President Biden laid out a three-part plan on Tuesday for combating high inflation.

The first part of his plan was an acknowledgment that the Federal Reserve “has a primary responsibility to control inflation.”

The second part involved making goods more affordable for families with a focus on high gas prices. His administration has blamed Russia’s invasion into Ukraine for the high price of gas and Biden touted the release from global oil reserves and called on Congress to pass clean energy tax credits. Biden’s plan to make goods more affordable also includes fixing supply chains, improving infrastructure, “and cracking down on the exorbitant fees that foreign ocean freight companies charge to move products.”

The third part of the president’s plan involved reducing the federal deficit through “common-sense reforms to the tax code.” “We should level the international taxation playing field so companies no longer have an incentive to shift jobs and profits overseas. And we should end the outrageous unfairness in the tax code that allows a billionaire to pay lower rates than a teacher or firefighter,” he said.

Tourism spending in Wisconsin has outperformed the national average for the past two years in comparison to 2019 numbers, state officials announced.

A release from Gov. Tony Evers spotlighted figures from the Travel Recovery Insights report released by the U.S. Travel Association and Tourism Economics. It shows travel spending in the state in February was 1 percent lower than in 2019, while the national average was 6 percent lower.

The release also notes Wisconsin in February “fared better than tourism powerhouses” such as Texas, Michigan, North Carolina, Hawaii, California, Minnesota, Illinois and New York, each of which were down between 4 and 18 percent compared to the same month in 2019.

A graph included in the release shows tourism spending in the state has largely followed the national trend, with a sharp dip in early 2020 coinciding with the start of the pandemic. Travel spending in the state has remained below 2019 numbers for much of 2020 and 2021, and exceeded 2019 for the first time in September of last year.

Over the six-month period ending in February, travel spending in the state exceeded 2019 levels four times, the release shows. It was up 1 percent in September, down 4 percent in October, up 1 percent in November, up 4 percent in December, up 1 percent in January and down 1 percent in February.

Overall economic impact data for 2021 won’t be available until June, the release shows, but the state’s tourism industry in 2020 saw $17.3 billion in business sales and supported more than 157,000 jobs. In 2019, those numbers were $22.2 billion and 202,000 jobs, according to figures provided by Travel Wisconsin.

The groundswell of organized retail crime is a national issue that risks spreading local law enforcement thin. While the American public sees headlines of smash-and-grab robberies or watches shock-inducing footage of their favorite retailers left ransacked and wrecked, it’s our local police forces that are left to pick up the pieces.

Almost 70 percent of storefronts have reported an increase in theft this past year, and the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail estimates that organized retail crime accounts for $45 billion in annual retail losses. In one instance alone in February 2021, a group brazenly grabbed handbags worth $165,000 from the shelves of a Chanel store in New York in a daytime robbery.

Why the sudden spike in crime sprees over the past couple of years? Historically, organized retail crime tends to increase in challenging times. According to U.S. court statistics, retail theft skyrocketed by 16 percent after 9/11 and by 30 percent during the 2008 recession. It’s no surprise that we are seeing a similar, albeit accelerated, trend amid the protracted pandemic and crippling inflation.

But what makes this current organized retail crime wave more pervasive and problematic than ever is where these stolen goods may end up once they are swiped from store shelves. Gone are the days of pawning stolen merchandise on street corners and flea markets; criminals are turning to the anonymity of the internet to peddle their loot. Stolen items are showing up on the virtual marketplaces that consumers traffic on a daily basis, seamlessly fitting in with honest online storefronts and businesses.

That’s why federal legislation such as the Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces for Consumers, or INFORM Consumers Act, could be a valuable and essential tool. It’s the least Congress can do to support law enforcement online as they continue to work to combat organized retail crime. The bill requires online marketplaces to clearly disclose contact information of certain high-volume, third-party sellers to consumers and provide consumers with ways to report suspicious marketplace activity. The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general would have authority to enforce the requirements.

Factory activity in the United States last month dropped to its lowest level since July 2020 as supply chain snarls intensified amid a new wave of pandemic-related lockdowns in China, an industry survey said on Monday.

The Institute for Supply Management said its manufacturing index dropped almost 2 percentage points to 55.4 percent in April, against expectations for a modest increase, but still above the 50-percent threshold indicating expansion.

The culprit was a renewed flareup in the supply chain woes that have dogged American factories throughout their recovery from the Covid-19 downturn, and in particular, China’s aggressive moves to stop renewed outbreaks in Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities.

“Overseas partners are experiencing Covid-19 impacts, creating a near-term headwind for the US manufacturing community,” said Timothy Fiore, the survey’s chairman. “Fifteen percent of panelists’ general comments expressed concern about their Asian partners’ ability to deliver reliably in the summer months, up from 5 percent in March,” he added.

We Energies wants to raise your rates. Residential customers would see electric bills go up $5 to $6 per month to cover what We Energies calls the largest clean-energy transition in its history, according to our partners at the Milwaukee Business Journal.

The proposed electric rate increases would be 5% to 6%, the company said.

The investment includes $175 million for a solar farm in southwest Wisconsin. It creates nearly as much power as the biggest coal burning unit at the Oak Creek power plant with zero emissions.

It also includes $660 million for two large solar and battery projects in southeast Wisconsin. The company said it also plans to spend $700 million over the next decade to bury power lines and strengthen its delivery against severe weather, the Milwaukee Business Journal reports.

The typical customer’s rate increase will amount to $4 to $8 per month for natural gas. However, the majority of a customer’s gas bill results from therms used rather than the base rate.

A final decision on the rate change is expected later this year.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday adopted Republican-drawn maps for the state Legislature, handing the GOP a victory just weeks after initially approving maps drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

The court reversed itself after the U.S. Supreme Court in March said Evers’ maps were incorrectly adopted, and came just as candidates were about to begin circulating nominating papers to appear on this year’s ballot without being sure of district boundaries.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court had adopted Evers’ map on March 3, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it on March 23. The high court ruled that Evers’ map failed to consider whether a “race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.”

Evers told the state Supreme Court it could still adopt his map with some additional analysis, or an alternative with six majority-Black districts. The Republican-controlled Legislature argued that its map should be implemented.

The Wisconsin court, controlled 4-3 by conservatives, sided with the Legislature.

“The maps proposed by the Governor … are racially motivated and, under the Equal Protection Clause, they fail strict scrutiny,” Chief Justice Annette Ziegler wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Patience Roggensack, Rebecca Grassl Bradley and Brian Hagedorn.

The Legislature’s maps, they wrote, “are race neutral” and “comply with the Equal Protection Clause, along with all other application federal and state legal requirements.”

Hagedorn, a conservative swing justice, initially backed Evers’ map but reversed himself once the matter came back before the court. In a separate concurrence, he wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court decision required the state court to adopt a race-neutral map, and the Legislature’s maps “are the only legally compliant maps we received.”

The court’s three liberal justices — Jill Karofsky, Ann Walsh Bradley and Rebecca Dallet — dissented. Karofsky, writing for the minority, said the Legislature’s maps “fare no better than the Governor’s under the U.S. Supreme Court’s rationale.”

Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) Secretary Randy Romanski and Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation Secretary and CEO Missy Hughes announced yesterday the creation of the new Wisconsin Agricultural Export Advisory Council (WAXC). This council will help guide the initiatives created through the Wisconsin Initiative for Agricultural Exports (WIAE), a collaborative project between DATCP and WEDC to promote the export of Wisconsin’s agricultural and agribusiness products.

The council includes international trade experts from WEDC and DATCP, state legislators, and agriculture organizations and agribusinesses representing crop, dairy, and meat products. The council will meet at least twice per year, and the first council meeting will take place at 9 a.m. on May 4, 2022 at the WEDC headquarters, 201 West Washington Avenue, Madison, WI 53703. These meetings are open to the public, and are
expected to have virtual attendance options.

Wisconsin agricultural exports reached an all-time high of $3.96 billion in 2021. Through the WIAE, DATCP is working collaboratively with WEDC to build on that momentum by promoting Wisconsin agricultural products in the international marketplace.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration is initiating an enforcement program that identifies employers who failed to submit Form 300A data through the agency’s Injury Tracking Application (ITA). Annual electronic submissions are required by establishments with 250 or more employees currently required to keep OSHA injury and illness records, and establishments with 20-249 employees classified in specific industries with historically high rates of occupational injuries and illnesses.

The program matches newly opened inspections against a list of potential non-responders to OSHA’s collection of Form 300A data through the ITA and reports all matches to the appropriate OSHA area office. If the area office determines that the establishment on the list is the same establishment where the inspection was opened, OSHA will issue citations for failure to submit OSHA Form 300A Summary data.

In addition to identifying non-responders at the establishment level, the agency is also reviewing the 2021 submitted data to identify non-responders at a corporate-wide level. This corporate level review is being conducted for the nation’s largest employers.

OSHA developed the program in response to recommendations from the Government Accountability Office to improve reporting of summary injury and illness data.  The initiative will begin in early April.

The agency is also posting ITA data as part of its electronic recordkeeping requirements for certain employers. By mid-March, 289,849 establishments had submitted their OSHA Form 300A information.

Today the United States Postal Service filed notice with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) of price changes to take effect July 10, 2022. The new prices, if approved, include a two-cent increase in the price of a First-Class Mail Forever stamp from 58 cents to 60 cents.

The proposed prices, approved by the Governors of the U.S. Postal Service, would raise First-Class Mail prices approximately 6.5 percent. The proposed Mailing Services price changes include:

Product                                                        Current Prices                Planned Prices

Letters (1 oz.)                                                  58 cents                         60 cents
Letters (metered 1 oz.)                                   53 cents                         57 cents
Letters additional ounce(s)                              20 cents                        24 cents
Domestic Postcards                                       40 cents                        44 cents
International Letter (1 oz.)                              $1.30 cents                  $1.40 cents

The PRC will review the prices before they are scheduled to take effect. The complete Postal Service price filing with prices for all products can be found on the PRC site under the Daily Listings section at prc.gov/dockets/daily.

More than half of U.S. households paid no federal income taxes in 2021, a temporary spike attributed to massive COVID-19 relief spending in the form of tax credits and stimulus payments.

A recent analysis from the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimated that 57% of Americans paid no taxes last year. While that’s down slightly from last year’s 60%, it marks a significant increase from the 44% recorded before the pandemic began.

The increase stems from the pandemic-driven surge in government spending, including three stimulus checks, expanded federal unemployment aid and the expanded child tax credit.

Because the stimulus checks were designed as refundable tax credits, they significantly reduced tax liability in both 2020 and 2021, the analysis said. And in some cases, the checks flipped some households from paying income tax to not doing so.

Essentially, no household making less than $28,000 paid federal income tax last year, nor will a majority – about 75% – of those making between $28,000 and $55,000. Among middle-income households, about 43% paid no federal income tax.

Still, while many households did not pay federal income tax, most Americans still owed payroll or state income taxes. The study shows that about four out of five individuals paid at least one of these taxes. Nearly everyone paid the government in another form, whether through state and local sales taxes, excise taxes, property taxes or state income taxes.