Walker Admin plays shell game on schools, roads. And sucks at it

Hey everybody! It's time to put the fun into the Funhouse for this post, because we're going to go along with our fair Governor, and play the old Shell Game!

Let's start with how we pay for our K-12 public schools, and bring in a guest contestant. State Sen. Kathleen Vinehout points out how the moves made 20 years ago to cut property taxes in Wisconsin actually funded the schools, and contrasts it with the shell game that exists today.

Many of you may remember Governor Tommy Thompson’s promise about state school aid back in the mid-1990s. Thompson promised that two-thirds of the school costs would be picked up by the state.

He then gained legislative support for over $1 billion new state dollars for schools. This action had a direct impact on property taxes. In tax year 1996, the school portion of property taxes dropped by 16% leading to a decline in overall property taxes of over 6%.

Today the state contributes almost half of the money for local schools – well short of the two-thirds funding from years ago. For taxes paid this year (2015 tax year), overall property taxes increased 2.3% to the highest level – $10.6 billion – in the history of our state…

With eight out of ten referenda passing, and state school aid below 2006 levels, I find it not surprising that people suspect state lawmakers are going to put the whole cost of schools on local tax payers.

Many Wisconsin residents look to Minnesota and see that the state contributes almost 70% of the total aid for schools. Property taxpayers in Minnesota only contribute one quarter of all school costs. Wisconsinites say if Minnesota can do it, why can’t Wisconsin[?]

Good question, Sen. Vinehout. It really comes down to how state officials prioritize paying for services, and if they desire to keep the quality of those services high. Instead of striking a balance of maintaining and increases in spending to avoid these shifts in taxes or fees, the WisGOPs in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan have tended to fail miserably in at least one of these goals when it comes to funding education, and often both.

Take a look at what is happening at the UW System. Gov Scott Walker is doing a lot of talking about the freeze he has instituted (and plans to continue) on in-state tuition for undergrads, but hasn’t added the state spending needed in order for the schools to have adequate revenues to continue their level of services. This is what the #FundTheFreeze backers are complaining about with that hashtag - having tuition frozen is great, but it needs to be backed up with enough funding to keep things operating well, like Tommy and state legislators agreed to do in 1996.

Instead, the UW System is receiving fewer state tax dollars in this fiscal year than they did for the 2012-2013 base year- the year the in-state tuition freeze began.

State aid, UW System
2012-2013 base $1.125 billion
2016-17 UW budget $1.024 billion

That’s a drop of over $100 million in 4 years BEFORE inflation. How can you expect to maintain quality when no one there's no money available to adequately pay faculty and staff, and the buildings can’t be fixed?

The Wisconsin Technical College System puts both of these methods (unfunded property tax cuts and lower state funding) together, Yes, by the raw numbers, the state is investing more into the Tech Colleges than it was 4 years ago. But take out a $406 million unfunded giveaway from 2014, done as a one-shot gimmick to drop property taxes instead of boost offerings at the 2-year institutions, and we’ve barely changed what is being put into Tech Colleges.

State aid, Tech College System
2012-2013 base doubled $216.5 million
2015-17 budget $1,038.6 million
2015-17 LESS unfunded tax break for both years $226.6 million

That 4.67% increase for tech college services is below the rate of inflation, and it includes the recent push for increases in "performance-based" funding.

(Quick sidelight- I find performance funding worrisome because of one obvious question. Who are the people and organizations deciding the measures that the funding is scored on? With the Fitzwalkerstanis, you can bet it’ll be the same WMC oligarchs and Koch-funded stink tankers that have been in charge of the strategies that have driven Wisconsin to dead last in the Midwest for job growth).

There's another way the Walker/WisGOP shell game works may well be coming to a community near yours, if it isn’t there already. Wisconsin Public Radio gave an overview of this latest tax shift last weekend, as part of an article on local wheel taxes.

Fifteen municipalities and counties are already tacking $10 to $20 onto vehicle registration to pay for local road maintenance, and now Milwaukee County, Marathon County, Wausau, Portage and Green Bay are considering following suit.

Dan Fedderly of the Wisconsin County Highway Association points to a decade of stagnant road funding from the state that's left locals with little choice.

"We just simply need to address what has been a pending dilemma for many years and has got to the point where it is in crisis mode for many local units of government across the state," Fedderly said.

You can bet this will be a common theme as local goverments debate their 2017 budgets over the next 3 months, and Dems in the state would be wise to connect the state’s defunding with the need to jack up registration fees locally. Unfortunately for Scotty and WisGOP, that added fee is paid out in the same bill as Wisconsinites’ regular $75 vehicle registration fee, so it’ll look like the state was the one who added the fee…which is essence, they did through their inability to fund the locals. So the voter anger will be right and wrong at the same time!

I can bet that Scott Walker will give some kind of spin job at his rally with Donald Trump tonight in the reddest part of Wisconsin- West Bend. He'll likely try to pull the same BS over on Fox News, and say that the state's tax burden is lower. But what Walker's not going to tell them is that he and his fellow WisGOP posers aren't cutting taxes on the average Wisconsinite, but is merely shifting the decision down to the local level, and likely pulling the double-whammy of higher local taxes AND a lower level of services.

Don't fall for the shell game, and give your friends the heads up if you see them being suckered by it.

Another school year, and Wisconsin's rural schools continue to bleed

State Senator Janet Bewley sent a note off to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau earlier this month, asking a simple compare-and-contrast question. "What did every school district in Wisconsin receive in general state aids in 2010-11 (the year before Scott Walker's Act 10 and first budget took effect), and how much did those districts get in aid in 2015-16. Well, the LFB came back, and not only were the overall amount of general school aids is down nearly $197.5 million you can click on your own district and look for the results in your own neck of the woods, but worse is that nearly 3/4 of the state's districts receive less money from the state, before inflation.

And remember, much of these cuts from 2010-11 have been at or near this reduced amount for five straight years, so multiply by 5 to get an idea of the total amount of money that has been taken away from these districts in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan. With the one-shot “tools” of Act 10 now being long gone, the Walker Administration or WisGOP have not done enough to fill in the gaps that now exist.

Note that outside of New Berlin (you know, the place where Icki McKenna encouraged citizens to taunt teachers with pacifiers to tell them to “quit whining”?) the biggest percentage cuts are overwhelmingly in rural Wisconsin.

Cuts in state aid 2010-11 vs 2015-16
Northwood -61.7%
Spooner -61.1%
New Berlin -56.9%
Northland Pines -56.8%
Williams Bay -55.9%
Herman -55.8%
Wabeno Area -55.1%
Phelps -54.3%
Alma -53.6%
Erin -53.5%

And then there are a ton of small districts that have lost 53.2% of their aid after that. Now, some of that may be made up by the relatively new sparsity aid program (the LFB memo is unclear on whether that is counted), but it sure doesn’t seem to be coming close to solving the funding concerns. Bewley (who represents a northwest Wisconsin district largely made up by the counties bordering Lake Superior) notes that while public school districts are losing talent because of low pay and appreciation, the failed policies of Walker/WisGOP tax cuts and giveaways to their campaign contributors in the voucher school lobby have continued.

“My Republican colleagues’ budget priorities are out of whack. They gave $209 million a year to a wealthy few, claiming it would spur the economy. The truth is that we created fewer jobs in the 3 years after we enacted that tax giveaway than we did in the three years before. Unaccountable voucher school operators were rewarded with over $200 million more, right out of taxpayer pockets,” said Bewley. “At the same time, our classrooms have been cut by $197 million.”

Bewley pointed out that data from the Department of Public Instruction shows that Wisconsin has lost 2,867 public school teachers and seen a 12.7% decrease in local experience in our student’s classrooms over the same period. “The 25th Senate District alone, with 36 of 40 school districts getting less general aid back under the Walker Administration, has lost 193 teachers,” Bewley said. “It’s time to stop favoring millionaires and voucher operators. Time we starting taking care of our public school students and looking out for middle class property tax payers.”

Walker policies have made it difficult for districts to come up with adequate funding to pay and support their teachers, and Bewley’s statements back up what a teacher friend of mine that works in a small, central Wisconsin district said on Facebook recently.

Act 10, in my understanding, was the means for local districts to have more control over their staff and costs. It was endorsed as a means to get rid of those "bad" teachers since they would no longer have the union to protect them.

Funny enough, in my district, I can't say that I've seen many if ANY bad teachers leave or get fired. I've only seen a surge of great teachers retire, leave for other states or other cities because we are a POOR district and don't have the means to offer higher pay or benefits.

Our schools are a revolving door of new teachers. The climate at school [is] abysmal. There is a plethora of new faces that I have no idea who they are, what they teach or the building they service. And they keep changing every year. They have no loyalty or ties to the district/town. They don't buy homes because they aren't planning on staying. They stay for 2-3 years and then move on....

Perhaps in better cities (i.e.: richer communities) like De Forest, Waunakee, or others have better results due to Act 10 but I can't say I'm reaping the benefits. My insurance out-of-pocket has gone up and I've lost long term and short term care. Thus, my pay is decreasing although my years of experience is increasing. The percentage cost of living increase we receive yearly falls far below the actual cost of living.

And despite what AM hate radio (paid for by the privatization folks at Koch and Bradley) may say, teacher pay continues to lag, especially in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Budget Project jumped off from a report from the Economic Policy Institute titled “The Teacher Pay Gap is Wider than Ever”, and said that Wisconsin teachers make approximately $11,900 less a year from other college-educated professions.

Nationally, public school teachers earned 17.0% less per week worked than other workers in 2015, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. That wage gap has tripled since 1979, when the wage gap was 5.6% between teachers and other workers. The analysis controls for age, education, race/ethnicity, geographical region, marital status, and gender.

In Wisconsin, the wage gap means that public school teachers earn $229 per week less than other workers with the same level of education. Teachers earn less than other college graduates in every state in the U.S….

When benefits are included, teachers still earn less than other workers: 11.1% less per week worked.

When teachers earn less than workers in other fields, it becomes harder for schools to attract and retain high-quality teachers. Some Wisconsin school districts have reported struggling to hire teachers, and as the wage gap grows, schools will face an even more difficult time attracting candidates to fill vacant positions. If we want to make sure that schools are able to hire well-qualified teachers to teach Wisconsin students, we need to make sure we can offer potential teachers a job with competitive salaries and benefits and a good working environment.

And that’s especially true in small-town Wisconsin, where there are notably fewer people with 4-year college degrees than the 27% of Wisconsinites that have one statewide. Sure, the reality that teachers are better-educated and likely better paid than most local (non-college educated) workers, and that may cause jealous anger that Trump/Walker types have exploited to their advantage (UW’s Katherine Cramer has hit on this with her book “The Politics of Resentment”).

But reality and numbers show that the Walker Way has failed rural Wisconsin, and if these individuals want to take out some resentment, it should be on the GOP poliiticians who have funneled sizable amounts of needed funds away from their schools, and into the hands of their cronies. So deal with where we are today, small-town Wisconsin. Understand that if your local schools fall apart and/or have to consolidate, one of the largest unifiers and areas of pride in that community go away. And then small-town Wisconsin becomes ghost-town Wisconsin. If you want to avoid that reality, you’re going to have to compensate teachers enough so that they will want to work in your community, and the way that’ll happen is by the state of Wisconsin (and especially corporate Wisconsin) contributing enough tax money to adequately fund a quality public education that benefits all of us in the state.

There’s only one way the aid cuts will stop, and the property tax increases resulting from the aid cuts will stop, and rural schools will be maintained and able to attract decent talent. That’s by removing the ALEC crew at the Capitol that doesn't care if they public education in Wisconsin and the state’s economic competitiveness, because they value a few more campaign contributions over improving things for the taxpayers that pay their salary. There is no other option, and the time for excusing this disgusting, destructive educational policy in Fitzwalkerstan is far past.

Walker, WisGOP are just fine with Milwaukee's despair, and want it to continue

Here are a few more thoughts and bits of context to chew on in light of this weekend’s rioting and tension in Milwaukee. And you bet your ass a lot of this goes right to the doorstep of the Governor’s mansion and our state Capitol.

First of all, go back to earlier this month, when the website "24/7 Wall Street" said Wisconsin was the worst state for black Americans IN THE COUNTRY, and the Milwaukee Business Journal’s Dan Shafer relayed these numbers that the website gave in making that assertion.

•The median annual income of black households in Wisconsin is just $26,053, much lower than the median for black families nationwide and equal to just 46.5 percent the median income of white Wisconsin households of $56,083.
•While 29.9 percent of white adults in Wisconsin have at least a bachelor's degree, 12.8 percent of black adults in the state have completed college. This is also much lower than the bachelor degree attainment rate among black adults nationwide of 19.7 percent.
•For black Wisconsin residents, the unemployment rate is 11.1 percent — higher than the national unemployment rate for all black Americans, and far higher than the white unemployment rate of 4.1 percent in Wisconsin.

Now add in these two Census figures from 2010, to realize how much of those racial disparities are part of everyday life in Milwaukee. Nearly 2/3 of Wisconsin’s 358,300 African-Americans lived in the City of Milwaukee, and over 90% of the African-American population in the 4-county Milwaukee metro area (Milwaukee County and the 3 overwhelmingly GOP WOW Counties) was confined to the city.

What this means is that African-Americans can be ignored by the WisGOP Legislature without suffering much blowback, because “those people” live outside of the legislators’ (and voters’) districts and any social problems that result from these apartheid conditions can be blamed on people and events outside of their home areas. Indeed, picking on minorities in the big city as “lazy moochers” isn’t just winning politics, it’s also way for suburbanites to maintain a feeling of superiority, despite the fact that the rest of the Milwaukee metro area also lags the country as well as many of our Midwestern neighbors in job and population growth.

That mentality from the burbs ingrains an acceptance of mediocrity that hurts the entire state, and not just because of the lack of economic growth. How do you attract talent into this state’s largest metro area when parts are wracked with 3rd World poverty combined with regressive social views and a business community that doesn’t seem interested in excelling and improving their game? This “I only care about myself” mentality not only is a key contributor to the provincialism in Milwaukee that keeps many outsiders away, but also has led to misused resources that has degraded the quality of life for individuals throughout the state, by choosing to throw tax money at campaign contributors like WEDC and voucher schools instead of investing in public goods like transit, public education, and roads.

In addition, Walker and WisGOP continue to increasingly add burdens onto local governments because the state has less funds available because of tax cuts for the rich and corporate, but then refuses to allow those local governments the chance to raise their own revenues to offset those state aid cuts. This is especially true for the City of Milwaukee, who has had massive cuts in shared revenues, but isn’t allowed to raise its own sales tax, despite housing most of the attractions in the county that attracts more tourism dollars than anywhere in Wisconsin. Let me go back to Bruce Murphy’s excellent story from June in Urban Milwaukee in response to State Rep. Janel Brantdjen’s suburban whining about Milwaukee crime, which shows that the City has found a way to increase spending on police despite being squeezed in recently years by cuts from legislators at the Capitol.

Brandtjen attended Marshall High School in Milwaukee and her district actually includes a portion of Milwaukee, but her press release had no concern or praise for that part of her district, while expressing worry about homeowners in the “flourishing suburbs” in the portions of Washington and Waukesha counties she represents.

Brandtjen’s blast came in the wake of a high-profile Milwaukee carjacking that ended with a chase into Washington County and the arrest of five juveniles. Barrett, she charged, has failed to “apprehend and arrest car thieves.” In fact, the crime statistics for Milwaukee show that arrests of juveniles for auto theft is up by 396 percent since 2010, while arrests for carjacking are up by 796 percent in the last two years….

Brandtjen also criticized Barrett for failing to hire enough police. In fact, the mayor and Common Council have devoted an ever-increasing portion of the city’s budget to the Police Department. The police budget has risen from just less than $190 million in 2005 to $280 million in 2016, while the property tax levy rose at about half that rate. The problem city officials have faced is a huge, long-term decline in state shared revenue, which dropped 36 percent in real dollars from 1995 to 2014. It’s a cinch that Barrett and the council would happily spend more on police officers, should Brandtjen convince her legislative colleagues to begin restoring shared revenue to cities.

Note that this chart is in actual dollars, before inflation is taken into account. But again, WisGOPs from the burbs see no reason to help solve the problem of heavily concentrated poverty combined with the handcuffing of the City of Milwaukee’s finances (problems they and their constituents have been significant contributors to).

Given the events of this last weekend, let’s review another article, this one in the New Republic from Summer 2014, that explains not only why the dire situation in inner-city Milwaukee has been allowed (if not outright encouraged) to continue, but also examines the career of our own Governor Dropout - Alec MacGillis’s “The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker.”

Over the past few decades, Walker’s home turf of metropolitan Milwaukee has developed into the most bitterly divided political ground in the country—“the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation,” as a recent series by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it. Thanks to a quirk of twentieth-century history, the region encompasses a heavily Democratic and African American urban center, and suburbs that are far more uniformly white and Republican than those in any other Northern city, with a moat of resentment running between the two zones. As a result, the area has given rise to some of the most worrisome trends in American political life in supercharged form: profound racial inequality, extreme political segregation, a parallel-universe news media. These trends predate Walker, but they have enabled his ascent, and his tenure in government has only served to intensify them. Anyone who believes that he is the Republican to save his party—let alone win a presidential election—needs to understand the toxic and ruptured landscape he will leave behind….

Walker’s growing profile [in the 1990s and early 2000s on TV and radio talk shows] served him well as he advanced through the political ranks. In 2002, the Democratic executive of Milwaukee County, which encompasses the 600,000-person city and 355,000 in its inner suburbs, resigned amid a pension scandal. Walker won the special election and proceeded to spend the next eight years tussling with the Democratic-led county board over taxes and spending. He succeeded in making deep cuts to county parks and public transit; once, he sent layoff notices to county workers so they would pressure the council to buckle to his budget demands. So often did he call in to [AM radio host Mark] Belling’s show—to chat on air or to spin the host during a commercial break—that he had access to an emergency-only phone line to the studio that was off- limits to station employees, even for calls to family. “It was essentially the ‘zombies are rising’ line,” says Terry, the former WISN employee.

During this period, the WOW counties continued to expand. But unlike suburbs elsewhere, they had not grown more diverse. Today, less than 2 percent of the WOW counties’ population is African American and less than 5 percent is Hispanic. According to studies by the Brookings Institution and Brown University, the Milwaukee metro area is one of the top two most racially segregated regions in the country. The WOW counties were voting Republican at levels unseen in other Northern suburbs; one needed to look as far as the white suburbs around Atlanta and Birmingham for similar numbers. The partisan gulf between Milwaukee and its suburbs in presidential elections has now grown wider than in any of the nation’s 50 largest cities, except for New Orleans, according to the Journal Sentinel series.

In such an environment, “there’s no persuasion going on at all,” says GOP pollster Gene Ulm, who often works in Wisconsin. In fact, there is not a single competitive state Senate seat left in the entire Milwaukee media market. Both parties focus entirely on turnout, and with impressive results. The WOW counties were in the top eleven nationwide for turnout in 2012, with Ozaukee first at 84 percent. Similarly, among urban counties, Milwaukee County ranks near the top, at 74 percent. (The national average was just over 60 percent.) In midterm elections, Republicans often win because the WOW counties vote no matter what, an achievement that Mark Graul, a Republican consultant, attributes in large part to the motivational power of Milwaukee talk-radio stations. However, in presidential-year elections, when turnout is up everywhere in the state, Democrats win—in fact, they have won every single major statewide race in presidential years since 1984. Even Walker admits that he isn’t working the middle much anymore: “It was always a divided state but it used to be (that) you’d explain it as ‘40/40/20,’ and 20 percent was the persuadable middle,” he told the Journal Sentinel. “That percent has shrunk now to 5, 6 percent maybe ... or five or six people.”

It is as if the Milwaukee area were in a kind of time warp. Like the suburbanites of the ’70s and ’80s elsewhere in the United States, the residents of the WOW counties are full of anxiety and contempt for the place they abandoned. “We’re still in the disco era here,” says Democratic political consultant Paul Maslin. This has affected the politics of the state in myriad ways. The nationwide trend of exploring alternatives to prison hasn’t reached Wisconsin—it has the highest rate of black male incarceration of any state in the country. [AM radio host/ Walker enabler Charlie] Sykes told me he could track the desertion of the city through the discussions of Milwaukee public schools on his show. “Through the 1990s we were very interested in education reform, and then it was like a button was switched, and those were someone else’s kids,” he said. “That’s when I realized we weren’t a Milwaukee station anymore.”

And this is why GOPs will do nothing except point fingers and mock the City of Milwaukee in light of these incidents, and won't lift those fingers to change the conditions that led to the tension and desperation that ended in looting and burning. Heck, Walker and Fox News Sheriff Tommy Clarke probably want to see more of it, becauser it gets them more support from the Trump “law and order” crowd as well as scared white suburbanites. Disgusting sickos…

Bottom line- the “Governor” of Wisconsin and the GOP majority in the Legislature don’t think the City of Milwaukee and its residents are equal to communities and citizens in the rest of the state, and there are no sufficient consequence to them not giving a fuck about those people. And the inner-city residents know it. Combine that with the breakdown in trust that has happened between Milwaukee Police and those neighborhoods (a lack of trust that has existed for decades, so much so that the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the city’s practices), and you can’t be surprised when you see uprisings like what happened this weekend.

A tale of two different Wisconsin cities in August

Had a great time at Great Taste of the Midwest with friends of mine from in and out of town. At the event, I noticed a sizable amount of Madison cops observing and being jovial with Fest-goers, including Madison Police Chief Mike Koval. I didn't notice any incidents (other than some silly debauchery), and I kept it surprisingly on the level for the evening, feeling reasonably decent (but not wasted or incoherent) as I got dropped off at home last night.

As I got into bed, my wife informed me of a "Ferguson-type" incident in Milwaukee, and the rioting that followed. I suppose the body cameras on the officer and outside investigation by the Wisconsin DOJ will tell us more over time, but Burning businesses in your own neighborhood (especially a neighborhood in need of jobs and positive influences) is an unacceptable and the absolutely wrong answer. Oactions injure the wrong people and objects, and all it'll cause is more crackdowns and worsening of the situation you already find intolerable.

On the flip side, many won't like last night's ominous words from Milwaukee Alder Khalif Rainey (especially scared right trash in the burbs), but I think he's mostly correct.

This entire community has sat back and witnessed how Milwaukee, Wis. has become the worst place to live for African-Americans in the entire country," Rainey said. "Now this is a warning cry. Where do we go from here? Where do we as a community go from here?

Do we continue - continue with the inequities, the injustices, the unemployment, the under-education, that creates these byproducts that we see this evening?...The black people of Milwaukee are tired. They're tired of living under this oppression. This is their existence. This is their life. This is the life of their children.

Now what happened tonight may not have been right; I'm not justifying that. But no one can deny there there are problems, racial problems, here in Milwaukee, Wis., that have to be closely, not examined, but rectified. Rectify this immediately. Because if you don't, this vision of downtown, all of that, you're on day away. You're one day away.

Sadly, I worry if that's what it takes- for the problems to come to the doorsteps of people outside the inner city. It's why I feel a sadness and disgust at a situation that never seems to improve. Largely because a lot of policymakers don't want it to improve - the politics of this state are so screwed up that "sticking it to Milwaukee" is a winning strategy in WisGOP World, and it drives ratings for the racist tripe that pollutes AM620 and AM1130 every weekday. On the flip side, the hopelessness, anger, and resentment and destructive behavior that results from the ghettoizing of poverty in the state leads to lashing out like we have seen, and the downward cycle starts all over again.

Already we are seeing bad signs from Governor Walker, as he was scheduled to attend a "Blue Lives Matter" rally in the suburbs with Bob Donovan and other righties today (an obvious dog-whistle heard loud and clear in the inner city), and now is threatening to send in the National Guard to control the situation in Milwaukee, instead of working with officials in Milwaukee to deal with the underlying problems that lead to the powder keg that exploded last night.

I'll have more thoughts on this later, as I get it together and events develop.

Corporate oligarchs back WisGOP. Real job creators? Maybe not

Last Fall, you may recall that the WisGOP Legislature passed a raft of new campaign finance rule, most of which were intended to increase the amount of direct money that could be sent to parties and individual candidates, and to allow even more corporate and special interest influence over Wisconsin politicians. These changes infamously culminated in Assembly Democrats abstaining from voting on the bill, to illustrate the conflict of interest involved in giving more power to incumbents and big money contributors.

Matt Rothschild of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign took note of which organizations took advantage of the law allowing these PACs and corporations to give even more money to the campaign wings of parties, and take a look at who two of the most prominent ones are.

3. ABC (Associated Builders and Contractors): $24,000
It gave $12,000 to the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee and $12,000 to the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate.

4. Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce: $24,000
It gave $12,000 to the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee and $12,000 to the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate.

Those are the maximums, and unlike the Beer Distributors and Altria Corporation (the two 2 givers to state parties), notice that ABC and the MMAC didn’t give anything to the Democrats.

Speaking of ABC, their boss was in the news this week because she’s going to be giving economic advice to another GOP politician.

When Trump unveiled his initial, 13-man economic advisory council last week, POLITICO reported it included five major donors whose families had collectively contributed more $2 million to Trump and his joint fundraising efforts with the GOP….

Among the new additions announced on Thursday is billionaire GOP financier Diane Hendricks, who donated $5 million to Scott Walker's super PAC in 2015. Hendricks is currently a vice chair of the national Trump Victory efforts and a "victory finance chair" for Wisconsin.

Liz Uihlein, a co-founder of Uline, Inc., a shipping supply company, was also added to Trump's economic council. Uihlein and her husband, Richard, are among the Republican Party's most generous donors. In May, Trump and the Republican National Committee introduced Uihlein as a national vice-chair for fundraising efforts.

You may recall the Uihleins gave $6.2 million to Walker’s failure of a presidential campaign, and also gave $284,500 for Scotty’s governor campaigns in Wisconsin. Oh, and they just got the Walker-appointed DNR Board to give some sweet shoreline access for a condo complex they own in Vilas County.

These oligarchs have no problem with doubling down on the failed policies of WisGOP, because they’re reaping all the benefits while everyone else stagnates and declines. And take extra note that the MMAC thinks continuing WisGOP policies that have gone a long way toward the ghettoizing of poverty in Wisconsin's largest city-