Sorry about the hot dogs and the pregnancy.
I love it.
It's great.
You know?
This is real life.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, Senator, thanks very much for joining us.
Great to be with you.
So we know that Congress is poised to cut Medicaid and food share.
Is it your expectation that the state will have to backfill any kind of those cuts?
I think we need to absolutely be prepared to do whatever we can to make sure that families
can survive the economic chaos and devastating cuts that are coming out of Washington.
I know that the governor had put, I believe, $500 million in the budget in case of that
kind of thing.
Did that remain when the Republican Joint Finance Committee members kind of pulled things out?
You know, I think that the Republicans have basically just been plugging their ears and
trying to pretend that it's not happening.
And what we do know is that almost a third of the state budget is money that comes from
the federal government.
So there is no way that we can be fully prepared for whatever cuts come down.
And certainly the scale of the cuts are going to be devastating to ever Wisconsin family,
whether it's nutrition, support, food share, educational funding, transportation, public
safety, and of course, health care.
Your GOP counterparts say a keen priority of theirs is what they call tax reform.
And they mention the middle class and the elderly.
Do you expect compromise around tax cuts in the state budget?
You know, we've had a mantra for decades of cutting taxes.
And I think my Republican colleagues have talked a good game about the middle class,
but when they actually show us their work, their tax proposals are always skewed toward
the very, very wealthiest among us in big business.
And at a time when people are really going to be struggling, struggling with higher
costs, things like groceries, housing, childcare, prescription drugs, we cannot be considering
more tax cuts for the wealthy.
That has gotten us nowhere.
And so, you know, Democrats have proposed reasonable tax relief that is targeted towards
the middle class, the working class, those that are striving to get there.
And Republicans have kind of thrown that back in our face and said, no, we want yet
more giveaways for the folks that are already doing fine.
And so you don't believe that there's room for compromise around that?
You know, my hope is that there would be, but I just haven't seen a lot of evidence
of that.
I mean, I think the compromise position would be what Democrats have continually proposed,
which is let's scale that tax relief and tax reform to the people who actually need it
rather than just continuing to double down on giving more money away to the wealthiest
as our schools, our universities, and our healthcare infrastructure are all struggling
for funds.
What are democratic members' priorities?
Well, I would say we want to make sure that we are addressing the high costs of living
for everyday Wisconsin families.
So things like childcare, making sure kids have great funded public education and healthy
school meals at schools that we're funding opportunities for advancement so that everyone
can thrive, our universities, our technical colleges.
These are the things that make Wisconsin a good place to live, and we have to be prepared
to fund those things.
That's also what we heard as we traveled around the state and listened to people's public
input.
The number one and two issues that people cared about were K-12 public school funding and
childcare.
We haven't had budgets that have met the moment, and now it is past time for our kids
to get what they need.
We know that the governor's budget included $450 million to continue the child care counts
child care program, but that was one of the 600 provisions pulled out by Republican members
of the Budget Writing Committee.
What happens in June when the federal subsidy for that goes away if the Republican majority
budget writers don't do something around that?
We've been in a child care crisis for a long time in this country, even before COVID, but
child care counts stopped the losses, it stopped the closures because it put more money in
classrooms and teachers.
This is really a supply problem.
There aren't enough child care slots to go around.
In many places, there are two, three, four, even more kids that need a slot for everyone
that's available because teachers can't afford to stay in early childhood.
They can make more at a fast food restaurant or at a gas station starting wage than they
can with a bachelor's degree in early childhood.
It's because parents can't afford to pay more.
This is where we do need the state to step in as we did with child care counts and help
close that gap so that the most talented and dedicated early childhood educators can
practice the profession that they love and that our kids get what they need at a price
that parents can afford.
Because what happens if we don't contribute toward that?
We're going to see massive closures of child care centers.
We're going to see parents completely unable to get a slot and the few that do are going
to be paying even more than they do now.
A lot of people, if they have a kid, they're paying more for their child care than they
do for their housing.
My husband and I, one year, had two kids in college at the University of Minnesota and
we spent less on those two kids than we did for our baby in daycare.
Speaking of K-12 funding and education funding in general, special education is a priority
for the governor.
How do you think that will fare?
Well, special education is a huge problem for our local school districts because, of
course, it is a mandated service.
We must provide a great equitable education to every student no matter what they're coming
into the classroom with.
And yet, the state only reimburses local school districts about 30 percent of the cost of
that special education.
That means the rest of those costs are all coming out of the school district's bank
account, so local districts have to make up the cost.
Now, private voucher schools that are funded by taxpayer dollars but not accountable to
taxpayers, they get 90 percent reimbursement for serving special ed kids, and, of course,
they can discriminate.
They can pick and choose who they want to have in their student body.
I think it's totally unacceptable that we continue to subsidize this private voucher
scheme, especially to the tune of 90 percent reimbursement for special ed.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Wisconsin kids are educated in our public schools and
they're having to scrimp and scrape and cut really important services for all kids so
that they can meet the needs of students with special education.
What do you think, I'm sorry, what do you think will happen with funding for universities?
Well, this is another area where we've had 15 years of cuts and failure to provide inflationary
increases to the universities of Wisconsin, and it's put our colleges, our public higher
education into a really dire situation.
They can raise tuition and they have certainly done that.
They have done an incredible job of getting more federal grant money, that's now at risk.
They have really increased the number of private contributions that they're getting.
But at the end of the day, if we want our public universities to be a place where every
Wisconsin kid can go to build a better life for themselves, we need to make it accessible
and we have to fund these universities.
The amount that they are asking for really just gets them back to the place where they
would have been had they not received the devastating cuts of the Walker era and sort
of kept pace with inflation.
That's what we're doing here.
When you discuss that kind of funding with your Republican counterparts, what is their
persuasion?
Well, I think that a lot of Republicans are very skeptical of the idea of public education
and especially at the higher ed level.
They just say, why should the state support this endeavor?
My answer is because we can't afford for anybody who has the talent and the drive and
wants to pursue higher education to not be able to do that.
We shouldn't be rationing opportunity in life based on who you are, who your parents
are, where you're from.
And when you don't have a public education system, that's what happens.
Now, we know that budget riders and the state of Wisconsin is working with about a $4 billion
surplus, which we also know can, for a variety of reasons, be whittled down.
But do Democrats have any kind of one-time priorities for such a budget?
Well, for such a surplus.
Yeah, I think it's really important when we talk about the surplus to recognize that
it is, in large part, born of chronic underfunding of these core public services.
So K-12 being right at the top of the list and public higher ed being closely behind.
So let's make sure that the money that the taxpayers paid is actually going to the things
that taxpayers expect to be funded.
We also want to make sure that things like building projects and when we borrow money
that we're doing it in a fiscally responsible manner.
So there are things that we can do with one-time money that will help create future revenue
sources and will help the state's bottom line moving into the future.
Funding for child care is a great example of that because the return on investment when
90% of brain development happens, that birth to five period is enormous, right?
I mean, we could stop building prisons if we were investing in early childhood education.
But think about the workforce impact, too.
Every child that can't get into child care, that means a parent is out of the workforce
and our tax collections are going down.
Our entire economy is slowing down.
So we should be prioritizing things that help the state's bottom line, not just now, but
into the future.
Is it your sense that the Republican majority is kind of emboldened by what's happening
in Washington with doge cuts and others from the administration?
You know, I think that they have a lot of different perspectives.
I think there's a lot of infighting right now amongst the Republican caucus here in Wisconsin.
Certainly, I think many of them are really enthusiastic about the devastating cuts that
are being contemplated and the illegal funding freezes that we've already seen.
And then there are others that are kind of laying low and waiting to see what's going
to happen.
But I can tell you that not one of them has focused on how can we help mitigate the harm
that is happening to Wisconsin workers, to families, to kids, right?
We have seen them offer no proposals and spend very little time on any floor session or
in any committees thinking about how are we going to lower cost per families for groceries
for utility bills.
They just are pretending that it's not happening or they don't care about the impacts.
You know, meanwhile, Democrats are trying every day with legislation that we're offering
and our focus to say this is not okay and it's our job to step up and make sure that
we're responding to the needs of Wisconsinites who are being harmed.
So the thing you'd like to add?
No, I really appreciate the time.
All right, Senator.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Nice.
Yeah.