Three Good Ideas That Won't Happen

(From the Janesville Messenger, 10-15-06)

“Good ideas are common - what's uncommon are people who'll work hard enough to bring them about.” – Ashleigh Brilliant

Here are three good ideas I would love to see come to fruition:

3) The Wisconsin Health Plan. With apologies to Mark Twain, health insurance costs are like the weather; everybody complains about it but nobody does anything about it. This bold bipartisan plan does. It would assure every Wisconsin resident of health care coverage, financed by assessing employers 3 – 12 percent of their payrolls (the sliding scale based on total wages) and employees a flat 2 percent. The assessments would also fund family Medicaid and BadgerCare, eliminating $1 billion from the state budget. The budget savings would be used to eliminate the personal property tax paid by businesses, double the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income workers, and eventually phase out the corporate income tax. (Before you cry foul on that last point, do some research about how doing just that completely turned Ireland’s economy around.)
Sound Utopian? Well, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau in Madison ran the numbers and says the plan will work.
This plan will be introduced as a bill after the new Legislature is seated in January. Unfortunately, several other legislators have introduced their own plans to fix health care so it may be a struggle finding enough support for one solution to the problem.

2) A New County Fairgrounds and Snappers Stadium on I-90. Two major location problems would be solved at once with this plan. Having the fairgrounds in the middle of a residential area is bad enough, but the Snappers’ need is even more pressing. Their low yearly attendance – less than half of their counterparts in Appleton and a half million fans less than their league’s leader – could eventually force the team to leave Rock County.

1) School Funding Reform. A few years ago, a very good plan for shifting school funding from property tax to the state sales tax was put forth by Rep. Wayne Wood (D) of Janesville and Rep. Mickey Lehman (R) of Hartford. The idea went about as far as a patent application for a folding waterbed.
Doubly disappointing is that in 2003, amid great fanfare, Governor Jim Doyle appointed a blue ribbon task force on educational excellence to study improvements to the system. That group came to the same conclusion: move school funding from the property tax to the sales tax. Their proposal would have lowered school taxes 43 percent by increasing the sales tax from 5 to 6 percent. This wasn’t what the Governor wanted to hear, so that group’s exhaustively researched document now collects dust somewhere in the state capitol.
In the meantime, badly-needed improvements to Janesville’s high schools hinge on whether residents believe they can afford the additional property taxes on their homes.
And how is that a good idea?