GOP tax cut isn't too surprising, and also bails themselves out of K-12 stimulus error

We're getting some outlines of what the WisGOP tax cut package will be. What they're planning to do on income taxes isn't surprising.

WI income tax is already very flat and cutting the 6.27% bracket down to 5.3% would only make it flatter, with no significant bump until you hit $264k for individuals / $351k for couples https://t.co/4F6BQZm0ql pic.twitter.com/kaWkTdqdP9

— Nick Fleisher (@nickfleisher) June 17, 2021

The good news is that this would give a tax cut to a lot of Wisconsinites...except for the poorer ones. But it also gives the biggest tax cut to people with higher incomes, and after we blow this surplus over the next 2 years, where would that leave us in 2023? A rebate would have been a better route, but GOPs are gonna GOP.

And the WisGOPs apparently have been reading this blog, because they've figured out how to give enough to Wisconsin education while cutting taxes in the same move.

Multiple GOP sources said the package keeps in place current spending caps on K-12 schools and tech colleges. In doing so, the additional state aid would drive down the amount of property taxes that locals can collect.

In all, the additional state aid going to K-12 and tech colleges is about $600 million, legislative leaders said. That doesn’t include the cost of moving a school aid payment up a fiscal year, a practice used in recent budgets to reduce costs.

The GOP leaders said the package also will meet the federal government’s maintenance of effort requirement to qualify for some $2.2 billion in the last two COVID stimulus packages.

So schools won't be able to do much more beyond the help they're getting from the Feds. Unless there's some kind of adjustment to who gets state aids based on stimulus dollars, this will actually help urban and poorer districts more than richer ones, although property owners in richer districts will get a bigger break.

And it wouldn't be a WisGOP tax cut unless WMC didn't get them to throw in some kind of giveaway to business owners.

The GOP budget proposal only gets halfway to the full personal property tax repeal: it sets aside money to backfill the cut, but the actual repeal will come in separate legislation (not in the budget). Dems note there's no guarantee Evers signs that bill.

— Jessie Opoien (@jessieopie) June 17, 2021

Now why they're doing it in a separate bill is beyond me, unless the WisGOPs don't actually want to see the personal property tax get cut, and think having Evers veto a bill that gives bigger property tax breaks to big businesses is a loser (you run on that, guys).

I'll dig into it more when I see all the provisions, but not much of this surprises me. The bigger question is how much of the surplus gets frittered away on this, and whether this creates a giant landmine that looms over the next 2 years.