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Economics

The WEDC Taints Walker (and local officials even more)

The WEDC is a state and national story that has local implications. Some of the toughest political battles are intra-party ones: Republicans or Democrats fighting against fellow party members for their respective primary nominations.  For rival Republicans, Gov. Walker’s creation of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation will offer a legitimate and compelling line of attack against his…

Retrospective and Prospective Costs

There are few more useful ways of looking at expenditures made and expenditures contemplated than as retrospective (sunk) or prospective (future) costs.  Consider the example of a man building a boat to catch one-hundred pounds of fish per day.  The fisherman spends seventy-five thousand building his own boat, and is partly done.  If he spends…

The State’s WEDC and Whitewater’s Facsimiles

Ongoing revelations about the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation are a double concern: they’re stories of statewide malfeasance, and those revelations beg the question of how local officials in Whitewater are managing their own pools of public money. First, the latest stories (it’s a steady stream) of state-level error, waste, and negligence: Madison— Failing to run…

Meetings & Motivations

Post 11 in a series. This is series about a proposed digester energy project for Whitewater, one that would rely on importing other cities’ unwanted waste into Whitewater for processing. A series like this is only indirectly about general wastewater upgrades, at whatever price. It’s about waste importation, and officials’ claims that importation would be clean…