John Torinus

If Congress stays as cocked up as it been in the recent past, high earners in states like Wisconsin and Minnesota could achieve the dubious distinction of paying more than half of their incomes to state and federal government in 2013.

Jim Spaeth, one of Serigraph's accountants, brought our quarterly report for unemployment insurance (UI) to my office Monday, and he showed me he had filed our first quarter report with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) on April 26, four days before the end-of-month deadline of April 30.

A deep and obvious fault line in Wisconsin governance has hit the state between the eyes as the recall process unfolds.

To put it in Heartland terms, state Medicaid managers are like deer in the headlights. The costs keep escalating beyond any ideas they have about control and management of the fiscal disaster that the program represents.

At least the Democrats are consistent. President Obama is targeting the one per cent of the nation's taxpayers in his campaign for a second term, and as of last week the party's contenders for Wisconsin governor in the June 5 recall election are sounding the same theme of making the rich pay more.

Flash back six years ago: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had almost no commercial intellectual property; then-Chancellor Carlos Santiago often lamented that there had been no construction cranes over his campus for decades; and academic R&D was at a low level.