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Alliance Meets at Lambeau

 Cause of High Property Taxes

Another Property Tax Break?

By Rich Eggleston

Alliance Meets at Lambeau

Are We the Big Spenders?cont'd

According to the Census Bureau, in 1991-92, state government spent $500 million more than all of Wisconsin’s local governments combined. By 1999-2000, state government was outspending all local governments in Wisconsin by more than $3 billion.

UW-Oshkosh Economist Kevin McGee has more closely analyzed the same numbers. Between 1992 and 2000, he found, Wisconsin local government spending grew a little below the average rate across the nation.  State government spending, even after McGee netted out the $700 million in tax rebate checks of a few years ago, grew substantially faster than the average rate nationally.

McGee counted $227 million in "excess" state government spending on corrections and $352 million in "excess" state spending on highways. If those areas of expenditures had grown at the national average rate, he calculated, our recent budget deficit would have been at least $1.16 billion smaller than it was.

We've also seen the misleading assertion published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  that property taxes outpaced inflation. Inflation measured by what?  The Consumer Price Index? That's a measure aimed at determining how rising prices affect your pocketbook and mine. Local government buys a lot of  concrete and steel, and not many boxes of corn flakes. Any comparison based on the Consumer Price Index is by its nature inaccurate.

In 1970, homeowners paid less than half the property taxes levied in the state. Today they pay more than two-thirds, Joe Wineke, who served in both the Assembly and the Senate in the 1980s and 1990s, said in a guest column that appeared in both The Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal.

'The real reason that property taxes are so high is that we have narrowed the property tax base by giving huge tax breaks to big business...agriculture...and various specialized groups," Wineke wrote. "In the past 33 years, a long list of tax breaks for everyone except the homeowner has been enacted."

To see Wineke's guest column, look here.

Joe Wineke

The special-interest tax breaks that Joe Wineke described above haven't done enough to shift the property tax burden to homeowners in Wisconsin, according to a bill sponsored by a bipartisan group of nearly three dozen state legislators.

Senate Bill 216, whose chief sponsor is Sen. Joe Leibham (R-Sheboygan), would exempt some $220 million worth of restaurant kitchen equipment from the property tax. There is no provision in the bill for the state to provide make-up revenue.