Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 90. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM for 15h 17m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Independence Holiday events begin tonight at the Cravath Lakefront:
Christman Family Amusements Wristband Specials $25 – only during posted wristband sessions. Rides are ticket based outside of wrist band sessions. Tickets/wristbands can be purchased on the midway.
Wristband Session 5-9 PM
Civic Food Vendors & Beer Tent 5-11 PM
Live Music – Marco Wence 5-7 PM
Karaoke 8-10 PM (onstage!)
On this day in 1864, President Lincoln grants Yosemite Valley to California for “public use, resort and recreation.”
Now that both the Wisconsin Senate and Assembly have passed the biennial budget, the bill is off to Gov. Evers for signature, veto, or approval with selected line item vetos. Baylor Spears reports:
Income taxes would be cut by $3.5 billion; the University of Wisconsin System would lose money for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; state employees would get a raise and local governments and public and private schools would receive additional state aid, under the two-year budget bill passed by the Wisconsin Assembly Thursday night. The bill will now go to Gov. Tony Evers desk for signing or potential vetoing.
The bill passed 63-34 with all Republicans voting for the bill and all Democrats voting against it following eight hours of debate. No substantive changes were made to the bill despite calls from Democrats to boost investments in child care, school safety, Wisconsin’s K-12 and university system and other priorities.
….
The budget bill will now go to Evers, who will have the opportunity to veto the entire bill, sign the bill as is or make changes using his broad partial veto powers before signing. Once he receives it, Evers will have six days, excluding Sunday, to take action.
Evers told WQOW News 18 on Thursday that if he does sign the budget, “there will be as many partial vetoes as we can muster.”
“We’re still in the process of looking at it,” Evers added. “Every time they take a whack at it they make some changes, so I want to make sure that the pieces are in place for me to sign it or not.”
Wisconsin Republicans have worked throughout the budget process to limit Evers’ partial veto power by introducing certain budget-related legislation in separate bills and by writing the budget in way that limits his veto authority on individual items.
Evers can remove or reduce appropriations using his veto power. However, the power has been limited in recent years by rulings of the state Supreme Court that have said the governor is not allowed to strike singular letters to create new words or cut sentences to create new ones.
There’s a Whitewater idiosyncrasy in this (but of course there is): Sen. Steve Nass was one of only two Wisconsin Senate Republicans to veto the budget. Nass erroneously contends that
Today (June 28), the Senate is missing an opportunity to maintain sound fiscal practices in developing the 2023-25 biennial budget. The budget submitted by the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) will take this state from a $7 billion structural balance to a $2.5 billion structural deficit at the start of the next budget period on July 1, 2025.
(Emphasis added.)
I’ll not predict whether there will be a structural deficit after 2025, but a $7 billion surplus is not a structural balance. It’s an imbalance in favor of hoarded revenue, held by the state rather than returned as tax reductions, local aid, etc. Under Nass’s reasoning, keeping billions — and perhaps accumulating billions more under state control — would be an act of equilibrium.
There’s a reason the majority of his own caucus ignored Nass’s argument: it’s wrong conceptually. A gigantic state surplus does not represent an equilibrium. Virtually no one in the state (Republican, Democrat, libertarian, independent) would think otherwise. There are debates about how to distribute the surplus, but thankfully there’s no 15th-century faction that believes holding or accumulating more in the state treasury is an act of “balance.”
Chimpanzee is awestruck after seeing open sky after 28 years in a cage: