News of the Day

After a week of headlines suggesting Foxconn was abandoning or at least reevaluating plans for a LCD display fabrication facility in Mount Pleasant, the company now says it will move ahead with a Gen 6 fab at the complex.

The company is moving ahead with the projects it said it would build in the next 18 months. Those facilities include assembly, packaging and molding operations. Building those facilities first would allow the company to ship components to Mount Pleasant for assembly while the fabrication facility, which would actually make the screens, is built.

Getting operations up and running would help the company increase its employment in the state, allowing it to potentially earn payroll tax credits. The company needs at least 1,820 employees in 2020 to earn any tax credits for job creation.

The Gen 6 plant, however, is still a departure from Foxconn’s original plans. When the project was first announced, the company said it would build a Gen 10.5 plant to make the largest screens in the world. The larger screen market, however, has been plagued by oversupply in recent years.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the GOP-controlled state Legislature will have about $1.8 billion in new state tax revenue as they craft the next budget, according to a report released Wednesday by the Legislature’s nonpartisan budget office.

The Legislative Fiscal Bureau on Wednesday released estimates of revenues and expenses for the state over the next three years.

In addition to new revenue projections, the numbers also show the state is projected to end the current budget on June 30 with nearly $700 million in the bank.

The estimates come as the Democratic governor and conservative majority at the State Capitol begin the early stages of budget negotiations.

“(Evers) has inherited one of the best budget scenarios in a generation,” Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, tweeted after the report. Nygren is the co-chair of the state budget committee. “The state is in a strong fiscal condition and there is no need to raise taxes.”

The governor’s office rejected Republicans’ assessment.

“The people of Wisconsin deserve an honest conversation about the challenges facing our state,” said Evers’ spokeswoman Melissa Baldauff. “Gov. Evers has inherited a budget from Republicans defined by eight years of failing to fully fund our public schools, ignoring our criminal justice system crisis, tax policies that prioritize millionaires instead of working Wisconsin families, no long-term solution on transportation, and attempts to gut healthcare protections for millions of Wisconsinites.”

Wisconsin’s tax season, like the federal tax season, officially begins today. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue (DOR) expects filing activity will be brisk, particularly the first few weeks and the last few weeks of the season.

This year’s individual income tax filing deadline is Monday, April 15. DOR would like to remind taxpayers not to file until they have all their tax documents. Having to file an amended return later will significantly delay a refund.

People may use the free, fast and accurate Wisconsin E-file online tool to file their state income taxes, or they may choose to use third-party software from an approved vendor. Like other online tools, Wisconsin E-file does the required math to prevent errors and allows direct deposit or withdrawal from a bank account.

“Providing excellent customer service is very important to us,” notes Secretary Barca. “We encourage taxpayers with questions to submit them online or call DOR’s individual customer service line at 608.266.2486.”

Taxpayers will find a number of helpful resources available on DOR’s website at www.revenue.wi.gov including:

 a list of free tax help sites across Wisconsin and more information about them

 an online application that will check the status of your refund

 a mobile app available free of charge from the Apple or Android app stores

 DOR’s video center with information on e-filing, free tax help and tax credits

As in previous years, DOR cannot issue refunds until March 1, if it cannot verify wage and withholding information from employers.

The U.S. Postal Service has raised prices on stamps and services.

• Price to mail 1st-class letter goes up to 55 cents
• It’s largest percentage increase since 1991
• US Postal Service reported net loss of $3.9B in 2018

Starting Sunday, the price to mail a first-class letter went up from 50 to 55 cents.

The cost of a “forever” stamp also increased to 55 cents.

The nickel increase is the largest percentage price hike since 1991, when the cost of a stamp rose from 25 to 29 cents.

Priority mail prices also jumped 5.9 percent, increasing the cost to mail a small box from $7.20 to $7.90.

The Postal Service reported a net loss of $3.9 billion in 2018, blaming lower mail volume and pension and health care costs.

It last increased stamp prices a year ago in January 2018, when the cost rose a penny to 50 cents.

The percentage of Americans without health insurance has reached its highest point since 2014, when ObamaCare was still in its early years of implementation.

The uninsured rate was 13.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018, well above the record-low rate of 10.9 seen in 2016, the last year of President Obama’s second term, according to a survey released by Gallup Wednesday.

That represents about 7 million people losing or dropping insurance between 2016 and 2018, Gallup said.

Before the implementation of the health care law, the uninsured rate was 18 percent. It steadily dropped since 2014, before hitting an all-time low in 2016.

The largest coverage losses in recent years have been among women, young adults and those with low incomes, according to the survey.

Those younger than 35 reported an uninsured rate of more than 21 percent, a 5 percent increase from 2016.  The rate of uninsured women increased from 8.9 percent in late 2016 to 12.8 percent in 2018.

Governor Tony Evers delivered his first State of the State address Tuesday evening focusing on a handful of campaign pledges including boosting school funding, fixing transportation, and expanding health care.

Evers pitched to return to two-thirds funding for schools and urged legislation to address the state’s achievement gap for low-income students.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald called it a “stretch.” Republican Senator Alberta Darling and others in her caucus do support restoring two-thirds funding but want to find what she calls appropriate ways to pay for it. “He has a lot of good ideas that we’d like to do,” said Sen. Darling. “The issue is how are we going to pay for it?”

Evers also stressed he’ll seek to expand Medicaid in his budget, citing the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau who projects it could provide health care coverage for an additional 76,000 Wisconsinites.

Fitzgerald said Evers should “give up” on plans to include it in his budget.

“All we’re going to do is end up in a situation where it’s going to be logger-heads and will have to continue to negotiation, but he can’t balance his budget on the Medicaid number, it’s not going to work,” said Fitzgerald.

Evers said soon he will launch a task force with stakeholders and feedback from voters to form a bipartisan solution to funding transportation and infrastructure.

“I know that caucus members in both houses support different approaches to solving our transportation funding crisis, it’s going to take sacrifices and compromises to find a long-term, comprehensive solution that works for everyone,” said Evers.

Wisconsin’s agriculture industry had a rough go of it in 2018 after losing 638 dairy farms in just one year. According to the latest data from the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, that’s a more than 7 percent decline and the biggest drop since 2004.

Steven Deller, a professor in the department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said 2019’s outlook is expected to remain weak due to the uncertainty over international trade policies.

“Farms will continue the trend toward bifurcation, which means that there will be growth in smaller and large farms, with middle-sized farms getting squeezed,” Deller said. “Most of it has to do with cost of production. The issue with the larger farms is that they tend to carry a lot more debt load and if commodity prices stay low, servicing that debt becomes harder. Smaller farms tend to have less debt to service.”

According to Deller, the best way to grow the industry is through exports, since the growth of domestic demand is limited. Most of the growth in smaller scale farming and specialty crops and products came from increasing demand for local foods. While many of the surviving dairy operations are larger, even they are struggling to survive, he said.

“Wisconsin agriculture is surprisingly diverse,” Deller said. “It is still dominated by dairy and cheese production, as most Wisconsin-produced milk goes into cheese, but compared to places like Illinois or Indiana, Wisconsin has lots of fruit and vegetable production.”