3rd straight year of fewer corporate taxes in Fitzwalkerstan do nothing for Wis wages

On this Labor Day, we see more evidence about how corporate power is being favored over labor power, and that it's not making things better for most of us.

Let's start with Preliminary final revenue estimates for the State of Wisconsin have been released for Fiscal Year 2018. Generally the numbers were in line with the (amazingly accurate) projections that the Legislative Fiscal Bureau came out with back in January.

Prelim total Wisconsin tax revenues, FY 2018
Income tax +5.47%
Sales tax +4.29%
Corporate tax -2.94%
Excise tax -1.55%
Public Utility +1.35%
Other taxes -1.24%

See that corporate tax number? That's not the first year that corporate taxes declined in Wisconsin. It’s become a common theme over the last 3 years, even as income taxes and sales taxes have both grown by solid levels as the country's economic expansion continues.

I also wanted you to look at another chart, which will give you an idea about how much various types of taxes consist of Wisconsin’s General Fund budget.

You can see that the proportions of income taxes rebounded with the Obama recovery from 2011-2013, while sales and corporate taxes were basically the same from 2011-2013. Then Walker and WisGOP used a one-time surplus in 2013 to cut income taxes before the 2014 elections, which promptly led to a revenue shortfall and large 2015 budget deficit, and also shifted more of the General Fund burden onto the sales tax. You can also see where corporate taxes started being a smaller piece beginning in 2015, with it shrinking from 6.9% to 5.5% in 3 years. Other taxes also took up less of piece, while the individual income tax’s share has risen by more than 2% in the same time.

Remarkably, Wisconsin corporations paid almost as much in taxes right 11 years ago, right before the Great Recession hit ($890.1 million) than they did in 2018 ($893.9 million). But because General Fund revenues were $3.5 billion less in 2007 than they are today (it’s not really a sign of growth, 3/4 of that is inflation), it means corporate income taxes take up a notably smaller share than it did in 2007 (7.1% then, 5.5% now).

Sure seems like there needs to be a reordering of tax burdens, especially given that corporations also are getting a massive tax cut on the federal side through the GOP Tax Scam (corporate tax revenues are down by more than 1/3 since it’s been in place). And it’s not like we’ve seen any kind of uptick in job growth since corporations started paying a smaller share of state taxes. In fact, 2016 and 2017 were the two worst years for job growth since Scott Walker and WisGOP came to power in 2011.

And yet we keep doubling down on these pro-corporate giveaways under the ALEC crew, such as this recent photo op in Green Bay, which came with $60 million in WEDC tax credits.

Glad to join @GreenBayPkging for the groundbreaking of their new paper mill in Green Bay! This latest investment by the company will create at least 200 new jobs statewide and maintain more than 1,400! #WIWorking https://t.co/k0MgD96Pcw pic.twitter.com/5FFeAGuqB7

— Governor Walker (@GovWalker) August 29, 2018

I’m sure it’s just coincidence that GB Packaging executives have given tens of thousands of dollars to the GOP and Walker. But I digress- we won't be paying for that additional tax writeoff till future years.

Meanwhile, people who work for a living aren't much better off. The Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) just released their annual State of Working Wisconsin report, and it shows that while more people are working in the state in the 2010s (like more are working in the rest of the country), those that are working are not becoming better off.

This is especially true for workers that don't have 4-year college degrees, whose wages have gone down over the last 4 decades. And the people hurting the most are the GOP's strongest voting bloc - white guys that didn't get a bachelor's degree.

Figure 3.7 makes the educational stratification of wages in Wisconsin obvious. Among Wisconsin men, those with four-year college degrees or more saw their wages increase nearly $5.00 per hour from 1979 to 2017, ending the period with a median of $29.94 per hour. That’s good news for one in three of the state’s workers who have these degrees. But for the two in three Wisconsin men without four-year degrees or more, the picture is one of nearly [40 years?] of wage decline followed by stagnation: since 1979, wages have fallen by about 38 percent for high school dropouts (from $ 19.29 to $11.93), by 22 percent for high school graduates (from $22.13 to $17.35) and 10 percent for those with one to three years of college (from $21.47 to $19.36).  In 1979, a four-year college degree secured about 15 percent higher wages ($25.52) than a high school degree ($22.13). In 2017, men’s pay-off to the four-year is nearly four times as large, providing a wage advantage of more than $12.50 per hour over the median high school graduates ($17.35).

In the new millennium, wages have been stagnant even for the group with the highest levels of education. While the returns to education are still substantial, they are no longer increasing as they did in the 1990s.

And while the graphics are a bit difficult to make out, you can see that wages for Wisconsinites with "some college" and HS diplomas have grown a bit since 2010, it doesn't come close to the increases that people with college degrees have seen. And it doesn't come close to making up for the losses non-college workers took throughout the 2000s in Wisconsin.

Along with education, COWS notes that another major separator in wages has to do with whether or not someone joins a union. This is especially true in the private sector, even more than the public sector.

And you wonder why a corporate-bought Wisconsin GOP has gone out of their way to bust unions and suppress wages every way they can for the last 7 1/2 years (with a lot of success, by the way)? Seems like it's well past time to reverse a lot of these giveaways to corporate Wisconsin, which have generally come at the expense of the rest of us in the state, union or non-union.

Those small-town and lower-educated Wisconsinites that wanted to "roll the dice" with someone like Trump in an attempt to return the state and the country to the glory years where their parents made decent wages need to know that the current corporatist GOP is a big reason why things have gotten worse. Try voting for a party and politicians this November that are going to stop the playing field from being so slanted, or else this crippling inequality will keep growing wider.