What Really Worries Wisconsin Businesses

Edward Zore -- the CEO of Milwaukee's largest private employer, Northwestern Mutual Life -- recently took the stage in front of other business leaders and told them that if his company was looking for a place to relocate from another city, Milwaukee would not be high on the list.

Once those lines were uttered, much of the audience was surely thinking: Taxes.

But, as the Journal Sentinel explains, "Unexpectedly for many, Zore repeatedly downplayed Wisconsin's tax burden as one of the impediments." "Taxes for us," Zore told the group, "are not bad."

So what are the impediments? While Zore didn't get into too many details, the relative low number of Milwaukee area residents with college degrees was a point he did stress.

Adding to the answer is a recent survey of 68 biomedical firms in the seven-county Milwaukee area. Top issues on the list were skilled and educated workers, access to university research, health care costs, and access to investment capital. Conspicuously absent from the list is taxes.

This news actually fits well with a similar survey completed by the state's corporate lobby group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, last spring. This survey was given to 600 manufacturing CEOs in the state, and when asked about "the top business concern facing your company," the executives responded with the following order:

1. Health care costs (35 percent)
2. Competition (16 percent)
3. Labor shortage (12 percent)
4. Energy (10 percent)
5. Regulation (9 percent)
6. Economic slowdown (9 percent)
7. Taxes (6 percent)
8. Other (2 percent)
9. Lawsuit abuse (1 percent)

While there is little doubt that there are some businesses in the state that would place taxes high on the list of concerns, it's clear from these surveys and comments by executives like Edward Zore that taxes are low on the list of concerns for many.

Surveys of the general Wisconsin public often show taxes higher on the list of concerns, but, depending on who's doing the asking, it's not necessarily the highest. According to the right-wing Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, taxes are at the top of the list with 26 percent followed by health care with 16 percent and education with 14 percent. On the other hand, according to the left-wing One Wisconsin Now, health care tops the list at 45 percent, taxes and the economy/jobs are tied for second at 34 percent, and education is third with 31 percent.

What makes all of this important to note is that, if you listen to the state GOP rhetoric, you'd think there was no more pressing or important issue for any business, individual, or family in the state than taxes -- by a long shot. This rhetoric, in turn, drives public policy attention toward that issue and, subsequently, away from others like education and health care that are actually of more concern to most state businesses and at least as much concern to the rest of the public.

To be sure, during the last legislative session over 14,000 hours were spent lobbying on the so-called Taxpayer Protection Amendment. That's over 6,000 hours more than the second heaviest lobbied bill of the session and 9,000 more than the third.

And one night toward the end of the session, our state Assembly spent the entire night -- literally -- trying to find a version of the amendment that was suitable enough for moderate Republicans to support, only to have that version and the original soundly rejected in the GOP-controlled state Senate.

Around the same time as the TP amendment all-nighter, state Sen. Russ Decker (D-Schofield) and Rep. Terry Musser (R-Black River Falls) announced a comprehensive health care reform package designed specifically with employers and employees in mind.

But while the fledgling TP amendment continued to grab front page headlines and take up time at the Legislative Fiscal Bureau -- which was even able to dedicate an entire section on its website to all of the analyses it did of the amendment -- the Decker/Musser bill touched off articles in only two newspapers in the state, the Capital Times and the Wausau Daily Herald.

None of this is to say that public revenue, in any form, shouldn't garner policy or press attention, but rather the amount of attention it has generated in the past is not on par with the level of concern that exists in the state, at least in relation to other issues that are at least as important.

And much of the attention is being driven by incessant GOP rhetoric that should be, ideally, toned down or, if necessary, neutralized by an equally incessant level of Dem noise on the issues that actually top the list of business concerns and those that share the top of public concerns.