Feb jobs losses regresses us back to 2025's stagnant job market

If you thought January’s six-figure gain in jobs was the sign of a rebound for the economy in 2026 (something I told you to be cautious about at the time), you got slapped into a rough reality with the jobs report for February.

The US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, Labor Department data released Friday showed, sharply missing economists' expectations and stalling the nascent hiring growth that started the year.

The unemployment rate edged up to 4.4%, while the share of people who have been without work for 27 weeks or more as a percentage of all unemployed hit 25.3%.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had anticipated 55,000 new positions after January's surprise print of 130,000 payrolls. Those gains were also revised lower by 4,000 positions, while December's previously reported addition of 48,000 jobs was updated to a loss of 17,000 — a combined culling of 69,000 roles from the last two employment reports.

It was especially shocking to see one sector in particular have a negative number in this report.

Healthcare, the one sector that has been gaining amid otherwise stagnant job growth, saw job losses of 28,000 in February amid strike activity, the Labor Department said. Shruti Mishra, an economist at Bank of America Securities, had noted in a research report previewing the jobs data that a massive strike among Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California and Hawaii could weigh on February’s payroll growth, since 31,000 employees walked off the job.

Still, health care had been averaging a gain of more than 35,000 jobs a month over the previous 12 months, so it’s still a significant change, and worth seeing if that is the start of something, or a one-month blip.

That said, I don’t think these job losses mean we suddenly fell into a recession in February, as much as I think it’s a seasonally-adjusted regression to the norm from January’s unbelievable numbers. If you take the gain of 126,000 jobs from January and then subtract the loss of 92,000 here, you get a total gain of 34,000 jobs between the 2 months. That’s an average gain of 17,000 a month, which is actually more than what we averaged in 2025 (now at a downwardly revised average of less than 10,000 jobs a month).

But this report also illustrates how an already-slowing jobs market from 2024 and early 2025 had gains grind to a halt starting in April 2025, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs. In fact, the US had more jobs then than we do now.

In the household survey, the slight increase in the unemployment rate to 4.4% reflected an increase in the number of unemployed by 203,000 combined with a near-zero increase in the labor force (+18,000). But the February report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also included later-than-normal annual updates of the population assumptions for that survey. And the official report told of this interesting adjustment.

Table A shows that the adjustment decreased the estimated size of the civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over in December by 231,000. However, the adjustment increased the number of people not in the labor force by 1.2 million and decreased both the total civilian labor force and the -5- number of employed people by 1.4 million each. The adjustment lowered the labor force participation rate by 0.4 percentage point and lowered the employment-population ratio by 0.5 percentage point. The adjustment had little effect on the total unemployment level (+15,000), and the unemployment rate was unchanged.

So nearly 1.5 million fewer men in the population and 1.6 million fewer men working than what was assumed, but the increased female population doesn’t translate into that many more women working. And in both cases, those adjustments mean a smaller percentage of Americans were actually working than what we thought – to the lowest non-COVID levels in since 2015.

It also means that the size of the labor force and number of people working in America is smaller than what we thought it was this time last year. Which also may mean our capacity for job growth is even more limited for job growth in 2026 (especially if we keep ICEing immigrants).

Lastly, average hourly wages had a solid increase for February, but raises for everyday non-supervisory workers are lagging

In February, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 15 cents, or 0.4 percent, to $37.32. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.8 percent. In February, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose by 9 cents, or 0.3 percent, to $32.03.

And the year-over-year increase for nonsupervisory employees is also below the overall average, at 3.7%. That's back to pre-COVID levels, but in a time where inflation is higher than it was pre-COVID.

In summary, January’s good jobs report was a seasonally-adjusted illusion that masked the fact that we’re in a jobs market that has near-zero job growth, with demographics getting less favorable to break that stagnation. Unemployment is higher than it was a couple of years ago, but it also hasn’t jumped in a way that it would in a recession.

So if there isn’t some kind of inflation shock from a stupid war and/or a declining stock market, we should stay on the slow-growth trend we were in for the second half of 2025. I mean, it’s not like something’s happened over the last week to change that outlook, is there?

Hoo boy....

The data shows Iran-related price spikes at the pump are greed, not economics.

After a week of bombing Iran and related Middle Eastern strife, you may have noticed an increase of prices at the pump. AAA sure has.

It's a similar straight-line jump in prices to what we saw 4 years ago after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and the Biden Administration and much of the rest of the Western World placed sanctions on Putin's oil-rich country. In that case, prices went up by 70 cents in the first 2 weeks of March, nearly 20% higher than what they were before the invasion.

But just like the situation in 2022, we also know that all the oil that is in the gasoline at those pumps has been in this country for weeks and months. And even more so than in 2022, we should be suspicious of these price hikes, because gasoline is more plentiful now than it was 4 years ago.

And part of the reason gasoline is more plentiful is that gasoline usage is generally lower than it was for much of 2022.

"But Jake, what about oil prices now? Yeah, oil futures are up a lot this week, going over $80 a barrel for the first time since the Summer of 2024 before dropping down below $80 in overnight trading.

But see that APR '26 reference? That's for the price of oil in 2 months, not today.

Put it all together, and there is no supply-and-demand reason for gasoline to be spiking the way it is. It's a profit grab, and I'd like to see people like Wisconsin AG Josh Kaul publicly be saying that he will go after gas stations and other chains that use these war actions in Iran as a reason to take extra funds out of the pockets of Wisconsin drivers.

Now that doesn't mean there won't be real economic effects and warranted higher prices in the future. And the resulting inflation of costs and consumer products should end any talk of further rate cuts for any time in the next few months - especially as the year-over-year inflation rate likely goes back over 3%. But the current price increases at the pump? All speculation and greed.

PPI report shows inflation still a thing, and lower prices for farmers also aren't good

If you thought INFLATON WATCH might be fading in 2026, Friday's report on the Producer Price Index says product inputs were still getting more expensive for businesses in January.

The Labor Department reported Friday that its producer price index, which measures inflation before it hits consumers, rose 0.5% from December and 2.9% from January 2025. Economists had forecast a 0.3% increase for the month and 1.6% year over year, according to a survey by the data firm FactSet.

Excluding food and energy prices, which bounce around from month to month, so-called core wholesale prices rose 0.8% from December and 3.6% from January 2025 — both higher than forecasters had expected. The year-over-year increase in core prices was the biggest since March of last year.

Driving the increase was an uptick in the wholesale price of services, led by higher profit margins for retailers and wholesalers. The increase suggests that companies are passing along the cost of President Donald Trump's tariffs to their customers.

“Retailers’ tariff bill has come down marginally in the last few months, but they have continued to lift their selling prices,” Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a commentary.

It seems odd that we’d still be seeing tariff effects starting to kick in 9 months after Trump first announced them, but when you see a 2.9% increase for January in business sales of “private capital equipment” (and 6.9% in the last 2 months) and a 2.4% increase for business sales of “personal consumption goods” (and 3.4% in the last 2 months), I can’t see what else it would be.

You dig into specific products, and it also looks like tariffs were hiking prices for some goods in January.

Change in Producer Prices, January 2026
Communication + Related Equip. +8.6%
Nonferrous Metals +4.9%
Iron and Steel Scrap +3.2%
Electronic Computers + Equip. +1.0%

On the positive side, food prices at the wholesale level dropped by 1.5% for January. And despite not fulfilling a number of promises over the last year, Trump can at least claim success in bringing down the price of eggs!

Change in Producer Prices, January 2026
Eggs -63.9% (!)
Fresh fruits and melons -10.5%
Oilseeds -7.7%
Fresh/dry vegetables -5.7%
Grains -5.6%
Dairy products -1.9%

Now, those price declines might not all be great if you’re a farmer and you’re getting less from your products (a common complaint from ag types about the tariffs, since they can’t sell as much overseas).

Sure enough, we saw farm bankruptcies go up in Year 1 of Trump 2.0, reaching the highest levels since….Trump 1.0. With Wisconsin having the largest increase in the Midwest.

We’ll see if those reduced food prices at the wholesale level translate into lower prices at the supermarket in the coming months, or if those companies grab higher profits as a result prices remain “sticky”.

What’s also concerning in the PPI report is that the 0.5% increase in prices for January would have been even higher, but gasoline dropped by 5.5% and energy overall went down by 2.7%. I don’t see that continuing for much longer given that oil futures had gone up by nearly $10 a barrel since the start of the year, even before we started bombing Iran this weekend on Israel's orders as Trump attempts to distract from the Epstein Files and his other Trump failures.

I don't see it as a good sign when some types of businesses are paying higher prices on one end due to tariff effects and generally higher costs, while more farmers are going bankrupt for the few areas where costs are going down. And what's going to change these trends for the rest of 2026, besides weaker demand from more people losing their jobs in a recession?

Property taxes and schools. Time to separate the vouchers from all of it?

School funding and property taxes are usually important issues in state-level elections in Wisconsin. And a report from today from WalletHub illustrates why, as Wisconsin is back among the top 10 states in property tax rates.

The analysis says Wisconsin’s property tax rate averages 1.42% of value, although I will add that we drop to 16th when looking at property taxes paid on the median-priced home (at $3,792), because Wisconsin’s median home value of $266,500 is below the nationwide median of $332,700.

Of course, if your community has passed a referendum and/or has a high amount of property value, your property taxes may be quite a bit higher than the $3,792 median that WalletHub lists for Wisconsin (raises hand).

On the positive side, Wisconsin is among the 25 states that don’t have a property tax for vehicles, unlike lower home-tax Indiana (average assessment is $350 there), and several Southern and Western states.

Source: WalletHub

But even though we have no vehicle tax, we have high property taxes in Wisconsin, and a new lawsuit filed by several school districts and education organizations helps to explain why. Public school districts have less state assistance to operate their schools, while local revenues (property taxes, mostly) have had to make up some of the difference

In the 1999–2000 school year, public school district revenue broke down as 53.7% state, 41.6% local, and 4.7% federal. By 2023–24, the most recent year of available data, that mix had shifted to 45% state, 43% local, and 12% federal.

The state share notably declined, beginning in earnest after the 2008 recession, and has never fully recovered. Meanwhile, the local revenue share has increased, and the federal contribution has nearly tripled, driven largely by temporary pandemic relief funding.

In the 2 years since then, COVID-era federal assistance has declined significantly, but General Aids from the state were not increased for 2025-26 by the WisGOP Legislature, resulting in over 70% of Wisconsin districts having less state aid this year vs 2024-25. As a result, even more of K-12’s costs are going onto the property tax.

The lawsuit also mentions two other reasons that Wisconsinites are paying higher property taxes for K-12 schools.

Had revenue limits kept pace with inflation since the 2009–10 school year, today school districts would receive an additional $3,380 in revenue per-pupil.

Making matters worse, the Legislature has placed a significant additional strain on public education by creating and greatly expanding a competing system of largely unregulated and unaccountable voucher programs for private schools (“voucher schools”). These schools have expanded from educating 341 students in 1990 to over 59,000 students in the 2025–26 school year.

The insufficient revenue limits have led schools to go to referendum to exceed those revenue limits in order to keep operating at the same (or even reduced) level of services. And outside of Milwaukee, school vouchers for private schools are funded by taking away funds from the public school district that the child lives in. Even if the child never attended a day of public school in the district.

That’s $394 million being reduced from K-12 public schools to pay for these voucher programs, and also results in up to $394 million in additional property taxes to make up the difference.

Which is why I think this question in the latest Marquette Law School Poll of Wisconsinites is kind of BS.

This is a false choice, because the correct answer is “BOTH”. It’s wrong to say that the only way we have to raise funding for our community schools is through property taxes. If we added state aids, we could have added resources for the schools without having to raise property taxes.

And even if we don’t outright ban vouchers (we’ll file that idea away for the future), there is no reason that we need to be forcing property tax increases as a result of that program. Make the voucher program fully state funded, and stop penalizing home owners when we give money to parents so their kids can separate themselves from the schools in their community.

Based on what the Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated earlier this month, making the state pay for all $394 million of the costs of vouchers would entirely cover Governor Evers' veto-based increase of $325 per pupil for Wisconsin school districts, and allow for $140 million in property tax relief on top of that. Seems like a win-win to me!

Given that state aid to schools are the largest cost of state government, a lot of other areas of the state budget are at least indirectly affected by what happens with how we choose to fund K-12 education. But given that we will have a new Governor, new Assembly Speaker, and both houses of the Legislature up for grabs with fair maps for November, it sure seems like it's a great time to talk about how we can change from a status quo System that isn't working for either public schools or property taxpayers.

Trade and tariffs in 2025 - this really didn't work, did it?

As you may have heard, the US Supreme Court told Donald Trump on Friday that he had no right to go out and slap tariffs on country without having Congress pass a law allowing him to do so. And naturally, Trump responded by whining like a bitch and planning to put in new worldwide tariffs of 10%.... wait, 15% (go ahead and try, old man).

In light of that, we got information about what happened to the flow of imports and exports in 2025 in reaction to Tump's tariff plans, and as you'll see 2025 didn't have a very different trade deficit than 2024, and December saw the trade deficit go up compared to the lows of October.

Trade deficits were volatile throughout 2025 as importers responded to President Trump's shifting tariff announcements, which have upended the global landscape but haven't significantly dented the US trade deficit, at least so far.

The data released Thursday by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis also provided an annual tally for 2025, totaling trade in both goods and services at $901.5 billion. The total for 2024, the last year of Joe Biden's presidency, was $903.5 billion…. The new monthly reading, delayed by the recent government shutdown, was the second consecutive increase following October's trade deficit of just under $30 billion — the lowest figure seen since 2009, which Trump and his aides often touted.

The new December reading saw US imports fall by about $5 billion to $287.3 billion, while imports jumped by $12.3 billion to $357.6 billion. Goods imported in 2025 rose overall, despite Trump's tariffs, to a total of about $3.4 trillion last year.

I do think it's important to note that how we got to that deficit of just over $900 billion is very different when comparing 2024 and 2025.

That ballooning deficit for the first part of 2025 reflects front-running that American businesses did, trying to bring in more imports before Trump announced tariffs on those products, and then backing off after Trump made his infamous “Liberation Day” announcement in April.

Meanwhile, the value of US exports were larger in every month of 2025 than the same month was in 2024, even as some countries put on retaliatory tariffs on US products.

So that’s good news. I would also guess that the 10% decline in the US dollar in 2025 contributed to this increase in exports, since it makes American projects cheaper overseas.

In looking at the figures, December 2025’s trade deficit of $70.3 million was nearing the monthly amounts that we had for much of 2024, which ranged between $71 billion and $81 billion in every month between April and November. But for now, I’ll say that we are on trend for a lower trade deficit in 2026, with exports going higher in 2025 and imports being lower in the second half of 2025. That would seem to indicate the tariffs are working if you only care about reducing the country’s trade deficit.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the average American might be better off as a result of that smaller trade deficit. It’s indisputable that tariffs raise prices from what they otherwise would have been, which is where I remind you that the New York Fed said this month that 90% of Trump’s tariffs were paid for by American companies and consumers.

In addition, employment in manufacturing continued to slide in 2025, so businesses weren’t onshoring to the US as a result of tariffs (ignore any media events you see about “future activity”, read the numbers).

Lastly, tariff revenue offset some of the extra deficits caused by Trump Tax Scam 2.0 and related increases in spending on ICE and the military (and grifting) in Trump's first year. But it plateaued in the second half of the year has been declining in recent months, as imports dropped and some tariffs were removed.

Other than bringing in a little more revenue (but nowhere near enough to make up for tax cuts or increased spending elsewhere), what have Trump's tariffs actually helped our economy or standard of living? I can't see it, likely because there is no strategy to help American manufacturing or offset the extra costs of these policies for everyday Americans. But the senile fool in the White House is going to screech and double down on it anyway, and the gutless GOPs in Congress aren't doing anything to stop it.

So now we have to waste a lot more time and effort to tell them "NO, DO YOU NOT GET IT?", and to get the hundreds of billions of dollars back that were taken away by this idiocy (and the Supreme Court's dawdling on the issue) in 2025. And it is infuriating to us in the non-elite, reality-based world.

It may not be recession, but economic growth got worse in year 1 of Trump 2.0

Before the markets opened on Friday, we got a surprisingly lousy report on economic growth for the end of 2025.

New data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis published on Friday showed the economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.4% in the final three months of 2025. Economists had expected GDP to grow at an annualized rate of 2.9% in the fourth quarter…..

In its release on Friday, the BEA said that "the deceleration in real GDP in the fourth quarter reflected downturns in government spending and exports and a deceleration in consumer spending that were partly offset by an acceleration in investment."

Underlying spending trends, however, remained solid, with real final sales to private domestic purchasers — the sum of consumer spending and gross private fixed investment — increasing 2.4% in the fourth quarter, compared with 2.9% in the third quarter.

Within that 2.4% rise in consumption, however, a sharp divide emerged in the quarter between goods and services, with services spending rising at a 3.4% rate and goods spending actually falling 0.1%.

The report also continued to show the impact the AI build-out is having on economic growth, with spending on information processing equipment contributing 0.65 percentage points to economic growth in the quarter. Among private fixed investment, which rose 2.6% during the quarter, spending on intellectual property products rose at the fastest rate, 7.4%.

That’s quite a bit different than what the Atlanta Fed was predicting ahead of the release of the GDP report, although the ATL Fed caught the downward trend as more data came in over the last month.

Then you look at the numbers underlying the Atlanta Fed’s models, and some of their stats match up. It’s the volatile “non-core” sectors where the differences show up.

President Trump is claiming that the government shutdown of October and November is the reason behind the decline in government spending. And certainly the main divergence between the ATL Fed’s 3.0% projection of GDP growth and the official report of 1.4% was a drop in Federal government spending, taking off 1.15% from Q4 growth. But then you look at the most recent Treasury Statement, and Federal government expenses didn’t seem to slow down in Q4 at all. So there may be some upward revisions to growth still to come.

I’d even argue that a bad GDP report isn’t necessarily bad for what TrumpWorld wants, since they and their tech oligarch funders are so strung out on debt that they need the lower interest rates that would come in reaction to a slower economy. But a different report on income and spending may have wrecked those plans, because it showed inflation was on the rise as 2025 ended.

Underlying U.S. inflation increased more than expected in December, and signs are pointing to a further acceleration in January, which would strengthen ‌expectations that the Federal Reserve would not cut interest rates before June.

The personal ‌consumption expenditures price index, excluding the volatile food and energy components, rose 0.4% after an unrevised 0.2% gain ​in November, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis said on Friday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the so-called core PCE price index climbing 0.3%. In the 12 months through December, core PCE inflation advanced 3.0% after increasing 2.8% in November….

The [overall] PCE price index increased 0.4% in ​December after rising 0.2% ​in November. [Overall] PCE inflation increased 2.9% year-on-year after gaining 2.8% in November.

The government also reported that consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity, rose ​0.4% in December after increasing ‌by the same margin in November. When adjusted for inflation, consumer spending gained ​0.1%, setting it on a slow growth trajectory heading into the first ​quarter.

That sure sounds like stagflation to me, and it shows that at the end of 2025, there was little difference in how the economy was doing vs the end of 2024 (when enough low-info voters put Donald Trump over the top in hopes of improving the economy). And in fact, the economy was likely slower than what we had in Joe Biden's last year.

Year-over-year Change

Real GDP
Q4 2024 +2.4%
Q4 2025 +2.2%

Real Personal Consumption Expenditures
Q4 2024 +3.4%
Q4 2025 +2.2%

PCE Price Index
Q4 2024 +2.6%
Q4 2025 +2.8%

Core PCE Price Index
Q4 2024 +3.0%
Q4 2025 +2.9%

Job Growth
Dec 2024 +1,459,000 (+0.9%)
Dec 2025 +181,000 (+0.1%)

In addition, there was a significant drop in personal saving by American consumers over the last half of 2025, as incomes stagnated while prices kept going up.

Seems like the end of 2025 indicates that we were in a slow-growth economy where businesses are taking growth in productivity for themselves, and not adding jobs or doing much to raise pay. And given that consumer sentiment stayed at depressed levels in February, don’t count on consumer spending to be that strong for Q1 2026 either.

And I sure wouldn’t expect SCOTUS striking down Trump’s tariffs to do anything for affordability or to lower inflation. The businesses that paid the tariffs aren’t getting their money back any time soon, and they sure as hell aren’t going to lower the prices that consumers have to pay. They’ll just pocket the profits and move on.

After letting LeMahieu back in, WisGOPs double up tax bills. And the numbers don't add up

After a week where Senate GOP Leader Devin LeMahieu complained he was being left out of a possible tax cut and school funding deal between Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Governor Tony Evers, apparently Dev is now back in the game, with the GOP Legislature now working out their own deal.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, sent a letter to the governor Feb. 16 outlining their proposal to address soaring property taxes and rising costs with the state's proposed $2.5 billion surplus.

"This is a generous, good-faith attempt to achieve our mutual goals of limiting the property tax impact caused by your misguided 400-year veto, helping families address rising costs, and ultimately doing what is best for the people of Wisconsin," LeMahieu and Vos wrote in the letter first reported by WisPolitics.

First of all, if the WisGOPs are blaming Evers for putting resources in K-12 schools as a reason property taxes went up, then they don't get to claim "good faith". Because the only reason we have higher property taxes for schools is because THE GOP REFUSED TO PUT ANY STATE AIDS TOWARD THE SCHOOLS THAT WOULD HAVE REDUCED PROPERTY TAXES.

But let's look at the WisGOP plan is. It appears to be a mish-mash where they added in parts of the property tax cut plan Evers and Vos were trying to work out, and then also put in the income tax rebate LeMahieu and other GOP Senators were asking for.

The GOP proposal includes:

$500 million to put toward the school levy tax credit, funding that would allow the state to offset property taxes.

$1.5 billion for income tax rebates ($1,000 for married filers and $500 for single filers).

$200 million in funding for special education costs.

$30 million to fund a grant program for businesses and households that were affected by flooding in 2025.

$1.4 million for an educator tax deduction (up to $300 of educator expenses per year per educator).

So a little more than $2.2 billion in all. The total price tag is important, because all of this would get rid of the entire $2.5 billion surplus, and leave a smaller cushion for the next 16 months of the state budget than what was expected before the Legislative Fiscal Bureau projected another $1.5 billion in available funds last month.

So barely 1/4 of a billion dollars of cushion to take care of unexpected expenses that may come up between now and June 30, 2027. And we already are projected to need another $213 million for Medicaid, let alone what other complications that Trump/GOP austerity is going to push down to Wisconsin state government. And if the flat job growth we have in both Wisconsin and America turns into an outright recession, we're going to need other moves to keep the budget in balance, with the next Governor facing a significant structural deficit in the budget upon taking office.

And while I approve of the idea of a tax rebate as a one-time giveback, I didn't realize the price tag of $500/$1,000 was $1.5 billion. Seems like it should be smaller, with $250/$500 allowing for a lot of other things to be put into play. And while increasing the School Levy Tax Credit by nearly 40% will nearly double the $254 million in additional revenue limit that K-12 districts can use for next year, it also gives bigger benefits to higher-value homes, and doesn't do anything to deal with inequalities in funding between schools like General School Aids do.

And other tax cuts working their way through the Legislature make these other tax cuts even less affordable. A "no tax on tips" bill has already passed the State Senate (cost $53.2 million in Fiscal Year 2026), and the Joint Finance Committee just signed off on a bill that would have no taxes for overtime pay, for a cost of nearly $326 million next year. So that would put us another $379 million in the hole if both of those bills became law.Because the numbers don't add up, so if WisGOP tries to pass all of these items in one swoop instead of splitting up these provisions into separate bills (as I bet they will), Wisconsinites are likely to get nothing, with Evers being able to blame the WisGOPs for being irresponsible.

This last-minute tax cut mismash will look especially stupid if the WisGOPs shrug and decide to go on a 10-month vacation without working with the Guv to get a deal done. And while these WisGOP dweebs think they've pulled a fast one by making it more likely Evers has to veto the entire $2.2 billion package, they're more likely to be giving yet another reason for Wisconsinites to throw them out of power, and let the Dems have a chance to put in a new and better way of funding schools and cutting property taxes.