July 25, 2006
What’s the real difference between Wisconsin and Minnesota?
To bolster his contention that Minnesota taxes are too high, former GOP party chair Bill Cooper has more than once made the point that Minnesota collects more tax money than Wisconsin, though Wisconsin has 400,000 more people.
Sounds bad. But the claim is actually just a bad comparison, says policy analyst Jeff Van Wychen who has looked at how government spending compares across states:
“A much larger share of general education funding is paid for at the state level in Minnesota than in Wisconsin, due to the state takeover of general education.”In fact, the Republican party, Taxpayers League and most progressives all supported the change in how the state paid for education, because it encourages more fairness in the system and was supposed to relieve the property tax burden. So let's not use a good policy to make it look like spending is up when it's just been shifted from the local level to the state. A more appropriate comparison would be based on the percentage of average personal income spent by all government — state and local government plus federal dollars spent in the state. By this measure, Minnesota has fallen to 36th among the 50 states based on 2004 data. And we haven’t been heading upward since. Wisconsin? It ranks 15th.
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