MADISON (WKOW) -- One Democratic member of the powerful Joint Finance Committee said Friday he expected some Democrats to vote in favor of the state budget set by Republican legislators this week.
Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-West Point) described the bill as "not bad," which is high praise in a legislature marked by significant splits on budget priorities. Erpenbach said he wasn't yet sure how he'll vote when full Senate votes on the bill, which is expected to happen before the end of this month.
"I don't know [how I'm voting]," Erpenbach said. "I would not be surprised at all if some Democrats vote for the budget. The budget overall, compared to previous budgets, really, is not bad."
Erpenbach said it was both a blessing and a burden to have the budget-writing finance committee go into the last night of deliberations Thursday with more than $5 billion at its discretion.
Democrats favored putting most of that money toward one-time generational projects, arguing there's no guarantee the state will have another projected tax windfall like this any time soon as the economy roars back from the COVID-19 pandemic.
"You can cut taxes but you can also give some of that money back to local units of government," Erpenbach said. "Whether it be school districts, counties, cities, villages, whatever. They have a lot of infrastructure needs."
Instead, Republicans went big on tax cuts, which they indicated they'd do in the days leading up to Thursday's vote. All told, the GOP budget cuts about $3.4 billion in taxes.
Most of those tax cuts come from slicing the third of Wisconsin's four income tax brackets; it covers tax filers earning between $24,000 and $263,500 per year.
The cut lowers that bracket's rate from 6.27% to 5.3%, amounting to about $2.4 billion in tax cuts. For someone making $50,000 per year, that amounts to $170 in annual savings per the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), who serves on the committee, acknowledged the wide income disparities in the group Republicans are branding as 'middle class.'
Felzkowski said GOP lawmakers were being consistent with a belief tax rates should be flat as possible, adding they had lowered tax rates for the two lower-income brackets in recent budgets.
"Republican, conservative philosophy is moving us toward that flatter tax rate," she said. "And in our last two budgets, we did our tax cuts in the lower rates."
School Funding Swap
While some Republican lawmakers have touted the budget as one that also makes an historic investment in education, schools across the state won't actually get any more money under the budget.
The GOP plan pumps about $400 million into the school aid formula but did not raise the limits on which school districts can levy property taxes.
That mix, according to the fiscal bureau, means the state is essentially swapping the sources of school funding with more coming directly from Madison while the beefed up formula lowers the property tax limits for districts.
The move brings Wisconsin into compliance with federal requirements for how much states must spend on education in order to qualify for more than $2 billion in federal coronavirus relief.
Felzkowski defended the measure, saying the federal aid now expected to flow into school districts negates any need for any additional true state spending.
"Our schools are fine and we have another budget coming up in two years," she said. "We will take a look at where everybody's at at that time and then we'll address the issues as they come forward."
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