Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker has told Wisconsin he’s got a brown bag full of tax cuts for the rich and big business. And he wants to slash BadgerCare to pay for it.
Walker has refused pointedly to detail exactly how he will pay for his nearly $2 billion in tax cuts in the midst of a projected $2.5 billion budget deficit. But it is clear a major part of this plan would include creating a time limit for BadgerCare health coverage -- a move that could end coverage for as many as 350,000, including children, expectant mothers and working Wisconsinites.
This is an appalling notion. BadgerCare was created as a bipartisan program under Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson. As Joe Leann, Thompson’s former head of the Department of Health and Family services said recently, “There was no time limit envisioned. BadgerCare was intended to be there for however long (low-income) people were working jobs that didn’t provide health care.”
Scott Walker sees it a different way … For a year, Walker has repeated on the campaign trail that he wants time limits for BadgerCare … But suddenly, Walker … offer(ed) a sheepish “never mind.”
But the facts are clear: Walker has called for time limits for BadgerCare in news outlets across the state, dating as far back as almost a year ago. Walker may be momentarily waffling, but his campaign-trail rhetoric has been consistent: Walker wants time limits for BadgerCare.
Consider, for example these Walker quotes from the campaign trail: “I think it has to be not just a pure time limit, but progressions for, ‘You’ve got this amount of time; here’s what we expect you to do; here’s the options you should have by that time.’ ” -- WISC-TV, 10/9/09
“I’d streamline it down so you had time limits on things of that nature.” -- “On the issues with Mike Gousha,” 3/11/10
“I think you have to have time limits in place, as we did under Gov. Thompson’s original proposal, and the state has to work more aggressively for ways to plug people in on the W-2 side, working with local counties, into work opportunities. In most cases, you’re talking about 24 months, depending on the threshold there.” -- Appleton Post-Crescent, 6/16/10
According to figures from the state Department of Health Services, if Walker imposed a two-year time limit, nearly 350,000 working Wisconsinites, expectant mothers and children would be immediately without health care coverage.
What is most unsettling about Walker’s plan to create time limits for BadgerCare is the reason why.
Walker has proposed, according to figures from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, nearly $2 billion in tax cuts, including a first-of-its-kind income tax cut for just the top 1 percent (cost: $287 million) and reopening the Las Vegas corporate loophole for banks and other big businesses (cost: $187 million). Walker also wants to make changes to the capital gains tax, which provides 70 percent of its benefits to those making more than $200,000 a year (cost: $243 million), and he wants to shelter the assets of the wealthiest Wisconsinites even more by a radical end to tax paid on retirement income, regardless of income (cost: $920 million).Scott Walker would cut 350,000 Wisconsinites from BadgerCare to pay for tax cuts for the rich and big business, and some would argue these are the same George W. Bush-type conservative policies that
caused the national economic collapse. In fact, Walker’s are worse.Scot Ross is the executive director of One Wisconsin Now, a statewide liberal advocacy organization.
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Sunday, September 5, 2010
Corporate Liberty and Freedom=Republican Tax Cuts.
Butting up against my recent dissection of Scott Walker's draconian plan for the state, Scot Ross, from One Wisconsin Now, put the above equation into words regarding the Republican position and direction they want to take our country. Corporate Royalty=GOP tax cuts and liability exemptions. I've posted much of his column here, so I can reference what actually does happen in Wisconsin if Walker does win. It's time to refute conservative revisionist history:
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