Murphy's Law

On May 27, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance did a new report showing Wisconsin dropped out of the ranks of the 10 highest-taxed states for the first time in more than 25 years. Indeed, going all the way back to 1963, when the state first adopted a sales tax, Wisconsin has ranked in the top 10 every year except 1980 and 1968.

As recently as 1999, when Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson was near the end of his long tenure, Wisconsin ranked as the third-highest taxed state. Today, Wisconsin has dropped to 11th-highest. That’s quite a change, and it got extensive coverage in the Wisconsin State Journal . The story was picked up by other newspapers statewide.

But the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sat on the report for nearly a week and then barely reported  it: The disclosure came in the 23rd graph of a story telling us “Property taxes jump 3.8%, most in 3 years.” At the very end of this story telling us taxes are going up, the paper devoted just four paragraphs to the news that the state dropped out of the top 10, and used a quote from Taxpayers Alliance President Todd Berry saying the ranking merely showed that some other states increased their taxes.

The use of this quote is incredible. For starters, although Berry is on vacation, I have full confidence he offered the JS more than a quote diminishing the significance of his own study. Dale Knapp, the organization’s research director, put it this way to me: “The fact that we’ve moved out of the top 10 is definitely significant.”

The essence of these rankings is comparative. In short, it doesn’t matter if Wisconsin cuts taxes if other states cut taxes more; we still look bad by comparison. Thus, if we’ve dropped in tax burden because we’re not going up like other states, that’s pretty noteworthy.

So let’s see. Why did the Journal Sentinel bury this story? Because the editors want to keep harping that taxes are high? Or because they don’t want to give Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle any credit? Whatever the reason, the newspaper is not serving its readers. The more it does this kind of selective reporting, the more irrelevant it becomes to the statewide policy debate on such issues.

As to whether Doyle deserves any credit, Republicans could certainly argue the GOP-led Assembly has helped forge compromises with Doyle that kept spending lower. But it always gets tricky as to who gets the most credit. Some time ago, I had an off-the-record conversation with a conservative GOP legislator who said he considered Doyle more fiscally conservative than most Republican lawmakers. I’m not sure I buy that, but certainly Doyle hasn’t spent money and added state employees like GOP empire builder Tommy Thompson.

Going back 40 years, every governor, including Republicans Warren Knowles, Lee Dreyfus, Thompson and Scott McCallum, and Democrats Pat Lucey, Marty Schreiber and Tony Earl, left office with the state ranked as one of the top 10 highest-taxed states. So doesn’t it seem newsworthy that we dropped out of the top 10 under Doyle? If you’re going to argue the rankings are important, then you have to report them consistently.

As for me, I think they’re misleading. The fact is that Wisconsin taxes more because its fees for roads (no tolls), university tuition (much lower) and other fees are lower than in other states. We also have to make up for the fact that we get less federal funding than other states.

A true measure of how spendthrift the state is comes from relative spending levels. And the latest Taxpayers Alliance study shows the state ranked 22nd in total state/local spending as a percentage of state personal income, just 5 percent

Art Museum Loses Its Savior

Last week, the resignation of Milwaukee Art Museum chief curator Joe Ketner was quietly announced. Things were quite different after he arrived just three years ago.

In June 2005, JS art critic Mary Louise Schumacher lauded him as the new arts savior. “If any one person has the power to dramatically change the way Milwaukeeans see and think about art,” she wrote, “it is Joseph D. Ketner II, the new chief curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum. He will shape the artistic identity of the city's most important art institution and is perhaps the most accomplished and well-connected curator the city has seen in a very long time, if ever.”

Ever? Such extravagant praise raised the question, how would Schumacher know this since she hadn’t covered the museum during most of its long history? But David Gordon, then the museum’s president, seemed happy to reinforce this theme. Hiring Ketner, Gordon told Milwaukee Magazine in March 2006, might be his “most important accomplishment.”

Museum insiders believed Ketner was being groomed to replace Gordon. As for Ketner, he told this magazine his goal was to double the operating budget. As writer Tom Bamberger suggested in this story, that was a “breathtakingly ambitious” vision and probably would have required raising another $100 million in endowment.

Bamberger also expressed strong doubts about Ketner’s curatorial background. “Going from director of the Rose Museum at Brandeis University to chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum is like moving up from coaching at New Holstein High School to the Big Ten … Google [Ketner] and there is no litany of essays and publications from past exhibitions. On Amazon.com you will find no publications on a contemporary artist. Ketner has never been to the Venice Biennial or Documenta art fairs in Europe that serve as official expositions for the contemporary art world. The art museum, in short, is betting more on Ketner’s potential than his accomplishments.”

Little more than a year after Ketner announced his bold plans to this magazine, he was out looking for a job. In May 2007, he was one of the final candidates for the position of director and chief curator at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College – a job he didn’t get. The fact that he was looking to leave Milwaukee so quickly would suggest he wasn’t happy here. He was passed over for the job of museum president when Gordon left, and just three months after new president Daniel Keegan took over in March, Ketner had announced his resignation.

The man who was supposedly the most accomplished curator the city has ever seen, the savior who was going to radically reshape our museum, will now slip back into academia, taking a modest job as a professor of contemporary art at Emerson College in Boston.

The Buzz:

- Many congressional Democrats oppose for-profit, doctor-run hospitals on the theory they drive up health care costs. But Sen. Herb Kohl, notes the New York Times, persuaded the Senate to accept an exception for a medical center in Green Bay. The hospital’s lobbyists included Theodore Bornstein, a former chief of staff for Kohl, and Milwaukee-based “super lobbyist” Bill Broydrick.

-The Journal Sentinel’s excellent, award-winning series on how chemicals from plastic products could be absorbed by humans was picked by Bill Moyers online.

-Can Milwaukee’s airport attract more customers from Kenosha, Racine and Chicago? The Public Policy Forum argues that the proposed KRM commuter rail line could help make this happen.

And why did the Brewers draft an 87-year-old man? See the Sports Nut.