On the Issues
Between the current state of our economy and people facing difficult times, these are the issues that I believe are of the highest priority at this time.Job Creation and Economic Growth
In just over one year, Wisconsin has lost 126,000 jobs as companies like General Motors closed their doors and businesses such as Briggs and Stratton and Thomas Industries relocated out of state. Topping this off was a Forbes article that ranked Wisconsin the 3rd worse state for business.
If there is any hope for a statewide recovery in which we reduce the number of people relying on unemployment while increasing the number of workers on payrolls, we need to attract businesses to our state and not force them to pack up and leave. With incentives such as tax credits and programs such as the Angel Investment program, we can revitalize the business community in our state, which in turn will produce more jobs in the long run. Measures such as these were included into the Assembly Republicans' Jobs Now agenda that we introduced early in the fall 2009 legislative session.
Taxes
One of the reasons behind our poor rating in Forbes and the migration of businesses from Wisconsin is our tax climate. We are among the highest taxed states in the nation and this will continue unless we halt our ever-increasing state tax rate. Instead of paying the government more and more money with each budget cycle, businesses could instead use that money to provide salaries and benefits to their workers and new hires. Freezing taxes and giving businesses the break they need to recover from this economy should be a priority in our efforts to initiate economic development.
Health Care
Besides economic recovery, health care reform has been another major issue dominating news coverage. With 47 million uninsured Americans and health care costs continuously rising across the nation, this is not an issue we can afford to ignore. Yet, we also need to be mindful of those people who are satisfied with their coverage and should not in any way be punished in the long run for having adequate coverage. Therefore, I do not believe the answer to fixing our health care "crisis" is allowing the government to take control of it. Researching similar programs in other countries and states such as Massachusetts has indicated that such a measure only increases costs while negatively affecting the quality of the health care many of us currently receive.
Rather than reforming the entire health care system, I believe we should specifically address the reasons why a certain percentage of the population does not have health care. From there, we can come up with solutions geared toward that population to ensure they have some kind of access to health care. I believe we can also tackle the rising cost of health care through TORT reform measures that are responsible for the ever-increasing malpractice insurance premiums physicians are confronted with. This is just one aspect of health care reform, but one that if properly address could result in significantly lower costs in the short term.
Addressing and Deterring Subsidy Fraud
In early 2009, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel unveiled months of hard work and investigations into cases of fraud within the Wisconsin Shares program. Since then, I have followed this ongoing issue very closely, especially as a member of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee and mother of two young sons who are supervised by a child care provider.
Created in 1997, the Wisconsin Shares program was intended to help guide low income families off of welfare assistance and onto company payrolls while providing them with financial assistance to hire child care providers. Unfortunately, over the last decade many of these families discovered ways of avoiding employment altogether, lying on their registration forms, and ultimately scamming millions of dollars from the taxpayers of Wisconsin. In 2008 alone, over $22 million in fraudulent payments were made to ineligible child care providers under Wisconsin Shares.
As both a legislator and a member of the audit committee, I have been working diligently to address this problem of child care subsidy fraud in the state of Wisconsin. In difficult economic times when more and more taxpayers are finding it harder to manage tighter budgets, we cannot allow more of their money to be abused in such a way as it has been under Wisconsin Shares. It is my hope that this program can be reformed in such a way as to harshly punish anyone who tries to scam it - or any other subsidized program for that matter - in the future.