The County Board Is Not Trying to Rob You

If you live in Waukesha, the County Board is considering a 0.5% sales tax.

(Note: this also appears in the Life, Under Construction newsletter.)

Under County Executive Paul Farrow, the county has resisted imposing a sales tax, unlike neighboring Milwaukee County. Waukesha County has always been frugal. If you doubt it, have you driven on a county highway after it snowed?

If the county doesn’t impose the sales tax, they’re going to have to cut real services like sheriff patrols at night in some communities. There isn’t “waste and fraud” that can be eliminated. It’s gone.

Farrow is no tax-and-spend liberal. He was a conservative Republican in the legislature before he became county executive. He also served as chairman of the state Republican Party.

Despite all this, relatively new Waukesha County resident Scott Walker, the former governor, is trying to rally Republicans to oppose the sales tax. Walker is also getting support. I’m sure Farrow appreciates Walker parachuting into Waukesha County to offer his opinion as much as Walker appreciated Donald Trump coming into Wisconsin in 2016 and trashing Walker’s reforms.

Of course, Walker didn’t live in Waukesha County for all of the years that Farrow and his predecessor Dan Vrakas resisted imposing a sales tax. Walker was too busy in Madison where he and his fellow Republicans froze the amount of shared revenue Waukesha County received. Now Waukesha County is at the bottom of receiving shared revenue.

Ironically, while Walker was governor, he enjoyed the budgetary benefit of a 5% sales tax. That’s a decimal point to the right, 5%. Walker never suggested repealing it.

Before he became governor in 2011, Walker was county executive in Milwaukee County from 2002 to 2010. The entire time Walker was county executive, Milwaukee County had a 0.5% sales tax just like the one proposed for Waukesha County and Walker never proposed repealing it.

The only conclusion we’re left with is that Walker is a tax-and-spend liberal. Or, as the modern Trumpified Republican Party phrases it, Walker is a Marxist-Communist-Socialist-Liberal. Who knew?

Can we point out one more irony? Walker is so busy bouncing around the country shilling for Trump, he’s not likely to pay much if any in sales taxes in Waukesha County.

His job, the one that supposedly pays his bill, is with the national organization Young America’s Foundation (YAF), based in Virginia, which pays him $800,000 per year, according to ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. The website also reports that in 2022, YAF had a net operating loss of $4,310,201 in 2022.

Perhaps YAF should charge a sales tax.

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