Here & Now

Republican Priorities for the 2021 Budget

Frederica Freyberg:

The heavy lift of crafting the state two-year budget got underway in the Legislature in earnest this week and the Republican majority voted to lift a lot out of the governor’s executive budget, more than 390 items, including big-ticket ones like the expansion of BadgerCare. Tonight, we talk with two members of the legislature’s budget committee. In a few minutes, a Democrat. But first Republican Co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee, Mark Born of Beaver Dam and thanks very much for being here.

Mark Born:

Good to be with you again.

Frederica Freyberg:

Why did you vote to remove so much from the executive budget?

Mark Born:

Because of the way it was built, you know? It was unrealistic. We just couldn’t move forward with a budget that was really built on sand with a lot of massive tax increases, welfare expansion, a lot of divisive policy. You mentioned on your open the number of things we took out, almost 400 items. Director Lang from the non-partisan Fiscal Bureau said it was one of the biggest lists ever as far as the number of policy items that the governor put in his budget. The co-chair Marklein and I, from the very beginning of the budget process, asked the governor not to fill it with divisive policy and massive tax increases, to work with us on a reasonable budget and that’s not what he put forward. So we’re going to go back and start from the base budget we all agreed to a little less than two years ago. Governor Evers and the Legislature agreed to what we’re operating under now and we’re going to work from there and build a budget from that.

Frederica Freyberg:

A lot of it obviously comes down to a political philosophical divide. Governor Evers would reduce tax credits for manufacturers and increase taxes on capital gains, for example. One Democrat called your budget action, “politically selfish, not helping those who can’t fend for themselves.” How do you respond to that?

Mark Born:

I don’t agree with that at all. Obviously, you know, working on a budget process like this there’s political differences, there’s difference of opinion, there’s different ways to accomplish things. And we’re going to focus on investing in priorities for the state of Wisconsin that will do a lot to help people and help businesses and help us grow our state. That’s the track record we have for the last decade in the Republican Legislature and they have different ways of doing it. The Democrats want to make things reliable on government and government programs and tax people more. We want to send money back to the taxpayers and invest in their priorities with the large surpluses that we have to build this budget now.

Frederica Freyberg:

Perhaps the largest bone of contention, which I don’t have to tell you, is the governor and Democrats want to again expand Medicaid in Wisconsin to allow some 90,000 more low-income people to qualify for BadgerCare. Why is it stricken from your budget document when expanding it would mean an infusion of $1.6 billion from the federal government?

Mark Born:

Because it’s a massive policy change. Like you’ve said, we’ve been having this debate for several years now that nothing has changed. The feds throw some more money at it but it’s about the fact that we don’t believe you need to expand welfare, the government-run insurance program, to insure these folks. We set something up in Wisconsin several years ago that allows people to have access. We don’t have the coverage gaps. People that currently are not insured is because they’re not choosing to take advantage of those opportunities. We have folks that are on private insurance through the exchanges. We’ve subsidized that as a state. The feds subsidized that very heavy and in fact, with the current federal legislation, it subsidized the premiums at 100% for folks up to 150% of the poverty level so we can get you on private insurance and have access to health insurance that way. It’s just a difference of they want everyone on a government program and we believe there are better ways to do this and we don’t have coverage gaps in Wisconsin because of that.

Frederica Freyberg:

As for the $3.2 billion in federal COVID aid coming into Wisconsin, the governor sees that money as supplemental funding, not replacement funding. How do you and the Republican majority see it?

Mark Born:

I think you can say it’s supplemental, but it still works with the state funds. I mean, if we’re accomplishing goals that we need to accomplish, whether we’re using federal money or state budget, a large part of the state budget includes federal money, includes other program revenue. It’s not all state dollars. So as we build a budget, federal money plays in a role in that. And to pretend that it doesn’t, either you don’t understand how this stuff works or you just don’t want to work with the Legislature on it. If the governor wants to work on how to figure out how to craft this stuff so we can work together and so that the funds can work together to do the best for Wisconsin, we should certainly be looking at all of the money, not just certain pots of it.

Frederica Freyberg:

Because you’ve made entreaties to meet with the governor to nail down where he’ll spend that money, but he asked you to come to any meeting with a plan of how you would spend the $1.6 billion coming from expanding Medicaid. Is this meeting going to happen? Has it happened?

Mark Born:

We’d certainly be happy to meet with him and talk about the federal funding coming into the state. I don’t know why we would come forward with a plan for money we’re not going to take on a welfare expansion. I don’t think that’s a good use of our time. We made that decision yesterday, as well as several other times. I don’t see why we continue to talk about that.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. All right. We leave it there. We will be watching, of course. Representative Mark Born, thanks very much.

Mark Born:

Thank you.