplification and they did and Because Wisconsin's law is based on the federal we dropped our income tax rate from ten percent or eleven percent down to six It shows you when you clean stuff up you can get rates down The only way it's gonna happen is if there's if some people on both sides of the aisle are given cover and allowed You know to work on it, but the problem is that People understand what they're losing deduction a or credit b and it's harder for them to grasp Yeah, but that money is going to come back to you because your tax rate is going to be lower And in fact, you'll probably be better off Fair tax those kind of arguments And In a perfect Economist world we probably would not have an income tax a federal income tax We probably would have a value-added tax and everybody cringes but From an economic standpoint, I don't think many economists Disagree that it's better to tax what people are wasting their money on Or not then on them putting money in the bank and saving it or working extra hours or whatever so I Mean that the theory is great, but that it's getting from there, you know from here to there There was there was one I saw one hand somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, I Come from Michigan and I remember when they instituted the lottery and they said we will have the best schools In the nation because we're gonna put all of that money into the nation in the schools You know what they did but every year after that they started taking general funding Well, and that's why any kind of tax reform discussion that involves balancing Taxes is politically really dangerous because the public doesn't believe it and legislators Who can keep the promise some of them in the back of their head are going? Well, I really want to do this and in a couple years, so it's it's it's an issue And and the proof in Wisconsin is we have a segregated transportation fund Governor Doyle took over a billion dollars from it to subsidize the general fund And this isn't a parking a partisan comment because now Governor Doyle is taking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions from the general fund and dumping it in the transportation fund and So much for having a segregated walled-off transportation Yeah Use tax, yeah Yeah, yeah with a use tax. Yeah, you're right the big stuff they get you on This you know Well, let's let let me be more precise because you're actually you're very right refrigerators stoves Freezers furniture, you know Yeah, we don't we don't we don't know we don't have good data on that that I'm aware of the one place where we do know a fair amount it's about cigarettes and and There's some there was there's some pretty good evidence that the state has been Has been overestimating its cigarette tax revenues because it wasn't taking into account The the leakage to internet sales to sales from purchases from other states From tribes, etc. Etc. So And I've seen I've seen data that suggests that our The cigarette tax smuggling or evasion here is top 10 in the country, which Wouldn't be out of hand because we have a cigarette tax that's in that upper tier That there have been really interesting studies done of cigarettes Academics running around New York picking up cigarette box of cartons looking at that's tax stamps from which state they came from Finding out nobody's buying New York cigarettes in New York so I it must be time So I thank you for being so patient and thank you for the great questions And if you've got something else you want to ask I'll be around for a little bit But it's always good to be in Sheboygan We'd like to thank you again time for coming and sharing your afternoon with us and I hope that you have a very safe drive home Thank you ladies and gentlemen for coming if you have any other questions We'll be around to answer them and have a great afternoon. We will see you next week at the Chamber of Ed's