Over the past week, the Wisconsin Budget Project has highlighted a piece each day from our larger publication Breaking with Tradition: How Wisconsin Lawmakers Have Shortchanged a Legacy of Investment in the State’s Future. You can access the full report on our website. This is the conclusion to the report.

Breaking with Tradition in Wisconsin

Over the last three and a half years elected officials have made dramatic changes to how Wisconsin supports its schools, communities and workforce. Lawmakers have reduced investments in public schools and higher education, despite the role education plays in individual financial success and building a strong economy. They have cut taxes for Wisconsin taxpayers with the highest incomes, but raised taxes on seniors with low incomes and on working families. They decided to provide health insurance to fewer people at higher cost. And lawmakers also made it harder to obtain important safety-net benefits like unemployment benefits and food stamps, during a period when families continue to struggle to emerge from the deepest recession in 80 years.

Lawmakers claimed that many of these changes would give the Wisconsin economy a boost and create jobs. But instead, job growth in Wisconsin has lagged both the region and the nation as a whole. We believe that these changes will have long-term negative effects on our state, that they are not in the best interests of our children and families, and that they are not in keeping with Wisconsin’s values of opportunity, responsibility, and community.

To construct a strong economy in Wisconsin, we need to create opportunities for everyone to thrive. Lawmakers should build on our long history of making the kind of investments in our schools and communities that create broad-based prosperity and help make Wisconsin a good place to do business and raise families. We should build on Wisconsin’s legacy of investing in the state’s future, rather than turning away from it.

You can access the rest of the report here.

Photo by cimexus released under a Creative Commons No Derivatives license.