Breakdown of a Supreme electoral margin in Wisconsin

It was quite the electoral blowout in this purple state when it came down to deciding the balance of power in Wisconsin's Supreme Court. Dem-supported Susan Crawford romped to a 10-point victory, beating the WisGOP/Elon Musk-backed Brad Schimel 55%-45%.

And the outcomes bore strong resemblance to the other double-digit blowouts for the Dem-backed candidates in these April Court elections in the 2020s. You get the first indication on that when looking at the results by county in the state.

See the blue in the Fox Valley and in the southeast corner in the state? That shows Crawford winning the "BOW counties" of Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago in northeast Wisconsin and Racine and Kenosha in southeast Wisconsin. All of those counties voted for Republicans Ron Johnson in the 2022 November elections, and Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential election, when both of them won statewide by at or just below 1%.

With Crawford breaking 50% of the combined vote in each of those 2 regions, along with getting over 47% of the vote outside of the largest metro areas, you could just look at those outcomes alone, and guess that you were going to get results that looked like the last 2 Court races.

Then things got worse for Schimel in the largest 2 metro areas of Wisconsin. Nearly 82% of Dane County's votes went to Crawford, and she got an even higher percentage in the City of Milwaukee, nearing 84% - more than 6.5% above what Kamala Harris pulled last November. Schimel also got blown out nearly 2 to 1 in the suburbs of Milwaukee County, with Dane County's Crawford putting up margins that even exceeded what Milwaukee County's Janet Protasiewicz drew in 2023.

And the consistent Dem improvement in the Milwaukee County suburbs has been mirrored with Dem improvement in the WOW Counties that border Milwaukee (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington). In 2019's Supreme Court election, Lisa Neubauer lost the WOW Counties by more than 2 to 1. But in both the 2023 and 2025 victories, the Dem-supported Justice candidate got 41% and 41.5% of the vote, respectively.

The other big story in this Supreme Court election was the strong turnout, which was likely spurred by all the local and national attention on the race along with the obscene amount of ad spending. There was over 2.36 million votes cast, totals that are closer to midterm November turnouts than April Supreme Court elections.

Where those votes came from also largely resembled a midterm, with Dane County and (especially) the WOW Counties having less of a share than in previous April elections, and the City of Milwaukee taking a larger share due to stronger turnout than they'd had for past Supreme Court elections.

The combination of larger turnout and larger Dem margins in the already strongly-blue Dane County and the City of Milwaukee means that the vote margins for Crawford grew larger in those places for Tuesday's election. Those margins have been steadily growing for Dem-backed candidates in every Supreme Court election since 2019.

It's near-impossible for Republicans to win anything statewide when they begin with a deficit out of those 2 areas that totals 12% of the state's electorate, as it did last week and in 2023.

One of the ways that Republicans held down those margins in the 2024 presidential election in Dane County and the City of Milwaukee as well as other blue-voting areas was to get more votes from younger men, especially in college areas. But that "bro strategy" didn't work at all for Schimel in this election, especially in the wards in Madison near the UW campus, where Crawford kept 5/6 of Harris's vote totals, but Schimel lost more 2/3 of Trump's votes in the same areas.

The "bro vote" also didn't seem to appear for the Schimel/Musk team in other college counties in Wisconsin, including the ones that included UW campuses in La Crosse, Eau Claire, Stevens Point, and Oshkosh.

Dem margins, 2024 Presidential election vs 2025 Supreme Court election
La Crosse (+9.3% in 2024, +26% in 2025)
Eau Claire (+10.6% in 2024, +25.6% in 2025)
Portage (+1.2% in 2024, +15.4% in 2025)
Winnebago (-4.7% in 2024, +7.0% in 2025)

And with no Senate race on the docket for 2026 to misinform casual voters, those numbers should be a big flashing warning to Republicans that they likely can't repeat Trumpian strategies in non-Trump elections.

It's not a guarantee that this translates into a big Dem win in next April's Supreme Court election, (even if the odious Rebecca Bradley hasn't been beamed up to the federal bench and ends up being the GOP's candidate), and it doesn't mean a Dem sweep in November 2026. But the trends are definitely in the right direction for the blue team, especially if they can replicate the huge efforts they pulled off to help push Susan Crawford to victory last week.

Even a good jobs report is a bad thing for Trump and Wall Street

With all of the turmoil of the last month overall and the tanking of the stock market on Thursday, lots of people were looking to see if Friday's US jobs report for March was going to show a significant slowdown (if not outright decline) in job growth.

Wait, really? Apparently so, if you buy the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 228,000 in March, higher than the average monthly gain of 158,000 over the prior 12 months. In March, job gains occurred in health care, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing. Employment also increased in retail trade, partially reflecting the return of workers from a strike. Federal government employment declined.

Health care added 54,000 jobs in March, in line with the average monthly gain of 52,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, employment continued to trend up in ambulatory health care services (+20,000), hospitals (+17,000), and nursing and residential care facilities (+17,000).

If our economy keeps adding jobs in health care, maybe we shouldn't be cutting back access to health care or stopping research on diseases, eh?

That said, the first two months of the year had their job numbers revised down.

The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for January was revised down by 14,000, from +125,000 to +111,000, and the change for February was revised down by 34,000, from +151,000 to +117,000. With these revisions, employment in January and February combined is 48,000 lower than previously reported.

Ok, that makes the March number make a bit more sense, as we're 180,000 above where we thought we were. But I did find it interesting that the BLS added this note in light of Elon Musk and other DOGE dweebs trying to impose large nunbers of layoffs in the federal government over the last couple of months.

Within government, federal government employment declined by 4,000 in March, following a loss of 11,000 jobs in February. (Employees on paid leave or receiving ongoing severance pay are counted as employed in the establishment survey.)

So if these former or furloughed employees are getting paid via buyouts or other severance packages, they still are part of the payroll, according to the BLS. It also makes me wonder if this is a big reason why unemployment claims have stayed so low despite all of the Trumpian economic vandalism going on.

Even the increase in unemployment to 4.2% was really a minor change from 4.13% to 4.15%, with solid increases in labor force (+232,000) and number of people working (+201,000). In addition, the U-6 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers not in the work force and Americans forced into part-time work, retreated from its 40-month high of 8.0% in February down to 7.9% for March.

However, after President Trump announced massive, across-the-board tariffs on Wednesday and the DOW Jones falling by 1,680 points, a good jobs report is NOT what the stock market wanted to hear. And so the bleeding kept happening on Wall Street for Friday.

The reason I say that the good jobs report was bad news for Wall Street is that it showed there was no reason to lower interest rates at this time, no matter what debt-laden oligarchs like Trump and Musk want. We have costs and prices slated to rise with tariffs, and that report gives no indication of widespread job loss in America, despite what the headlines say about TrumpWorld’s efforts to wreck the operations of the federal government. Which is why I think the report is real and hasn't been messed with by the White House.

With the data coming in combined with recent events, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell admitted that he was going to have to wait to take any action when asked about where things stand on the economy and related monetary policy.

President Donald Trump's new tariffs are "larger than expected," and the economic fallout including higher inflation and slower growth likely will be as well, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Friday, while cautioning it was still too soon to know what the right response from the central bank ought to be.

"We face a highly uncertain outlook with elevated risks of both higher unemployment and higher inflation," undermining both of the Fed's mandates of 2% inflation and maximum employment, Powell told a business journalists' conference in Arlington, Virginia, in remarks that pointed to difficult decisions ahead for the U.S. central bank and did nothing to staunch a global bloodletting in stock markets….

Powell said the Fed has time to wait for more data to decide how monetary policy should respond, but the central bank's focus will be on ensuring that inflation expectations remain anchored, particularly if Trump's import taxes touch off a more persistent jump in price pressures.

"While tariffs are highly likely to generate at least a temporary rise in inflation, it is also possible that the effects could be more persistent," Powell said.

In other words “HEY DONNIE, I CAN’T LOWER RATES WHEN YOU’RE DOING STUPID SHIT LIKE THIS!” You think Tariff Man will get the hint this weekend while he’s entertaining the Saudis at the LIV Golf tournament at Doral?

The good jobs report also indicates to me that the fall in the coming months is going to be even harder. We've seen how manufacturers boosted imports and orders in the first 2 months of 2025 to try to get ahead of the tariffs, and with the drop in the stock market and Trump/Musk Admin layoffs hitting Americans' pocketbooks, we are likely to see significant cutbacks sooner than later.

Trump tariffs tank the market today, and manufacturing set to tank in near future

So what's going on in the US financial news today?

Seems like it'll be quite an adjustment for people. For no good reason beyond...they can?

While there was a minor decline in the trade deficit in February compared to January, it's still a massive jump compared to where we were at the start of 2024.

February exports were $278.5 billion, $8.0 billion more than January exports. February imports were $401.1 billion, less than $0.1 billion less than January imports.

The February decrease in the goods and services deficit reflected a decrease in the goods deficit of $8.8 billion to $147.0 billion and a decrease in the services surplus of $0.8 billion to $24.3 billion.

Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $117.1 billion, or 86.0 percent, from the same period in 2024. Exports increased $24.0 billion or 4.6 percent. Imports increased $141.2 billion or 21.4 percent.

This is a clear example of businesses trying to get imports into the country before any Trump tariffs would raise the costs of those products. And in addition to that big jump in imports, new orders and shipments for manufacturing went up in February.

New orders for manufactured durable goods in February, up two consecutive months, increased $2.8 billion or 1.0 percent to $289.4 billion, up from the previously published 0.9 percent increase. This followed a 3.4 percent January increase. Transportation equipment, also up two consecutive months, led the increase, $1.5 billion or 1.5 percent to $98.4 billion. New orders for manufactured nondurable goods increased $0.8 billion or 0.3 percent to $304.5 billion.

Shipments of manufactured durable goods in February, up three consecutive months, increased $3.4 billion or 1.2 percent to $292.3 billion, unchanged from the previously published increase. This followed a 0.7 percent January increase. Transportation equipment, also up three consecutive months, led the increase, $2.0 billion or 2.1 percent to $96.7 billion. Shipments of manufactured nondurable goods, up five consecutive months, increased $0.8 billion or 0.3 percent to $304.5 billion. This followed a 0.3 percent January increase. Chemical products, up twelve of the last thirteen months, led the increase, $0.6 billion or 0.8 percent to $83.7 billion.

Let’s remember that these new orders and imports happened before the main tariffs hit, so they shouldn’t cost as much for consumers vs orders and imports that happen after the tariffs hit. But I bet that won’t stop those businesses from raising prices in the coming weeks and blaming the tariffs, while pocketing large profits on the excuse.

If we had an administration that really wanted to improve things for American workers and consumers with these tariffs, they’d include this announcement with an added emphasis on going after price-gouging companies in the coming months. But does anyone believe an administration that is defunding the CFPB and the SEC to allow companies to avoid consequences for defrauding consumers and investors is going to do anything legit to stop price-gouging? Me neither.

All of this would indicate a growth scenario in manufacturing, and we did see a rush to buy cars last month, even as consumer sentiment collapsed. But given that the economy is (to be kind) in an uncertain place, I’d be surprised if a lot of people want to run out and buy vehicles and other goods in big numbers in the near future, especially if they've already pulled some purchases forward.

That means there won't be buyers for the added orders in manufacturing, so there won't be any need to keep this level of production going. Businesses can try to pass on the higher costs from tariffs to consumers, but I doubt consumers will go along with it if they have any choice. So you’ve got a collision of several factors that lead to further declines in manufacturing in the coming months.

Now combine those cutbacks in manufacturing and consumer spending, and do you see a scenario to keep the economy growing in 2-3 months? I sure don't, and then compound it with major job losses imposed by the Trump/Musk Administration, the latest coming from the US Department of Health and Human Services.

But hey, this will bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, so it's worth it, right? Isn't that the headline on factory jobs that I saw today?

Just hours after the latest tariffs went into effect, Stellantis has announced it would idle plants and begin layoffs.

President Donald Trump’s 25% tariff on imported vehicles was put into action at midnight, Thursday, April 3. The White House has also said it plans to place tariffs on key auto parts and components.

In a letter sent out Thursday morning, Stellantis’ North American COO Antonio Filosa said that despite seeing market growth since January, the company would idle its Windsor Assembly Plant for two weeks and its Toluca Assembly Plant for April and temporarily lay off 900 workers.

"With the new automotive sector tariffs now in effect, it will take our collective resilience and discipline to push through this challenging time,“ Filosa wrote. ”But we will quickly adapt to these policy changes and will protect our company, maintain our competitive edge and continue delivering great products to our customers."

I don't think this is the “winning” that low-info voters imagined they were going to get with a Businessman in the White House. But it sure looks like the type of careless idiocy that a lot of us tried to remind these low-info dipshits about, and instead those folks decided to follow what the algo told them was "expertise" instead, and now we are all going to be paying the price.

What to look for in Tuesday's election - trends and turnouts

You may have heard there's a big statewide election here in Wisconsin on Tuesday. God knows it's hard to avoid in these parts if you watch any TV with commericals (outside of Brewers games on the FanDuel TV app, which is a nice respite), or if you're reading any Wisconsin-based newspaper.

I wanted to examine the results some previous statewide races for both Supreme Court and in statewide races that Republicans won by 1% in November 2022 and 2024, so we can get an idea what benchmarks to look for as the votes come in on Tuesday night. These races include:

The last 3 Wisconsin Supreme Court races. These races were held in April of 2019, 2020 and 2023. Conservative Brian Hagedorn won the 2019 race by less than 1%, while Dem-backed Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz won the 2020 and 2023 races by double digits each. I will also look at WisGOP Ron Johnson's win in 2022 by 1% in the US Senate race, and Donald Trump's 0.9% win in the 2024 presidential race here.

As usual, I will look at two dimensions of the election results - the amount of Wisconsin's vote share based on where votes are cast, and how much better or worse Dems or Republicans did in those areas across the various elections.

I'll start with voter turnout, which was larger in each of the last 3 Supreme Court elections, with 2023's election to decide the balance of power having total votes go up by more than 50% compared to 2019's election.

Total votes Wisconsin Supreme Court elections

2019 Wis Supreme Court 1,207,569 total votes
2020 Wis Supreme Court 1,549,697 total votes
2023 Wis Supreme Court 1,843,480 total votes

Are we making it to 2 million total votes this time? More?

Obviously who votes, and where the votes are coming from are important when analyzing things. I tend to break down Wisconsin into 7 different regions when it comes to voting results.

1. The City of Milwaukee
2. Milwaukee County outside of the City of Milwaukee
3. The WOW Counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington in the Milwaukee suburbs
4. Dane County (Madison and surrounding suburbs)
5. The BOW Counties of Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago in northeastern Wisconsin
6. The combined totals from Racine and Kenosha Counties in the SE corner of the state
7. Everywhere else in Wisconsin

As you will see, in all of these statewide elections, slightly more than half of the state's votes come from the first 6 mostly urban areas, and somewhere between 45-47% votes tend to come from the rest of the state.

You'll see that the outstate votes take up a bit more of a share of the November electorate than it has in the last 3 April elections, and so does the City of Milwaukee, while the higher-turnout areas of Dane County and the WOW Counties combine for 26-28% of the Wisconsin electorate in April, but only have made up 23-24% of the electorate in November.

This may not seem like a big difference to you, but in a state where the last 2 presidential races and the last 2 US Senate races have been decided by 1% or less, any movement of 1-2% could be a deciding factor. For example, if people in these areas voted Dem vs GOP in the same rates that they did in November 2024, but the turnout shares were the same as April 2023, Kamala Harris would have beaten Donald Trump 49.33% to 49.03% in Wisconsin, instead of Trump winning the state 49.60% to 48.74%.

This helps explain why Brad Schimel is allowing Elon Musk and the rest of the GOPs that want to flip the Court to be as bro-ey and as awful as they've acted. They need the votes of low-info and mis-info'd dipshits low-propensity voters that have voted for Trump and Johnson in November elections, but aren't as likely to vote in an April election.

The outstate voting results in Wisconsin are interesting to look at for another reason, as the Dem-supported candidates have done better there in the Wisconsin Supreme Court races (including 2019 loser Lisa Neubauer, who got 45.5% of outstate votes) than the 41-42% numbers that Mandela Barnes and Kamala Harris pulled in the last two November elections. Maybe race factors in here (Crawford is a white woman, like Neubauer, Karofsky and Protasiewicz are, and Harris and Barnes are not white), or maybe it's an April-November thing, but it's an interesting difference.

However, Neubauer did not better than Barns and Harris in Racine/Kenosha and the BOW Counties in her 2019 loss to Hagedorn, while Karofsky and Protasiewicz exceeded 50% in both of those areas in their double-digit victories.

So on Election Night, if Susan Crawford is winning in the BOW Counties and is at or near 50% in Racine and Kenosha, she's not just likely to win, but the race may be called rather early for her. Likewise, if Schimel is comfortably ahead in the BOW and Racine/Kenosha, and he is rolling up sizable margins outstate, that would put him in a strong position.

There's also been a noticeable trend in the state's 2 largest metro areas - Milwaukee and Madison. Dane County and the City of Milwaukee are strongly blue, giving between 75% and 81% of their votes for the Democratic-supported candidates in these 5 elections. But Trump did make some percentage gains in Dane County in November 2024, mostly with college bros, and that kept him from getting as destroyed in Dane like other GOP candidates had in recent elections (although Dane County's larger vote share still gave Harris a larger margin than Biden had vs Trump in 2020).

That Dane County shift for 2024 also helps explain this report that I've seen.

(Side note - If you know of anyone that's trying this, feel free to drop Wisconsin AG Josh Kaul and the Wisconsin DOJ a line at 608-266-1221, and give the local DA a jingle as well.)

We'll see if the "bro strategy" works like it did last November for WisGOP. But if abortion is a central issue to voter turnout on UW campuses in both Madison and statewide, that's advantage Crawford, as I can attest that around 3/4 of the votes at the Madison campus location I worked at in the April election came from college-aged women, and Judge Janet dominated there as well as the rest of the Madison area. You'll also see that Protasiewicz did extremely well in the Milwaukee County suburbs, grabbing nearly 65% of the vote. And as we saw above, the Milwaukee County burbs usually account for more votes than the City does in April elections, so that's a double boost for Dems if they can rebund at or near that 65% level on Tuesday.

Maybe that strong result in the Milwaukee County burbs was related to now-Justice Janet being a Milwaukee County judge at the time, or because it was less than a year after the Dobbs decision, and a more-educated people in the burbs weren't going to let Wisconsin's 1849 abortion ban stay around. Will the same suburban swing hold in April 2025, especially after Trump used trans rights as a wedge issue (and Schimel and his allies are trying some similar "you vs them" BS today)? Good question.

Lastly, we have the vote-rich WOW Counties, where Republicans used to run up the score in November elections until the Trump era, and even did so in state elections through the end of the 2010s, as the main reason Hagedorn snuck out a win over Neubauer in the 2019 Supreme Court election was because he pulled nearly 70% from WOW. But while Republicans still get the majority of the votes from the WOW Counties these days, Dems have made steady progress in shrinking the deficits.

As noted on the turnout part, WOW tends to have a larger share of the statewide vote in April elections than in November ones, and Schimel being from Waukesha County makes for an interesting wild card here. If he gets some kind of hometown boost, that could have a significant payoff in the final results.

The flip side of that is a lot of the Trump 2.0 Resistance seems to be coming from the burbs, and the WOW Counties have been slanting towards Dems in the Trump era. In fact, it was the one area of the state that Harris did better in 2024 than Biden did in 2020. Schimel tying himself to Musk and Trump could be a loser here, especially as Trump's approval rating deteriorates and more people would rather see the state Supreme Court protect Wisconsinites from Trump and Musk instead of acting as a protection racket for those 2 and their donors.

I'm not in the mood for predictions here, not after last November and not when there is a different electorate than what we have in November elections. But I do hope this helps you ID the trends and the numbers to look for, to see if Schimel or Crawford are hitting their marks, and if we get a result that is more like the Dem blowouts of 2020 and 2023, or the down-to-the-wire close GOP wins of April 2019, and November 2022 and November 2024.

Incomes, spending OK for February, but a lot bad signs for the future

We’d seen several economic reports that indicated February wasn’t going to have the bad overall numbers that we saw in January. And that continued on Friday with February’s release of the US's income and spending figures.

Personal income increased $194.7 billion (0.8 percent at a monthly rate) in February, according to estimates released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Disposable personal income (DPI)— personal income less personal current taxes—increased $191.6 billion (0.9 percent) and personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $87.8 billion (0.4 percent).

Personal outlays—the sum of PCE, personal interest payments, and personal current transfer payments—increased $118.4 billion in February. Personal saving was $1.02 trillion in February and the personal saving rate—personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income—was 4.6 percent.

That sounds like an impressive jump in incomes, which you’d think would indicate a strong economy. But look further into the report, and you’ll see that more than half of the increase in February’s incomes were in the category of “personal transfer receipts”, and not wages and salaries.

So what kind of income is that?

• The increase in personal current transfer receipts was led by government social benefits to persons and other current transfer receipts.

o Within government social benefits, the increase primarily reflected premium tax credits for health insurance purchased through the Health Insurance Marketplace.

o The increase in other current transfer receipts was led by business payments to persons, reflecting settlements from a domestic medical device manufacturer and a social media company.

It’s one-time stuff from Obamacare tax credits and class-action settlements. Not something that was widespread among a large number of Americans.

Take out that “personal transfer receipts” figure, and incomes only went up by 0.46%. Still beating inflation, but not by much, as PCE inflation was up 0.32% in February and 0.36% in the core measure that excludes food and energy.

That PCE figure is what grabbed the attention on Wall Street, which began a decline that got worse throughout the day, ending up with a loss in the DOW Jones Industrial Average of more than 700 points.

US stocks opened the day lower and began to slide as data from the Commerce Department showed inflation in February remained slightly sticky.

The Personal Consumption Expenditures index rose 2.5% year-over-year in February, unchanged from January and matching expectations. Yet the core PCE index, which strips out volatile categories like food and energy, ticked up to 2.8% year-over-year from 2.7% in January. That hotter-than-expected rise signals that inflation, while broadly cooling, remains above the Fed’s target of 2%.

Meanwhile, consumer sentiment tanked 12% this month, according to the University of Michigan’s latest survey released Friday.

The selloff gradually turned into a rout as investors dumped stocks in industries including technology, autos and airlines. Google slid 4.9%, Stellantis slid 4% and Delta Air Lines slid 5%.

The Atlanta Fed sure didn’t like the data it was getting on Thursday and Friday, as it dropped its GDP Now estimates to -2.8%, and even its “adjusted for the huge amount of gold imports in January” figure went negative.

What's remarkable is that the largest tariffs haven’t even hit yet, but inflation was already on rising in Trump 2.0’s first full month in office. In addition, another report from late this week showed the large increase in the trade deficit for goods that we saw in January didn’t go down much in February, and was nearly $148 billion for the month.

That’s a clear front-running of the tariffs, and without a big pick up in spending on those goods, you have a recipe for serious cutbacks in the coming months. Those cutbacks might not affect Q1’s employment and growth numbers, but it sure could after that.

So does it look like we’re winning with the “businessman president” and his South African billionaire sidekick/owner in charge?

Upon further review - less manufacturing and more service gigs in Wisconsin

Wanted to catch up with the Wisconsin jobs report from last week, which gave the numbers for January 2025. On the surface, not bad, but also nothing extraordinary.

Place of Residence Data: Wisconsin's unemployment rate was 3.2% in January, 0.8 percentage points below the national rate of 4.0%. Wisconsin's labor force decreased by 1,200 over the month but is up 20,700 over the year. The number of people employed decreased 3,800 over the month to 3,082,900 employed, but up 10,600 over the year.
• Place of Work Data: Total nonfarm jobs increased 5,700 over the month and increased 20,900 over the year to 3,053,300 jobs, a new high.

But as I have mentioned before, these January state jobs reports are a bigger deal to me for what the revisions of prior years show us vs what they tell us about how the new year began. And it looks like job growth in 2023 ended up being faster than we knew, and 2024 leveled off a bit more than what was previously reported.

Put it together, and Wisconsin had 5,500 more total jobs at the end of 2024 than what we knew before, but 500 fewer jobs in the private sector.

Not much of a change within the overall picture. But it should be a big concern to see that manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin did not recover last year, as was originally reported, but instead continued to lose jobs in late 2023 and all of 2024.

The lower revisions in manufacturing were made up for with higher amounts of jobs in several sectors, including: professional services (+7,500), private educational services (+3,300), health care and social assistance (+4,200), accommodation and food services (+7,400), and local government (+5,500).

These revisions are heavily influenced by the recently released update to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which runs through September 2024, and you’ll find that Wisconsin wasn’t alone when it came to Midwestern states having subpar job numbers. Both overall and especially in manufacturing.

It's a small consolation that Wisconsin ended up 2nd for job growth in the Midwest between September 2023 and September 2024 in that QCEW survey (+0.44%, only trailing Minnesota). It again illustrates that while job growth kept continuing in 2024, it wasn’t at the same strong pace we saw in the first 2 years of the Biden tenure in the White House. And maybe that was a hidden thing that a lot of us didn’t account for ahead of the November election.

Despite the slower job growth, the overall picture in Wisconsin still seemed good for January. The state’s unemployment rate was still low at 3.2%, well below the US rate of 4.0%. While above the state’s lows of 2.6% at the end of 2022 and start of 2023, we also saw the state’s labor force grow by nearly 78,600 over the last 2 years, and the number of working Wisconsinites went up by more than 62,000 in the same time period. And the revisions show that even more Wisconsinites were in the labor force and in jobs than we knew before.

I’ll take that, but it also underscores the real challenge in keeping the growth in the labor force and jobs going for 2025. And with headwinds like tariffs and job cuts for federal workers and researchers, what’s happening in DC is going to be a serious barrier to things getting better in Wisconsin in the near future.

A tale of 2 tax plans

2 recent releases spell it out well, both at the state and federal level, when it comes to tax plans.

On the national side, here's what Yale University got when they looked at spending cuts and tax changes in the Trump/GOP budget outline.

Back here in Wisconsin, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau has just released its distributional analysis of Governor Evers' tax initiatives in his 2025-27 budget. And it shows that nearly 3/4 of Wisconsinites will pay lower income taxes under Evers' plan, and just over 1% (which are almost all 1%ers) will pay more.

In addition, Evers includes property tax cuts as a method of giving more state funding to schools and municipalities, along with a sizable increase in spending that generally assists more lower-income Wisconsinites than higher income ones (although a lot of the Evers initiatives are universal in nature).

WisGOPs are likely to remove most if not all of these items, and push a tax cut that will undoubtably give the highest benefits to the richest Wisconsinites.

Choose you tax plan accordingly, folks!

Lots of imports, no tariff consistency, and few orders to match? Not a good combo

The country's manufacturing situation was already struggling before Donald Trump took office, with over 100,000 jobs lost in the sector in 2024, and America now has 135,000 fewer jobs in manufacturing than they did in its February 2023 peak.

There was a growth in new orders for manufacturing in January following 2 months of declines to round out 2024. But as I have mentioned before, the boost in new manufactured orders for January was almost entirely due to a one-month increase of $9.8 billion in non-defense aircraft. The dollar amount for the other 97% of manufactured goods was basically unchanged, with new orders for auto bodies actually dropping by 1.5%, and construction machinery orders down 2.2% for January, and down 6.4% year-over-year.

Then turn around to another report from last week which showed a massive increase in imports for January, in order to front-run possible Trump tariffs. This was especially true with “finished metal shapes”, which went from $13.75 billion of imports in December to $34.23 billion in January. These are basically pre-made structural beams and tubes that require little to no further manufacturing once it gets to America.

Given today's events, you can see why manufacturers of metal items were trying to stockpile their imports. Look at this routine from our Dear Leader, which helped prompt another losing day on Wall Street.

President Donald Trump is reversing course and no longer doubling tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, Peter Navarro, the White House’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said Tuesday.

The abrupt shift comes in response to Ontario Premier Doug Ford saying he would suspend a 25% electricity surcharge on about 1.5 million U.S. energy users in New York, Michigan and Minnesota....

Trump's turnabout came after saying Tuesday morning that he would be doubling tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports, set to go in effect Wednesday, from 25% to 50%. With Trump backtracking, the steel and aluminum tariff rate for Canadian imports will remain at 25%.

So who knows how much it'll cost to import these products tomorrow, or how much it'll cost to make them here? Not a recipe to keep the economy growing, that's for sure.

But all of that extra product is going to have to be sold some time soon. And if some burst of demand doesn’t appear in the coming months (and it ain't), those products might have to be dumped at a loss, without much of a need for further orders and business in future months and years. Those bad business situations would be even worse if demand goes down due to recession.

Oh, and did I mention there was an increase of more than $1 billion in passenger car imports for January at the same time that there was that January decline in orders for auto bodies, and a January increase in inventories for cars and trucks. But at the same time, tariffs seem likely to raise prices of imported cars right when there is a lack of demand from both business and consumers.

If the laws of supply and demand still exist, it sure seems like we have a recipe for falling profits and lower production in the auto industry. And likely other manufacturing industries.

Jobs report and Powell's words mask that worse numbers are likely coming soon

The monthly jobs report always get headlines and notice in both the financial and economic media. But this was especially true for the report for February that dropped on Friday, as there had been significant turmoil in Washington DC over the last month with mass firings announced at numerous federal agencies by the unelected (and unauthorized) Elon Musk and his broccoli-haired dweeby acolytes.

So here came the report on Friday and it ended up...mostly business as usual for now.

That seems odd, given all the stories we've been reading. Also, federal government jobs were only down 10,000 and not 100,000+. So what gives?

Ahh, that explains it. You'll have to wait untilnext week to see the larger drop in federal jobs...if the numbers are legit, of course.

What saved the stock market from having yet another down day were statements later on Friday from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Powell said that the Fed would....wait and see, I guess?

"We do not need to be in a hurry and are well-positioned to wait for greater clarity."

The central bank leader added in a Q&A portion following his speech that "the cost of being cautious is very, very low. The economy is fine. It doesn't need us to do anything, really, so we can wait and we should wait."…..

"The new administration is in the process of implementing significant policy changes in four distinct areas: trade, immigration, fiscal policy, and regulation," Powell said. "It is the net effect of these policy changes that will matter for the economy and for the path of monetary policy."

In other words, a one-time spike in prices due to tariffs alone would not be appropriate for the central bank to react to, according to Powell, since restrictive monetary policy would reduce employment and activity at a time when it would not be needed....

Still, Powell cautioned that most economists are forecasting some inflationary effects from tariffs that will likely hit exporters, importers, retailers, and, to some extent, even consumers. If those effects are significant enough to impact longer-term inflation expectations within the context of the current environment, "that would matter," Powell said.

That doesn't seem like anything that should give you great confidence that things will stay as good as they were in 2024, or that interest rates will be going down more any time in the future. But I guess Powell and Wall Street traders aren't going to admit that reality until the DOGE job losses actually hit the jobs reports and unemployment claim numbers over the next month, and we see another month of disappointing consumer spending.

While the February jobs report seems relatively benign, there was one part in the full official release that seems to be getting ignored.

The number of people employed part time for economic reasons increased by 460,000 to 4.9 million in February. These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs.

The number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job increased by 414,000 to 5.9 million in February. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job.

The number of people whose hours were limited due to economic reasons were at their highest non-COVID levels since 2018, and the number of people who have held themselves out of the labor force despite wanting work is at its highest non-COVID level since 2016.

That seems like a sizable one-month increase for both of these categories, and it was a big reason why the U-6 unemployment rate jumped from 7.5% to 8.0% in February.The U-6 increase could be a weird one-month thing in a cold month, so we can see what next month's report says before panicking. But it could be a clear sign of trouble where one large-scale event of job loss and/or drop in economic activity ends any chance of growth, and tips us over into recession (HI, DOGE!) . And once that cycle starts, it takes a lot more effort to reverse the momentum of job and demand losses.

Federal budget update - still nothing close to decided

Not that this should surprise anyone, but when Republicans say their budget plans don't cut Medicaid, they are claiming something that is literally impossible. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed it this week (read the report here if you want).

And the Wisconsin Medicaid Coaliton gave a quick summary of what those numbers translate to.

The CBO analysis finds the committee has only $581 Billion in spending that is not Medicaid or Medicare. Congressional leadership has long promised no cuts to Medicare which would mean a minimum of $299 Billion in cuts to Medicaid, and only if it made deep cuts to other safety net programs. In fact, eliminating every program besides safety net programs only adds up to $135 Billion.

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Budget Resolution that commits the House to $2 Trillion in cuts, with at least $880 Billion in cuts assigned to committee covering Medicaid. Based on previous proposals from House Budget Committee Republican leadership, the $880 Billion in cuts are widely anticipated to come from the Medicaid program.

Remember that what passed the House wasn’t any type of specifics, but an outline of a budget with total numbers, and the committees that would figure out the details. If the Senate were to agree to this budget resolution (which they haven’t yet), then we’d have to get into the actual programs and specific programs that get cut to make the US budget match up with those numbers, or at least the same amount of deficit.

As a reminder, here are the required changes in all the committees to match up to the budget resolution of $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years.

The Senate passed its own budget resolution in February that would have increased spending on macho Trumpian stuff like border security and defense, and planned to wait until later to do the taxing and budget cuts part. But it now seems that they will try to jam everything into one mess of a bill, although any Senate outline that gets revealed won’t come out for a while.

Senate Republicans adopted a budget reflecting their desired, two-bill strategy, which would have put the tax changes in a separate bill later this year. They are now switching to the one-bill track, but not before they address necessary changes to the House product to pass muster with their members.

The Senate Finance Committee, Thune noted, has quietly been socializing ideas with Senate Republicans on the tax piece and Senate Republicans are expected to talk about the House budget during their own closed-door lunches this week. It will mark the first chance leadership will have to take the temperature of the whole group at once.

Senate GOP leadership staff also briefed senior Senate Republican staffers during a meeting on Monday, indicating that they were still in the very early stages of ironing out a deal on the House budget resolution. Senate Republicans hold multiple staff meetings, which are run by leadership offices, at the start of every week.

While Senate Republicans grapple privately with the House budget resolution, Senate Republicans are expected to focus floor activity next week on a much closer deadline: funding the government.

Oh yeah, there’s that too!

The government shutdown deadline is looming for a week from Friday, and deals with the current year budget, to allow spending for the next 6 1/2 months. It is not the 2026 budget that would have the Medicaid cuts and GOP's tax giveaways in it. While House Speaker Mike Johnson says he plans for a vote on Tuesday to avoid a shutdown, let’s see if that actually happens.

If not, it could quite a different case of March Madness up on Capitol Hill next week. And we'd better not see one Dem vote for anything put up by the GOP until the unauthorized dweebs at DOGE and Elon Musk are driven out of DC, because otherwise we can't guarantee that our tax dollars will go anywhere other than the pockets of the crooks getting 6 figures to make things more inefficient in DC, and to screw things up for everyday Americans.

Manufacturing struggles to start 2025, and that's before any tariffs

We had another day of concerning economic news for America. Even though the Manufacturing Index from the Institute of Supply Management (ISM) showed expansion for the 2nd straight month, it was considered a disappointing. That,along with other Trumpian stpudity,caused the DOW Jones Industrial Average to give up all of its 600+ point gain from Friday.

Timothy Fiore chairs ISM's Manufacturing Business Survey Committee, and his notes are ominous.

…Demand weakened, while output stabilized and inputs, for the first time in several months, contributed to PMI® growth. Indications that demand weakened include: the (1) New Orders Index dropped into contraction territory, (2) New Export Orders Index continued expanding, but at a slower rate, (3) Backlog of Orders Index continued in contraction, but moved upward, and (4) Customers’ Inventories Index moved further into ‘too low’ territory. Output (measured by the Production and Employment indexes) was stable. Factory output marginally expanded compared to January, indicating that panelists’ companies are being cautious about ramping up output in the face of economic headwinds. The Employment Index moved back into contraction, as panelists’ companies continued to release workers. More companies cited ‘attriting down’ as the best process, with destaffing not as urgent as it was in the second half of 2024. Inputs — defined as supplier deliveries, inventories, prices and imports — revealed the first signs of supplier difficulties due to some pull-forward deliveries and discussions about who will pay for tariffs. Inventories recovered somewhat as a result.

Then you go inside the numbers for both February and for January, and it seems evident that a one-time pre-tariff bump in orders from January has gone away, and that manufacturing suppliers and businesses are raising prices even before the tariffs are put in place.

The data complements Friday’s report that told us the dollar amount of imported goods went up by nearly $35 billion in January compared to December (11.9%), including a $22 billion increase in industrial supplies and a $6 billion increase in consumer goods. That spiked the trade deficit in goods by more than 25%, and caused the Atlanta Fed to project a decline in economic growth for the first quarter of Trump Presidency 2.0. There also was a sizable increase in new orders for manufactured goods for January. But that increase was almost entirely due to a jump in nondefense aircraft and parts, and that sector also is the cause behind a large jump in unfilled orders in manufacturing. That overall increase in new orders nearly reversed monthly declines of 1.8% in December and 2.0% in November.

However, that same report has a significant 2.5% decline in new orders for motor vehicles and parts in January. It was the 4th consecutive month that new car and parts orders have gone down, and by (seasonally adjusted) dollar amounts, it's the lowest in 2 ½ years. That's a significant turnaround from the end of 2024, where cars and auto parts accounted for nearly 1/5 of the country’s GDP growth of 2.3%.

And sales of cars in America were even worse, as inflation-adjusted auto sales declined by 6% in January. It was a key reason behind a surprising 0.5% drop in inflation-adjusted consumer spending for that month, which was the other reason we saw projections of economic growth falling on Friday.

Again, these worrying numbers in January happened before tariffs were imposed. And Pras Submramanian of Yahoo Finance mentions that the price tag will be noticeable.

The Anderson Economic Group (AEG) found that vehicles like EV crossovers could have price hikes of over $12,000 depending on the vehicle if proposed tariffs of 25% go into effect on Canadian and Mexican imports. According to news reports, Trump is expected to decide on tariff levels today.

The tariffs don't just affect vehicles imported from those countries, but also parts that cross over the border many times during the production process, adding to additional tariff costs. The costs would almost all be passed on to US buyers, the study said.

Other popular vehicles, like a standard, gas-powered crossover, could see hikes of at least $3,500, while pickup trucks — a staple of working-class Americans and small business owners — could see costs jump as much as $8,000 due to the tariff effect.

Full-size SUVs could see costs rise by $9,000, and small cars could see a hike of $6,200.

With all of these imports coming into the country, and the threat of tariffs raising prices, it’s hard to see where consumer demand rebounds for these items any time in the near future. Sure, January has volatile numbers due to seasonality. But weak numbers for February and March might put things on a point of no return.

Given the huge amount of front-running of orders, imports and inventory, a lack of demand for manufactured goods should cause cutbacks in both production and jobs. And that would mean even more rough times for American manufacturing after 3 years of stagnation and/or decline in the sector, which started with the Federal Reserve raising interest rates in early 2022.

A Bad Friday for US economic reports

We now have more proof that the economy hit the skids in January, with consumer spending going down, even as Americans got a solid starting-year boost in their wallets.

The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge eased modestly last month, data indicated Friday, but personal spending figures showed one of the biggest pullbacks in three years, suggesting further weakness in the world's biggest economy….

The BEA's headline PCE inflation index quickened to an annual rate of 2.5%, matching Wall Street's estimate and slightly below the 2.6% pace recorded in December. The BEA said prices rose 0.3% on the month, following a 0.3% reading in December.

The BEA also noted that personal incomes for January rose 0.9%, more than double Wall Street's estimate and the 0.3% forecast, while spending slumped 0.2% compared with the 0.7% advance in the prior month.

A slowdown in consumer spending, which was also evident in the Commerce Department's January reading of retail sales, is crucial for an economy that relies on the services sector for around two-thirds of its growth.

An even bigger drag on growth came with another report on Friday, which showed a massive boost in imports ahead of Trump taking office, which led to a big jump in the trade deficit for goods.

The U.S. trade deficit in goods widened sharply in January, most likely as businesses front-loaded imports ahead of tariffs, potentially positioning trade to be a drag on economic growth in the first quarter.

The goods trade gap surged 25.6% to $153.3 billion last month, the Commerce Department's Census Bureau said on Friday. Goods imports vaulted 11.9% to $325.4 billion….

On Thursday, Trump said a 25% tariff on Mexican and Canadian goods would take effect on March 4, after being delayed for a month, along with an extra 10% duty on Chinese imports, on top of 10% already imposed. Other duties aimed at imported steel, aluminum and motor vehicles will either soon go into effect or are in fast-track development.

Looking at the report that goes over the trade in goods, it looks like the biggest front-running was done in industrial supplies (up nearly 33% in January vs December!), but there was also a $4 billion increase in imported capital goods, and nearly $6 billion more in consumer goods.

That huge jump in imports without a corresponding increase in exports also subtracts from economic growth, and combined with January’s drop in consumer spending that we’ve now seen for both retail sales and this spending and income report, and the Atlanta Fed had a stunning change in how things look for Q1 so far.

Sure, a lot of this is based on the trade imbalance deducting 3.7% from the GDP totals. But the Atlanta Fed’s estimate for consumer spending growth’s boost to the economy has gone down by more than 2/3 as data has come in throughout February. And this January data was before the Trump/Musk layoffs and chaos hit the federal government and its contractors.

So as March dawns, it seems unlikely that the economy is doing much to reverse the downward track that it was on in the first month of 2025. If we get honest data in the coming weeks that shows February was as bad as January (that’s a definite if with this crew) , when do we start seeing demands to do something about a coming recession? And for Trump/GOPs to pay an increasing price for the reckless austerity and trade policy that upended what was a solidly growing economy in late 2024.

And oh yeah, have I mentioned that the government is slated to shut down with the debt ceiling being breached in 2 weeks? GOOD TIMES!

Medicaid stuff and what it might do to Wisconsin's budget. And Wisconsinites

I wanted to riff a bit about where we are at with Medicaid, both as part of the discussions around GOP Tax Scam 2.0, and in how this might affect our state's budget.

You may have heard that the GOPs in the House were able to cobble together a budget bill yesterday, squeaking it through without another vote to spare. I heard some people take on an attitude of "Medicaid is now doomed!" following that vote, and that's not close to true. As Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress tells us, what was voted on yesterday was an OUTLINE of a budget, and there are plenty of steps left.

You'll notice that there aren't any specifics besides what committee adds or reduces spending, or in what way the Ways and Means Committee would cut taxes by up to $4.5 trillion over 10 years.

It's that Energy and Commerce item of $880 billion in cuts where Medicaid comes in, since that is where Medicaid funding is determined. Which led to this pathetic attempt at spin by GOP House leadership last night.

It is literally impossible to get $880 billion in savings over 10 years from that committee without deep cuts to Medicaid. That's not a liberal take, it's MATH.

So now this budget resolution heads to the US Senate, and the one Wisconsin US Senator that does actual work had an event in Milwaukee this week to discuss the potential Medicaid cuts.

"Congressional Republicans are ripping away health care from our most vulnerable to fund tax breaks for their wealthy friends," Baldwin said in a press conference last week with other Democrats. "Cuts of this size will endanger the health and lives of millions of Americans….

"In Wisconsin, about one in five residents are covered by Medicaid in some form. Last fiscal year, close to 1 million people, more than half of them children, were covered by BadgerCare Plus, the state's largest Medicaid program, in an average month. Hundreds of thousands more, including low-income seniors and disabled people, were covered by other Medicaid programs, such as Family Care and the Katie Beckett program.

Together, the programs in Wisconsin cost more than $12 billion to run each year. Federal taxpayers pick up more than half of Wisconsin's Medicaid expenses. For most Medicaid services, for every 40 cents in state dollars spent, the federal government pays 60 cents.

And that's an amount that would go up Back in September, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) said that even if Medicaid wasn’t expanded in the state, there was still expected to be an increase in Federal funding of over $1.73 billion in this biennium, and total FED funding of $16.85 billion overall. Governor Evers’ Administration later estimated the FED increase would be even higher, at $2.65 billion. That’s because of an expectation of increased costs of services and higher enrollments over the next two years (in what was estimated to be a growing economy, mind you).

In addition, Evers’ budget asks for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which would increase FED coverage of costs by $2.51 billion, while reducing the share of state tax dollars by more than $1.9 billion (costs are higher in the program overall because the number of Wisconsinites eligible for Medicaid would go up).

Those numbers were based on the current laws of 2024, with Biden-era incentives and extra coverage for Medicaid expansion staying on. Now throw that into reverse, where not only do the Federal incentives for Medicaid expansion and increased coverage not get used, but also where the Feds cover less of any expense associated with the Medicaid programs that currently exist (a likely way that Trump/GOP would find “savings” to pay for their tax cuts to the rich).

If more state tax dollars are going into BadgerCare services, the $4.3 billion that we are slated to have in the bank on July 1 will go away quickly.

Another aspect to possible GOP health care "savings" was outlined in a different Journal-Sentinel story on how Trump/GOP wants to cut funds that help Americans figure out their options under Medicaid and other health care programs.

This month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it would cut funding nationwide for navigator programs, which help enroll people in health coverage, to $10 million, a drop of about 90%.

"A cut of this size will impact our ability to provide all the services and all the information in as timely a way as possible," said Allison Espeseth, director of Covering Wisconsin, the navigator program for the state.

Federal funding makes up about three-quarters of Covering Wisconsin's budget, Espeseth said. The cuts would occur starting in its next budget cycle in late August, she said….

Navigators differ from insurance brokers in key ways. Brokers, who rely on commissions, were far less likely to help consumers sign up for Medicaid, the publicly-funded insurance program for low-income people, or for the Children's Health Insurance Program, also known as CHIP, according to a 2022 survey by the health policy research group KFF.

Last year, Covering Wisconsin helped enroll more than 9,600 people in marketplace coverage or in Medicaid, Espeseth said. More broadly, the agency assisted around 60,000 people with questions or other issues that year, she said.

And those navigators have been especially busy in recent years, as Wisconsinites were de-enrolled from Medicaid after COVID-era laws expired, which led many people to seek health care through the Obamacare exchanges. There also was a boost given through the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed by a Dem-run Congress and signed by President Biden in 2022, which expanded tax credits to people who got their coverage on the exchanges.

As the Legislative Fiscal Bureau reports, Wisconsin had a record number of sign-ups for coverage under the Obamacare exchanges in 2024, with more likely to have signed up in this year.

While this may not be directly related to Medicaid cuts, those enhanced subsidies for ACA exchange policies need to be renewed by the end of the year. And the Kaiser Family Foundation went into what would happen if expanded subsidies are allowed to expire on January 1.

If the enhanced subsidies expire, monthly premium payments for the vast majority of Marketplace enrollees will increase sharply starting January 1, 2026. Among subsidized enrollees living in states that use Healthcare.gov (where data are available), premium payments would have been an average of 93% higher in 2024 without the enhanced tax credits. (Wisconsin is one of those states). If these enhanced subsidies expire, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that there will be an average of 3.8 million more uninsured people each year. Unsubsidized premiums will also likely rise as healthier enrollees drop their coverage. While some state-based Marketplaces offer additional premium financial assistance for certain enrollees, the amount of and availability of these state subsidies would not be enough to fully replace the federal enhanced subsidies….

The expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits would mean that people with incomes over four times the poverty level are no longer eligible for financial assistance. Prior to the availability of enhanced subsidies, ACA Marketplace premium assistance eligibility capped at 400% of poverty (which is $60,240 for a single person or $81,760 for a couple in 2025). If enhanced subsidies expire, Marketplace enrollees making just above 400% of poverty will encounter the “subsidy cliff” and would face the full price of a Marketplace plan. If the enhanced subsidies expire, a 60-year-old couple making $82,000 (401% of poverty) would see their premium payment for the benchmark silver plan, on average, at least double in the vast majority of congressional districts. The benchmark silver premium for a 60-year-old couple at this income would triple or more, on average, in 328 congressional districts.

A 40-year-old Marketplace enrollee in the contiguous U.S. making $31,000 (206% of poverty) would see monthly premium payments in 2025 rise by $95 (a 165% increase) from $58 to $153. (Alaska and Hawaii have different poverty guidelines). Nationally, there are 75 congressional districts where at least 10% of the population is enrolled in the Marketplace. For a 40-year-old making $31,000, premium payments would at least double on average in all 75 districts. 62 of these districts are in Florida, Georgia and Texas. 38 of these 62 districts are represented by Republicans while 24 are represented by Democrats.

Under the enhanced phase out caps, Marketplace enrollees with incomes up to 150% of poverty currently pay zero (or near zero) dollars for a benchmark silver plan. Should the enhanced subsidies expire, enrollees in this income group will be on the hook for some of the cost of their premiums if they want to keep a silver plan. Before the enhanced subsidies went into effect, Marketplace enrollees at this income group paid about 2-4% of their income for a benchmark plan. A sizeable portion of the Marketplace population benefits from zero dollar premiums, with 42% of HealthCare.gov enrollees in 2024 paying nothing for Marketplace coverage (up from 14% of HealthCare.gov enrollees in 2021).

That increase in out-of-pocket costs would be a hell of a sticker shock for a lot of people as 2026 begins, and Trump/GOPs would rightfully be blamed for it, especially if those "savings" are done to lower taxes for the rich.

And the more that Trump/GOP would reduce Federal funds to pay for health care services, it reduces the funds available for any kind of tax cuts in Wisconsin. That's true whether you're talking about the extra funding to allow property tax cuts like Gov Evers wants in his budget, or the general income tax cuts that Wisconsin Republicans seem to support. So maybe WisGOP’s state legislators should try to get in touch with their Congressional counterparts and tell them that it isn’t a good idea to mess with Medicaid at this point, for multiple reasons. Or else they’ll all be out of power in 2027 (well, even more likely to lose power than they already are).