State is loaded with cash, study shows
Report calls for strengthening the rainy day fund,
The last several weeks has brought to us a medley of messages from the current Democratic governor, most of them involving growing state government at the expense of fiscal responsibility and of liberty.
The topper was Evers’s creation of an Office of Environmental Justice, which he tried unsuccessfully to wrangle into the state budget last year. But there’s always that old workhorse of the administrative state to get one’s way—the executive order—and that’s exactly what Evers ordered on Earth Day.
One wonders just how this mission will be different from that of the DNR, whose own mission statement includes its work “to protect and enhance our natural resources” and “to provide a healthy, sustainable environment.” I assume that means a healthy, sustainable environment for all—you know, environmental justice—but maybe the governor knows something we don’t about what goes on inside the DNR. Or maybe his new office will really a cocoon of woke environmental overlords whose job it will be to make sure the DNR is woke enough.
I’ll have more about Evers’s new environmental justice office and his overall efforts to grow government through small-check stimulus stunts and massive infusions of cash in the government school system, as well as on long-standing abominations such as the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, which is sitting on a $1.3 billion bank account that could be returned to taxpayers without hurting school libraries one bit (the interest on that principal is distributed to school libraries) and which for years has violated its basic constitutional reason for being.
But today, let’s focus on the money the state is expected to have, and which Evers no doubts want to spend. In that regard, a new report by the research firm Forward Analytics shows that Wisconsin is sitting on a large store of cash and, what’s more, the stash is growing. The April report, “Flush with Cash: Wisconsin’s Growing Financial Reserves,” revealed that the state’s financial reserves totaled $4.3 billion at the end of fiscal 2021, and, at 22 percent of annual state spending, reserves are at an all-time high.
Here’s an idea …