The guy who oversaw Evers budgets says Tiffany's math doesn't add up

The day that David Crowley and Tom Tiffany had their only debate, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran a column written by Joel Brennan, who you may remember as someone who also wanted to be Governor in this election, but finished a distant 4th in the Dem primary behind Crowley. Brennan also served as Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Administration for Tony Evers' first term, and was in charge of overseeing the budgets that Evers presented every two years.

So as a guy who knows a bit about budget numbers, let's listen to what Joel Brennan has to say about what would have to happen in order to make Tiffany's plan to remove the state's income tax work out.

The first option is to make you pay at the checkout line. To replace the income tax, Wisconsin’s sales tax would have to more than double, to nearly 13%. ( I say 12% given inflation, but you get the idea) The conservative Badger Institute says that would give us the highest sales tax in America. Every pair of school shoes, every car repair, every new furnace in January would cost you more, and the families on the tightest budgets would feel it first.

And let me give a visualization of Wisconsin's revenue mix, to remind you that our state's income tax is Wisconsin government's largest revenue source.

But Tiffany insists he wouldn't raise any other taxes to make up for the income tax cuts, so Brennan looks at how much spending would have to be cut to make the numbers work.

The second option is to gut the things that make Wisconsin work. Tiffany’s campaign swears he won’t raise any other taxes, so let’s do the math he won’t. Using the state’s own budget numbers, if you spread the cut across our schools, health care, the UW, technical colleges, prisons, child and family services, and aid to local communities, every single one of them gets cut in half.

If you try to protect our schools and corrections, you’d have to wipe out every state dollar for health care, including BadgerCare and nursing home care, along with the UW, our technical colleges, and local property tax relief. If you protect health care instead, every dollar of state aid to our K-12 schools disappears. There is no version of this “plan” where your kid’s school, your mom’s nursing home, and your local fire department all come out whole.

For an idea of scale, let me give you numbers from last week's Annual Fiscal Report for Wisconsin, showing which agencies and areas of government have the largest expenses for the state.

Let's not forget that Tiffany's fellow Republicans worked out a deal with his opponent to send a huge increase in shared revenue that disproportionately helped their rural districts. So is Tom Tiffany going to reduce all those boosts in shared revenues and cause even more service cuts and higher property taxes after promising no increase in taxes and nothing getting cut? Well, he still might do that because GOPs assume their yokel voters are morons who'll accept anything, but I can't think that would fly with most Wisconsinites.

But Tiffany insists there's a third way, where taxes go down and the economy is so great that the revenues . If this sounds familiar, Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessentt trots out this line on occasion, even while the US budget deficit was surging in Fiscal Year 2026.

Brennan says that especially will not work at the state level, and points at the epic failure of this attempt of magic revenue growth in Kansas from the 2000s.

Tiffany would like you to believe there’s a third option, where the cut magically pays for itself. Kansas believed that story. The result? A $900 million deficit, and Republican lawmakers scrapped the whole idea.

And here’s what should make everyone angry. Either way, the people at the very top win. Wisconsin’s income tax is the one part of our system where people who earn more pay more. Erase it, and the biggest windfall goes straight to our wealthiest residents (the ones who have poured millions into the Tiffany campaign), while everyone else picks up the tab. We’ve seen this playbook before. In Washington, Tiffany voted for a bill that cut Medicaid by nearly a trillion dollars over the next decade while handing out massive tax breaks at the top. Now he wants to bring that same deal to Wisconsin.

But that's not the only way Tiffany believes in magic to pay for spending. In last night's debate, Wispolitics notes that Tiffany said "he wasn’t open to new user fees, tolling or indexing the gas tax for inflation." However, Tiffany still insisted roads and other transportation would be invested in.

Tiffany insisted he would still be able to put more money into transportation, saying he did it while in the Legislature.

“We are going to put additional money into transportation,” Tiffany vowed.

May I also add that Tiffany and the rest of his GOP colleagues in Congress don't have a highway bill in place to continue the added federal assistance that was part of the Biden-era infrastructure act, so we may also be seeing less assistance for transportation coming down from DC.

Which means Tom Tiffany's transportation funding plan echoes the debt-ridden era of Scottholes in Wisconsin, which Tiffany was part of when he was in the State Legislature.

Yeah, that type of fantasyland poserdom didn't work out for us in the 2010s, and we don't need it in the 2020s.

I'll let Dan Shafer of the Recombobulation Area have the last word on how empty Tiffany's tax and spending plans are.

[image or embed]

— Dan Shafer (@danshafer.bsky.social) October 21, 2026 at 10:38 PM