The Legislative Leadership Roundtable with the Wisconsin Counties Association provided an excellent opportunity to contrast Republican and Democratic perspectives on how to spend your hard-earned tax dollars. As I mentioned during the taped broadcast, Governor Evers' $91 billion budget proposal is pure fantasy and I announced that legislative Republicans will begin the budget process from scratch just as we did two years ago. The governor's budget contains too many poison pills. The governor wants to increase spending by nearly 10 percent (all funds) and increase the size of government with hundreds of new employees. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that we simply don't support increasing taxes by more than $1 billion or allowing local governments to increase taxes on their citizens. Now is not the time to ask hardworking Wisconsinites for more of their money. My colleagues and I also have no appetite for a massive $2.3 billion capital budget that he proposed on top of the $1.69 billion in bonding in the state budget.

I look forward to the legislative budget process to begin. I have every confidence in the members of the Joint Committee on Finance who will start reviewing agency budgets and take public input. The goal, as always, is to complete work on the budget by the end of June and send it to the governor for his signature in time for the new biennium.