Wisconsin Will Raise Public School Funding For the Next 400 Years – Slashdot

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It’s a strong political message, but little more.
The new law was going to be for two years, and it passed.
The courts can change it back to 2 years. The next legislature can change it. The next governor can change it.
It’s really only gullible people who would think the state’s education budget is now set in stone for four centuries. Sadly, there are plenty of gullible people and clickbait-writing reporters, but really that’s bound to make the political message that much bigger.
Both Democrats and Republicans have flexed their partial veto authority for years, with Mr Evers’ Republican predecessor once deploying it to extend a state programme’s deadline by one thousand years.
Sounds like the current republicans are just mad that Evers is smarter than they are.
And also it’s downright weird that they would freak out over this, unless they realize it’s actually a popular thing to do because the electorate thinks restoring funding to public schools is worth doing in the long term a

And also it’s downright weird that they would freak out over this, …
Not too weird because to change it Republicans would be the ones seen reducing school funding. Not a good look.
They love reducing school funding. Like increasing their per diem while getting rid of school breakfast. https://newrepublic.com/post/1… [newrepublic.com]
The party that supposedly protects children.
The anonymous coward brings up another good point: they are the nanny state. They dictate your medical care without medical training nor knowledge of the situation, they dictate education despite not being trained as educators nor knowing the details of the child, and otherwise work to eliminate self-determination and claim it is freedom.
After just one year they’ll have the support they are looking for. This is a big hike to property taxes year over year. Not to mention the finally acknowledged as illegal DEI programs that should have been cut.

Not too weird because to change it Republicans would be the ones seen reducing school funding. Not a good look.
They do that all the time and they’re proud of it.
Or they can wait a year for the property tax hikes to hit and not only toss him out but win every seat campaigning on fixing what he did. Nevermind that they actually did authorized it for a couple years, nobody is going to pay attention to that when this guy extended a few centuries.
Since the DEI measures violate civil rights he essentially is violating civil rights by vetoing the removal of that staff.
The audacity of wanting children to have a better education.

The audacity of wanting children to have a better education.
Some love the poorly educated [qz.com]. They’re easier to fool.
Others just want to program children.
More money doesn’t magically make for a better education. Pretty much any high school graduate is more than qualified to teach kids up to high school, with the notable exception of a very slight bump to math majors there is no correlation between teaching certificates/degrees and student outcomes. The only thing that makes a difference is experience and even that levels off after about 4 years.
In other words, if you toss in burger flippers with slightly better than avg IQs (to offset the heavy weighting at

More money doesn’t magically make for a better education.
Saw a chart the other day. We’ve something like tripled inflation-adjusted per-student primary education spending in the US over the last 40 years. Test scores have not budged. Clearly more money isn’t the solution.
So what is the solution, less money?
I would argue that raising standards, and getting parents more involved is the answer. In order to get parents more involved, their wages would have had to keep pace with inflation since the 1960’s. Raising standards — do away with common core among other things.
Less money to the public schools and more investment into private options which DO have significantly higher scores than public schools. Give parents the money they pay in taxes for schools back in vouchers for a private school of their choosing.
The US currently spends about $20k/pupil/year in federal expenditure between the Dept. of Education and direct state and local school subsidies that should be more than suffice to pay for a teacher with classes that are about 5 students large, and many states collec

The audacity of wanting children to have a better education.
There are other problems other than funding for public education. Throwing more money at public schools likely won’t make a difference at all. Unless and until the teacher union is removed, no amount of money or funding will do any good. It will however make most homeowners upset with you. It will increase expectations for the public schools which they won’t meet. And doing it in this highly visible way will make sure that the voters know who to blame for the extra money they have to pay when they pay
He changed the bill to span 402 years, aside from a typo, why?
Yes, it can be changed – I can just hear the Democrats wailing “Republicans don’t want to fund education! They don’t value our children!”. Think it won’t happen? Common sense hasn’t been part of US politics for a long, long time.
Why do we have the US Department of Education? Seriously – it didn’t exist before Jimmy Carter entered the Oval Office. The country got along for almost two centuries (and even put a man on the moon), and where are we now
Only in America could someone be that dumb

Only in America could someone be that dumb
Whether education is an investment, and expense, or a boondoggle is not the issue. We have a democratic system with separation of powers. The legislature is supposed to write the bills. An edit like this is egregiously letting the executive massively change the intent of the bill. You or I might not like what the legislature came up with but it’s their decision. Making decisions about the timeframe of a tax policy is what we hire and pay them to do.
If it were me, I’d immediately repeal partial vetos. Clearl
Hey, slow down there, dumbfuck.
The partial veto is in the WI constitution, and the voters can and have reeled it in in the past because of abuses not entirely dissimilar to this.
You can’t bitch and moan about “separation of powers” when the document which DEFINES THEM, the WI state constitution, gives this power to the governor. Much less can you bitch and moan knowing that voters can and have adjusted this as they see fit.
No matter what constitution you personally feel governs you, it’s the WI state consti

[Investing in Education is “Screwing the Tax Payer”] Only in America could someone be that dumb
The way the governor altered it allows taxes to be increased every year for 400 years and no longer vacates positions at the public university Republicans removed. Both changes affect taxes and budgets in a way the elected legislative branch desired. It’s the legislative branch’s responsibility to create laws.
It probably is a good idea to fund education for the long term instead of turning it into political fodder every election. The governor doing it single-handedly in this fashion most likely is overreach
“The governor doing it single-handedly in this fashion most likely is overreaching his authority.”
The prior governor – anti-education republican Scott Walker – used this same form of veto to extend a moratorium on school districts installing air conditioning without a public referendum [wpr.org] from a single year to 1000 years. [twitter.com]
I’d rather that school districts be able to fund appropriately, because kids deserve a good education (plus, having a well educated population is important for civic engagement, economic s
Once upon a time I used to be a computer service tech who worked for school districts. For the most part they were ridiculously overfunded.
The fact is that pretty much anyone can teach [it has been shown education on education doesn’t improve student outcomes], or rather pretty much anyone who gives it a shot has an equal chance of turning out to be able to teach well. Teachers are actually overpaid while feeling underpaid due to their pointless student loans. Replace them with burger flippers, give them $4
The fact is that pretty much anyone can teach – Not remotely true, and often something said by anti-education people who have no idea of the skillset required of teachers.
Teachers are actually overpaid – False. [marketplace.org]
You could say the same for computer service techs.
Take a group of individuals and equip them with Internet access and Google and you have a 50-50 chance that they can solve most computer problems.
If you disagree with this statement maybe you should also reevaluate your statement.
Since the veto is in the Wisconsin constitution and the Wisconsin constitution defines/designs the Wisconsin government it doesn’t “violate[] the basic design of [Wisconsin] government”.
There is an argument to be made though that this veto power may need to be adjusted.

Both changes affect taxes and budgets in a way the elected legislative branch desired. It’s the legislative branch’s responsibility to create laws.
No.
The legislature passed a bill that provided for two years of funding increases, the governor altered the bill with his “partial veto” and gave the bill an additional 400 years of defined level funding per student. That is NOT what the legislature approved.
Agree with it or not, but the Governor altered the bill the legislature passed.
Republicans would be jizzing their pants if this was intended to fight “woke”
It was supposed to fight the unconstitutional DEI measures, which are ‘woke’ in a nutshell.
Guess woke has lost it’s outrage and DEI is the new hot conservative boogeyman.
What unconstitutional DEI measures has the governor enacted?
and it doesn’t matter which party, such an obvious abuse of power to skirt the obvious spirit of both the bill and the power of the office he holds
I’m sure he and sycophant apologists will say how ‘good’ or ‘clever’ this is
like the phrase ‘Help your uncle, Jack, off his horse’ with comma-removal power… in the hands of the self-righteous this becomes a joke instead of a desire to help
now imagine what this guy — and the other govs — would do if unchecked

and it doesn’t matter which party, such an obvious abuse of power to skirt the obvious spirit of both the bill and the power of the office he holds
And this is why politicians are less popular than toenail fungus. This was clearly not the intent of allowing partial vetoes. I’m as much of a legal textualist as you’ll find but that’s just an annoying stunt. Sheesh, I expect the next bill will just be 10,000 repetitions of the alphabet from which the Governor can delete everything which doesn’t look like the bill he wanted to write.
Sadly, our intended governmental structure may not help. The theory was legislators would be more loyal to their institution,

The entire point of the power is to let governors fuck with bills.
Yes and no. The intent of line-item or partial vetoes is to let Governors remove items from bills. The typical use case is to let the governor defund a crony provision added to a budget in sleezy back room deal. In fact, think about the term, “veto”. Veto power is intended to let the executive block legislative action, not expand it.
That being said, it sounds like the Wisconsin partial-veto legislation was not particularly well thought through. No doubt they thought “what would I want the governor to use th

and it doesn’t matter which party, such an obvious abuse of power to skirt the obvious spirit of both the bill and the power of the office he holds
I’m sure he and sycophant apologists will say how ‘good’ or ‘clever’ this is
like the phrase ‘Help your uncle, Jack, off his horse’ with comma-removal power… in the hands of the self-righteous this becomes a joke instead of a desire to help
now imagine what this guy — and the other govs — would do if unchecked
The other factor to consider is that Wisconsin is heavily gerrymandered [wikipedia.org].
At the Federal level, and for statewide offices like Governor and Justices, they tend to be slightly Democratic [wikipedia.org]. In free elections their state legislature would either be Democratic, or have only a slight GOP majority.
So really what we have here is a legitimately elected branch of the Wisconsin government (the Governor) using an illegitimate means (ridiculous inline veto) to override an illegitimately elected branch of the government (a legislature with a permanent GOP majority regardless of the will of the people).
Still problematic, but less a specific outrage and more a sign of general democratic collapse.

Gerrymandering is a real problem and we need to do something to address it but both parties love to do it and pretty much all politicians don’t want to fix it.
Both parties do it, but one is clearly far worse.

Also, gerrymandering started before the Constitution was written so I’m not sure your hyperbole about a ‘general democratic collapse’ holds any water.
I can’t find a proper peer reviewed study, but it does seem to be getting worse [umbc.edu].
But there are two big issues with gerrymandering:
1) It yields non-competitive districts where the party partisans, rather than the general public, effectively choose the representative.
2) When you have a gerrymandered minority ruling a majority the government loses legitimacy.

Seems like just another histrionic rant from someone who is treating politics like a game.
I’m a Canadian, and I want the US to fix its political system because I seriously think it’s headed toward
Don’t worry, the Conservatives are taking lessons from the Republican’s and Harper is pushing taking lessons from Hungary, I’m sure given the chance, Elections Canada will be defunded and Parliament will directly control the boundaries of ridings.
“In free elections their state legislature would either be Democratic”
In my experience Democrats tend to abuse these claims to pretend that a couple overpopulated cities should completely disenfranchise the rest of the state by denying them representation. Which sort of tosses a wrench in the core concept we are founded on, likeminded people can flee to here, incorporate their own community, and more or less be left alone to live according to their ideas without being subjected to the tyranny of the majorit

“In free elections their state legislature would either be Democratic”
In my experience Democrats tend to abuse these claims to pretend that a couple overpopulated cities should completely disenfranchise the rest of the state by denying them representation.
The converse of that is that those people in “a couple overpopulated cities”, end up deprived of political power and end up getting ruled over by the rural and suburban minority.

Which sort of tosses a wrench in the core concept we are founded on, likeminded people can flee to here, incorporate their own community, and more or less be left alone to live according to their ideas without being subjected to the tyranny of the majority.
Even worse is tyranny of the minority, which you’re seeing with the anti-abortion bills that are passed even though they are generally opposed by the public in the state.
Though the cities tend to contain a lot of minorities as well… so in disenfranchising them you still end up with a tyranny of the majority after all.

Having proportionate representation in the legislature
You mean disp
Long-time Wisconsin resident here. Not long ago Scott Walker was a Republican governor and used this same trick. As has basically every governor before him; the line-item veto is not exactly a secret among Wisconsin politicians.
As to what the government would do if unchecked, we don’t need to imagine. The Republicans had control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature, as well as a (very) friendly supreme court, back in 2019. They left this power right where it is. (Honestly, I think this was a dumb move; the way the districts are in WI it’s much more likely you’ll see a Republican legislature and Democratic governor than vice-versa.)
Everyone moans when the line-item veto gets used on their budget, but they keep it as a cudgel for stupid tricks when their governor is in power. At this point, my take is: Politics has rules. Play by the rules or get played. Change the rules if you don’t like them and have the power to do so. But don’t whine when someone else plays by by the rules in a way you don’t like.
“a Republican governor and used this same trick”
Yes and no. Putting in a year-over-year tax hike for homeowners for the next several centuries might sound similar to extending the requirement for a public measure before spending a boatload of money for 1000 years because they both involve a lot of years but the impact of the two fiscally and on the residents of the state isn’t even remotely within the same sport let alone ballpark.
You are right the fiscal repercussions are vastly different.
In one you have to waste money studying if air conditioning is needed and the other one only costs taxpayers money if their local government deems it necessary.
The new law doesn’t force any tax increases it just spells out a maximum that they can be increased if school boards choose to.
Years ago this was referred to as the “Frankenstein veto” as it allowed creating new legislation such as this without legislature input. Regardless of political alignment, as a Wisconsin resident I’ve never liked it and wish it would be removed from the governor’s toolbox. Sure it may let you pull stunts like this, but the parts vetoes may have provided positive public benefit and now they are gone.
Now, some may say that the severely gerrymandered districts (I recall that a state that votes roughly 60% Demo
The legislator could always try to override the veto if it is so bad. 8^)

and it doesn’t matter which party, such an obvious abuse of power to skirt the obvious spirit of both the bill and the power of the office he holds
I’m sure he and sycophant apologists will say how ‘good’ or ‘clever’ this is
Did you miss that his predecessor from another party did the exact same thing first? That’s not saying it’s right. It’s wrong but, as an action, this helps draw attention to just how broken their law on vetoes is.
tax foxconn for not building on their land
That republicans called public education “screwing the taxpayer”

That republicans called public education “screwing the taxpayer”
It seems education, especially higher education, is a hindrance to Republican power. According to some articles, Democrats seem to attract more people with higher educations than Republicans do. From Elections 2022: The educational divide that helps explain the midterms [politico.com] (and others):

Republicans failed to make significant gains in districts dominated by college-educated white voters — or nonwhite voters without degrees.
— Democrats control 77% of the U.S.’s most highly educated Congressional districts.
— Republicans control 64% of districts where the fewest people went to college.
Search: level of education vote democrat or republican [google.com]
I’m a Republican, and that seems 100% clear to me.
It’s a stupid administrative capability.
The big problem here is not that a governor did something annoying. This is a loophole that seems to allow the governor to rewrite an entire bill without oversight. The US Constitution is very clear on forbidding any government from operating like that.
What next? Allowing the governor to run arbitrary regex on the law? This is tantamount to granting unlimited executive power, and as much as you may want to fund education you should not want this to stand. It’s shenanigans, and the fact that it’s shenanigans in your favor shouldn’t sway you. Next time it’ll be against you. Then what?
I think most of us have a reasonable understanding of what a line-item veto should mean, and this is not it. If legislators didn’t act so much in bad faith with “riders”
Wow, this would be a great April Fools story. However, it’s real. Here’s a writeup of the Wisconsin partial veto [wisconsin.gov]:

the partial veto power allows the governor to strike words, numbers, and punctuation in both appropriation and non-appropriation text
A 1930 amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution created the governor’s partial veto power. The amendment provided that “Appropriation bills may be approved in whole or in part by the governor, and the part approved shall become law.”
In 1990, the voters amended the constitution to provide that “In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill.”
In 2008, the voters again amended the constitution to prohibit the governor from creating “a new sentence by combining parts of 2 or more sentences of the enrolled bill.”
Strictly speaking, the governor can strike out the word “not”, thus directly inverting the meaning of a new law. Wow!
This means that a wise legislature should following certain strategies in writing the text of bills, such as using very short sentences and not using the word “not” or any negative modifiers. So, “2023 lasting for two years” instead of writing “2023-24 and 2024-25”. Of course,

… program’s deadline by one thousand years.
It’s not a problem when the GOP does it.

… for the next two school years.
Please think of the children, unless you have to pay for it.
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