Backwards GOP keeping Wisconsin from starting up, attracting business

Marc Eisen has added to what seems to be a series that he will run in Isthmus dealing with Wisconsin's workforce. Part 2 deals with start-ups and innovation, and it illustrates how we continue to go in the wrong direction during the Age of Fitzwalkerstan.

Max Lynch is quoted in Eisen’s article, and co-founded Ionic, which designs platforms for mobile apps. He says that the Scott Walker/WEDC strategy of “trickle-down tax cuts and tax credits” are a backwards, failing way to approach economic development in the 21st Century.

“Taxes are not even remotely important to our company,”[Lynch] says. “We never even think about it. No! We are in a growth industry. We are investing a lot of money to grow quickly. Our constraints are people and capital. We need [money to hire] talented people. Taxes are irrelevant. The politicians talk about attracting manufacturing companies with tax breaks — that is completely the opposite of what you would do to grow a technology industry in Wisconsin. And the technology industry by many measures is the future of this state.”

The most valuable companies in Wisconsin are going to be in Madison, Lynch predicts. “The kinds of companies we’re building are going to be valuable in a way that manufacturing companies just won’t be.”

That’s because manufacturers, particularly those in traditional supply chains for cost-cutting corporate giants, are competing for those contracts on price per unit. That’s not true of the burgeoning software industry. “We are building companies that have incredibly high profit margins, that can reach millions of people and have low operating costs. You’re going to see an outsized amount of value created in Madison that’s going to overcome the downsized Milwaukee.”

Lynch adds that the current GOP leadership clings to the past with its regressive economic and social policies, the latter of which he describes as “toxic” to encouraging the type of people that invest in and grow tech companies.

While I’m not a fan of Lynch's Madison vs. Milwaukee framing - I think Milwaukee absolutely has the quality of life and talent pool to go to the next level, if the mediocre, racist fucks in the burbs would get out of the way - Madison is growing much faster than the rest of the state in no small part because of its “high-education, high-quality of life” approach to attracting talent. Maybe the rest of the state could learn something from that.

In addition to the anti-education mentality at the Capitol and the cheap pay scales of typical Wisconsin companies, another problem is a lack of infrastructure to allow more places to compete nationally and globally. Eisen’s article quotes State Sens. Kathleen Vinehout and Jennifer Shilling both bemoaning that the state is at a serious disadvantage when competing for talent against nearby Minnesota.

“The big cities in Minnesota keep winning the bidding war for our teachers,” says Vinehout. Rural districts are “becoming finishing schools” for teachers and administrators who leave for better paying jobs, Shilling grumbles.

Spotty broadband remains a hardship for education and business in the hinterlands, despite regular press releases from Madison on how much better things are. Only 32 percent of Wisconsin households are connected by broadband versus the national average of 47 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Wisconsin is trounced by all its neighboring states in the provision of high-speed internet, except for Iowa.

Vinehout says her country road connection is so bad that her college-age son in the Twin Cities won’t even return home on weekends if he has work to do.

This is yet another example of Scott Walker's political game-playing coming home to roost, as the state keeps lagging because of his decision to stick it to the Black Man in the White House and turn down $23 million in federal money for broadband 6 years ago that would have made that map look very different today.

Another point in the article is that the GOP’s disinvestment and politically-motivated denigration of Milwaukee is something that holds the state back from creating a coordinated “I-94 development corridor” that could create exchanges of ideas, start-ups and win-win growth from Milwaukee through Waukesha and Jefferson Counties, and onto Madison. Again, the GOP's spite and "divide and conquer" mentality is keeping this state from reaching its potential.

A main part of WisGOP strategy is to keep a large portion of Wisconsinites down and fighting for crumbs amongst each other, while using pay-for-play corruption to kick back funding and advantages to corporate campaign donors. These guys don’t care as much about what the state looks like as long as they get to be on top of it, and get paid big money in the process. The "politics over policy" approach is why none of this will change with the current ALEC crew in charge.

And it’s yet another reason that they have to go.