Governor Tony Evers is recommending that Wisconsin renews the ability of illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses. That was the policy here before 2007. There are any number of safety and financial concerns that inform granting licenses and any number of political and legal issues in opposition.
But Rep. John Nygren has some other thoughts:
Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette,the co-chair of the Joint Committee on Finance that will review the budget proposal, said he opposes including the non-fiscal policy measure in the budget.
Oh my…I am so in agreement with Rep. Nygren. We should not include non-fiscal measures in the Wisconsin biennial budget. And that became quite a habit over the past decade or so. So I support his efforts to remove non-fiscal items from this and every future budget. I would wholly support a bill, if he saw his way to introduce it, to make it illegal to add non-fiscal items in future budgets. We should know what the legislature is voting for every time they vote. Budgets when they vote on Budgets…and non-fiscal policy items the rest of the time.
But I am not sure that this is a non-fiscal policy item exactly. If we increase the number of Wisconsin driver’s licenses issued…won’t that include additional expense and added revenue…and possibly additional staffing at the DOT?? We all pretty much know they are understaffed already! So this may in fact be a fiscal item if it is going to have an effect on the budget for the DOT.
So Rep. Nygren, please take non-fiscal items out of the budget…but please correctly identify fiscal items correctly.
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