MacIver News Service - The Joint Committee on Finance will decide today if able-bodied childless adults will be required to get a job or take job training to receive food stamp benefits. Governor Scott Walker's budget has several entitlement reform proposals, including require able-bodied childless adults to get a job or participate in a work training program at least 20 hours per week to receive FoodShare benefits. Read More »

by James Wigderson-Special Guest Perspective for the MacIver Institute The Reverend Jeremiah Wright continued his grand tour of speaking engagements Friday night in Milwaukee. The occasion was a $50 per plate dinner in honor of MICAH's 25th anniversary. The headline after-dinner speaker did not disappoint the estimated 350-400 people in attendance. Read More »

MacIver News Service - Wisconsin's Medical Assistance (MA), BadgerCare Plus, and other MA-related programs' costs will increase by $73.5 million in 2013-2015, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB). The LFB said that Governor Scott Walker originally increased MA-related spending by $660.6 million, but revised estimates require an increase of $734.1 million. Read More »

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post fact checks the statements made by the IRS on the question if the agency was targeting tea-party groups and other conservative organizations filing for tax-exempt status. Read More »

Brett Healy and Nick Novak of the MacIver Institute joined their friends at Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin to participate in Tax Townhalls all across Wisconsin last week. The two traveled to Appleton, Green Bay, Green Lake, Oshkosh, and Wausau to speak with taxpayers about Wisconsin's tax code, the state's income tax, and Governor Scott Walker's proposed budget that includes a $343 million income tax cut. Read More »

Why was the IRS interested in efforts to ensure the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was legitimate? Read More »

Wisconsin State Superintendent Tony Evers has recently criticized the idea, saying that the report cards are currently a pilot program and that these report cards aren't ready to be a piece of high stakes educational policy. However, that's not what Evers and the Department of Public Instruction said as these report cards were being developed to replace an ineffective No Child Left Behind (NCLB) system back in February of 2012. Read More »

Robert Mentzer, the opinion editor at the Wausau Daily Herald, is grateful that my op-ed last week for the MacIver Institute was free of "Obamacare = death of freedom" rhetoric, even as he finds my arguments opposing Medicaid expansion to be less than compelling. I'll leave the cataclysmic rhetoric to Democrats like Senator Max Baucus and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who described President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act as, "a huge train wreck." Read More »

Department of Workforce Development (DWD) Secretary Reggie Newson announced today that Wisconsin's economy added over 62,000 private sector jobs in 2011-2012. Read More »

This recommends that the state's non-instrumentality charter schools no longer exist going forward. It's a bold statement, and one that doesn't line up with the rest of the study's mission; to provide high quality education for low-income students. Milwaukee, which is home to all but one of the state's independent charter schools, has had great progress in these institutions. They commonly outscore public schools and instrumentality charters in both WKCE and School Report Card metrics while educating a high population of low-income students. Read More »