Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:23 and sunset is 4:25, for 9 hours, 2 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 43.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1688, as part of the Glorious Revolution, King James II of England flees from England to France after being deposed in favor of his son-in-law and nephew, William of Orange and his daughter Mary.
The State of Wisconsin has both a general fund surplus and a rainy day fund, with the surplus now at $4,500,000,000. It is, after all, a lot of money:
Gov. Tony Evers announced Friday that Wisconsin’s Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, which is published by the Department of Administration, recorded a $4.5 billion positive balance in the state’s general fund at the end of the 2023-24 fiscal year.
In addition to the general fund, the state’s Budget Stabilization Fund — or “rainy day” fund — ended the fiscal year at the highest level in state history with a balance of $1.9 billion. The rainy day fund has set a new record every year since Evers took office in 2019.
“For thirty consecutive years, our state’s checking account ran at a deficit. Thanks to our efforts to pay down our state’s debt and work across the aisle to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, Wisconsin has never had a deficit since I took office,” Evers said in a statement. “This is great news for the people of Wisconsin and our state’s economy.”
The balance in the general fund — a budget surplus — will likely be a major point of discussion next year as Evers and lawmakers begin work on the state’s next two-year budget.
See Baylor Spears, Wisconsin’s annual financial report records $4.5 billion budget surplus, Wisconsin Examiner, December 21, 2024.
The inability of lawmakers to agree on a plan for the use of the general fund surplus is unsurprising. These are the men who gerrymandered, backed grossly wasteful projects, pretended a pandemic was safe, and endorsed election conspiracies for so long as conspiracists did not level accusations in their own direction.
Honda and Nissan start merger talks in historic pivot: