No Runny Eggs

The Journal Sentinel is reporting that the tax-increasers on the County Board (Richard Nyklewicz, Lee Holloway, Michael Mayo and Marina Dimtrijevic) want to shove a 0.25% sales tax through to fund the parks, Milwaukee County Zoo, Milwaukee Public Museum, the UW Extension (why in the hell does Milwaukee County have an extension when we have UWM?), Historical Society, War Memorial Center, Villa Terrace/Charles Allis art museums, Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, Visit Milwaukee, the library system, and the Milwaukee County Fund for the Arts. What’s worse, 2 other unnamed board members want a larger 0.5% sales tax for just the parks.

Never mind that we already have a maxed-out total sales tax of 5.6% (and a state-high 5.85% for food and beverages) – 5 percentage points to the state, 0.5 percentage points to the county, 0.1 percentage points to Miller Park, and 0.25 percentage points on food and beverages to the Wisconsin Center District. Never mind that we have outrageous property taxes that many of these same county board supervisors looted to enhance pension benefits. These asshats want more, more, more. I know damn well that they won’t return the property tax money that they saved by shifting the parks and cultural funding to a sales tax; they’ll spend it on something like a parking structure for themselves.

While the gang of 4 will seek to have a September referrendum on this (gee, why September and not November; could it be that there are less voters in September?), that would only be an advisory one because the Legislature would have to pass enabling legislation.

While County Executive Scott Walker opposes this idea, his grand proposal to shift the parks to an “independently elected parks district board” with separate property tax levy authority is little better. Fortunately, that proposal would also have to go through the Legislature.

We should stick with Walker’s scaled-back proposal to do more privatizing. If this new tax flies, I’ll be doing my medium-ticket shopping in Racine or Waukesha Counties, which don’t penalize me for shopping there (I already do my big-ticket shopping there).