Wis still has $3 billion to play with, but number is slowly decreasing

Late last week, the Wisconsin Department of Revenue released the always-important revenue figures for April, which reflects payments from tax filing season. Along with the April revenue figures, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau released updated estimates of how the 2023-25 budget will end up.

As Emilee Fannon and JR Ross ran down on Wiseye, things are still on track for what has been projected.

As Ross mentions, there is still projected to be a sizable amount of money in the state's bank account as the biennium ends in 13 months - over $3.1 billion. There is slightly less to play with in the "structural" outlook for the next budget, largely due to an increase in the state's child care tax credit that Governor Evers signed in March.

That was in the same set of actions where Evers vetoed income GOP-backed tax cuts on regular and retirement income, as well as an increase in the state's married couple credit, and Evers rightfully claimed backing all the tax cuts would have thrown the next budget into a deficit.

So we are still in a spot where we have a big enough surplus to do give some strong one-time moves, or have moderate levels of increased aid and services (such as following Evers' budget request to increase K-12 special education aids to 60% coverage, which would be somewhere around $450 million a year, and also could reduce the need for districts to raise property taxes through referendum).

But the cushion isn't so big that we can have multi-billion dollar tax cuts that stay in effect year after year. These numbers show that we are already projected to spend more than we take in for the next 3 fiscal years without additional tax cuts, so why would we want to make that into a much larger long-term problem with tax giveaways?