WI governor gets creative with veto, increases school funding for 400 years | Hacker News Reader

WI governor gets creative with veto, increases school funding for 400 years

usatoday.com

55 pointsceejayoz18 comments

The Frankenstein veto; Wisconsin is infamous for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_veto

That sounds awful. Either a law should be passed so that the executive branch can enforce and make laws, or they should remove the Frankenstein veto.

When a party has the power to change it, they have little reason to; when they don't have the power to change it, their opinion doesn't matter.

Go back through the history of line-item vetoes. The arguments for are convincing until one considers the counterfactual.

100 years seems like too large of a timeframe to forecast well. Imagine committing to $32,500 extra per student by the end and having deflation for example.

Possibly the point? Do something so ridiculous to the point where forcing the legislative to do their jobs.

What do you think the legislature was doing here by writing a law?

While I don't know the specifics of Wisconsin politics, I wouldn't be surprised if the legislative branch was trying to gut the education budget.

If you click the title of the post it takes you to an article where you can read the context instead of having to speculate.

>Wisconsin governors have expansive partial veto power, and Evers got creative with his use of it in this budget. He crafted the four-century school aid extension by striking a hyphen and a "20" from a reference to the 2024-25 school year. The increase of $325 per student is the highest single-year increase in revenue limits in state history.

Thanks for that and I did. I looked into it a bit further because I felt the article was ommitting a lot of information. Apparently the current governor was an educator, so I'm sure he has an additional bone to pick with the current legislature. However, over the past 20 years or so there has been a huge push, nationally, to gut education. So I'm not surprised by this governor's move. He's playing the game with the rules he can.

> While I don't know the specifics of Wisconsin politics, I wouldn't be surprised if the legislative branch was trying to gut the education budget.

Correct. (I'm a Wisconsinite.)

Wisconsin is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, and as a consequence, the state legislature is dominated by Republicans, despite receiving fewer votes than Democrats. (State Republicans actually came close to getting a veto-proof supermajority but fell slightly short.) The Governor, who won reelection in 2022, is a Democrat.

The partisan conflict is so bad in Wisconsin that a number of years back, one of our Supreme Court justices (who was formerly the speaker of the state assembly) physically choked another Supreme Court justice in their chambers. Needless to say, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is extremely partisan.

Wisconsin is a weird state. Tammy Baldwin was the first open lesbian elected to the US Senate, while our other Senator Ron Johnson is... well, a total wacko who claimed that mouthwash cures Covid. And Wisconsin reelected both Republican Johnson and Democrat Evers in 2022. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a shame no one can rewrite the law should circumstances change. /s

So the first google hit[1] says Wisconsin spends 16k/year per k12 student[2]. So $325/year is a 2% increase, which is not significantly removed from inflation. Moreover this is an absolute amount, so the % increase will steadily decrease over time.

This $325/student/year funding increase is above nominal 1.8% inflation for 7 years, at which point this "huge annual increase" has become lower than rate of inflation.

A $325/year increase in budget for a hundred years is a funding increase of $32500, from $16000 to $48500. Continuing a fairly conservative assumption of 1.8% inflation, this would mean in a hundred years you've decreased funding by 50%, as simply matching inflation alone would require funding of $98000/student/year.

Inflation is compounding, and like interest, it can result in unexpectedly large changes in total value.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=wiscons... [2] https://wisconsinwatch.org/2023/07/is-annual-funding-for-wis...

Goodness gracious this is all going to end in a ball of flames isn't it.

If you take inflation into account it’s not doing much

Yeah, I did the math, it drops below inflation in 7-8 years. Weeeeee. Let's ignore the below inflation funding increases of the last few decades.

new Wisconsin constitution coming in 3... 2...

Yeah, that's going to end well.

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