With days leading up to the election, Gov. Jim Doyle and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Green, R-Green Bay, are both wooing voters with a nostrum favored by all politicians: tax breaks.
On Oct. 25, Doyle and Green rolled out competing tax cut proposals. Green's plan offers sales tax exemptions for energy-saving appliances and tax credits to encourage the creation of renewable energy. He estimates the price tag at under $17 million.
Doyle's plan would raise state income tax deductions for tuition at Wisconsin colleges and universities from $4,243 to about $6,000 per year. The deduction could be applied to books and fees—a feature not included in the current system.
It would allow families to keep an additional $120 for each student in college, based on Wisconsin's top income tax rate of 6.75 percent. It would also mean about $10-15 million less in annual state revenue.
Wisconsin college students need relief from the high cost of education and the state needs to encourage energy conservation. However, it is politically cynical for Doyle and Green to propose these patches as important solutions, especially when the candidates haven't explained how they would meet the resulting revenue shortfalls.
At this stage of the campaign, such proposals represent political pandering and are offensive because they diminish voters' genuine economic needs. Such proposals are also naA_ve because most voters' support can't be bought for a couple hundred dollars.
Furthermore, it is disingenuous for candidates to present pie-in-the-sky promises—pulled like rabbits out of a tattered policy hat—as accomplished fact. Each candidate's proposal would have to pass the legislature. Doyle's, in particular, would be DOA in a Republican-controlled legislature.
We are not surprised Doyle feels pressure to pledge an education tax break. A signature Green campaign strategy has shown Doyle as the enemy of Wisconsin higher education. During Doyle's first term, UW-Madison undergraduate tuition has indeed risen by about 50 percent. However, a statehouse firmly dominated by Republicans since 2002 has been writing the laws—not Doyle.
Doyle weakens his campaign and gives Green ammunition by offering a tax proposal clearly aimed at winning votes rather than fundamentally improving the affordability of education. The motives behind Green's own tax plan, of course, are no less self-serving.
At this stage of the campaign, voters deserve to hear Doyle and Green talk about big issues and substantive solutions—not be tricked or treated by further political pandering.
