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Now, for my Lake WSOTA studio, here is the founding editor of Up North News, Pat Critello.
706 now, welcome back.
I'm Pat Critello here, like the man said, from Lake WSOTA, not really live today because, well, it's a holiday.
We're sharing some of our favorite clips from over the summer here, including about an hour from now, Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez will give a little background on herself and why she chose to run for governor and is hoping that you'll support her in that primary, which is now still 11 months away and the race for governor itself 13 months away.
but the lieutenant governor is in the race early as are a couple of Republicans and we'll hear more about her campaign coming up.
Also going to visit with Up North News reporter Selena Heller who has a story about women's reproductive health care and a point that was missing prior to the Dobs decision and has been heard repeatedly since then.
Abortion care is health care.
It's a necessary part of keeping women healthy and alive and she's got a Wisconsin story about that.
Tomorrow we're back live and we begin a new weekly report on Tuesday mornings at 6 30 We're gonna be hearing from my courier newsroom colleague cam Stevenson cam joined us over the years from Arizona Where he was one of the founders of the copper courier for courier newsroom, but like the Jefferson's he's moving on up
to the east coast to Washington DC and he's about to become our new Capitol Hill reporter.
He has a daily newsletter from Washington DC called Below the Beltway and he'll join us on Tuesdays starting tomorrow morning to tell us what's happening under the big dome up there in Washington.
Well, closer to home, we have our own newsletter here.
I want to tell you about four Wisconsin politics called Sunday mornings with Pat Crite low sign up for it at up North news wi.com.
And again, if you can't catch all of our shows, you can always subscribe to us as a podcast on Spotify, or Apple, we'd love to have you along as a follower.
All right, as we look back at some of the best of our summer conversations, we'll start with talking to Dr. Kristen Lierly.
about her show that appears on the stations out of Green Bay and Wausau on the weekends.
You can catch the Dr. Kristen Lyrely show through the Civic Media app.
And she was trying to make the point about a guest that was coming up on her show.
And while the cause was just, I just had to again insert and say that this whole notion of us opening up our hearts and our wallets for medical fundraisers, it's all fine and good, but
What the heck are we doing in a country that still requires those anyway?
We spoke with Dennis Peters.
He's the lead singer of the Glam Band.
If you're not familiar with the Glam Band, they are an 80s hair metal tribute band.
They are a blast.
They're at all the county fairs.
They're doing gigs all over Wisconsin in the summer.
And Dennis is suffering from stage four prostate cancer.
And like so many people in his situation,
He didn't have health insurance, so we're doing a benefit.
In Green Bay, it's for Dennis.
You get to hear Dennis's story on the Dr. Kristen Lyerle show.
You get to hear the folks who established On Stage for Cancer.
It's onstage, the number four, cancer.org, if you're interested in learning more and pitching in.
It is a beautiful community tribute to Dennis and a way to help out somebody who has entertained and brought joy to so many people all across the state.
I'm glad to hear it.
I'm glad to hear about the benefit.
Don't get me wrong.
But if it sounds like I'm banging my head against the microphone as a metaphorical brick wall here,
it's
that we are just like the last segment, having this discussion about having to hold benefits for people because they didn't have proper health insurance coverage because they're threatened with bankruptcy, which again happens in no other developed country in the world.
Yes, I put a period after every one of those words because it is so unnecessary.
We've been talking about this for 30 plus years.
And we still have politicians blocking one of the most basic things that a free people could want.
And that would be not going bankrupt because of health care and needing to rely on the charity of others.
Sorry, there's my rant.
I hope the benefit is fun.
It's still not necessary that we have to have a country where we need them.
But I hope the benefits fun.
Thanks.
I agree.
It's really demoralizing.
You're healthy until you're not healthy.
I mean, this is a guy who was a great baseball player.
He had tryouts with the pros.
He's active if you've ever seen them perform.
This is a guy who's all over the stage and just vibrant and beautiful and wonderful and then boom.
And it happens to so many people.
Health issues like this are the number one reason that people file for bankruptcy.
And it's a lot of people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So again, I'm glad we're talking about the benefit and for people who, you know, want to help out.
That's a wonderful thing.
It just shouldn't be the thing.
Let's move right along to our next summertime highlight.
And there will be a familiar voice that of Matt Rothschild, along with Marisa Strano of the group New America.
which is urging political reforms in Wisconsin that not only defend our democracy, but encourage us to find new ways to put democracy into the hands of Wisconsin voters when it comes to amending the state constitution, putting in new state laws, even taking current state laws off the books.
Give a listen.
Matt Rochelle joins us along with Maurice Estrano.
And Marisa is from Deputy Director of, I'm sorry, Deputy Director of Political Reform at New America.
Matt Rothschild, of course, hosts the Wisconsin Forward podcast on the Civic Media Radio Network.
And together, they recently co-authored an article that I saw in the Wisconsin State Journal that is titled, Give Wisconsin Voters More Say Through Ballot Initiatives.
Matt and Marisa, good morning to you both.
Good morning.
Thanks for having us.
You
bet.
Good
to be
on with him.
Yeah.
Well, Matt, good to be on with you.
You're the one that's on more often than me or any other hosts here.
You're like, civic media should be your middle name or something.
You're everywhere.
I'm paying rent here in the studio.
That's great.
No, it's wonderful to have you here.
So Matt, since you're the hometown fellow there, let's have you start and then we'll go to Marisa after that about what initiated, what prompted this column about ballot initiatives in Wisconsin?
Well, I got to give credit to Marisa.
She reached out to me.
She's been working on and her organization's been working on this idea of
defending direct democracy to the right of citizens to go to referendum and pass a bill that they want to pass or overturn a bill that they don't like or amend the Constitution if they want to.
I also, coincidentally, this is dear to my heart, I wrote a book a few years back called 12 ways to save democracy in Wisconsin and one of those chapters was give us direct democracy.
So we decided to team up and write this little op-ed.
Well, then let's turn that over to Marisa as well.
Marisa tells us more about New America.
And again, you know, the impetus for, you know, making this kind of a push for citizen initiative.
Sure.
Yeah.
Thanks for teeing me up, Matt and Pat, to really appreciate you having us on to talk about this piece.
So at New America, I work in the political reform program in which we explore, do research and try to socialize a whole
swath of ideas for how to make our democracy work better for more people in a nutshell.
So sometimes that means reforming the way we do elections.
Sometimes that means pioneering and supporting and lifting up new models of civic engagement like citizens assemblies.
And we sort of had this gap between improving representative democracy and improving deliberative democracy in which direct democracy kind of fit.
And what we were thinking was that there are all these efforts underway by state legislatures across the country to roll back initiative and referendum powers to restrict that process.
And defense is happening, which is great.
But what we're not seeing, we have not been seeing in decades and in some ways over a century, is a real effort to expand access to citizen-led ballot measures like the initiative and the referendum.
to new states, because currently only half of US states allow their citizens to petition to change laws, to put new ideas on the ballot, or to repeal existing laws, as Matt said before.
So when we started scoping the landscape to see what activity was already happening within states to amend their constitutions to establish a new process to...
to allow citizens this power, we realized there was very little happening and much of that is because it doesn't feel possible.
So what we did was we developed a methodology to evaluate a state's readiness to bring on a new process like this within the current very polarized, very nationalized, very difficult political landscape for reform.
And we looked at different indicators, social, political, socioeconomic, civic indicators of a state's readiness for reform.
And what we found was, and actually it's sort of aligned with my initial expectations when setting out to do this project, that Wisconsin was the most promising candidate to come online, to be the first state to come online for many decades as the newest
state within an initiative process.
And that was exciting.
And I connected with Matt through a mutual colleague.
And I said, is this something that you might be interested in starting to talk about a little bit more?
What do you know about what's happening on the ground?
And it just felt like there was a lot of synergy there.
So we decided to say, let's write something and see if we can kick up some interest and see if that can
sort of nudge the issue a little bit forward.
Again, there is some interest already, but we are just interested in seeing how far we can take
it.
There was Mauricio Strano with New America and Matt Rothschild.
Matt, of course, has a podcast here on civic media.
It's called Wisconsin Forward.
It's a weekly dive into a topic surrounding some current political problem in our state, a little background on how we got to where we are today.
What some folks are working on now about possible ways forward.
And in one of his recent episodes, Matt talks to four faith leaders in Wisconsin about how to respond to the president's push for authoritarianism.
He talks to the Reverend Dr. Kerry Parker, Rabbi Bonnie Margulis, Pastor Walter Lanier, and the Reverend David Cooper all offering their wisdom and their hope for the good people of Wisconsin.
You can subscribe and
Download Wisconsin Forward on Spotify, on Apple, and of course on the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.
The Milwaukee Brewers are home taking on the Philadelphia Phillies.
Then tomorrow is going to be their first off day in the past 18
days they played 19 games in that stretch.
But today's game pregame coverage starts at 235.
That's when you can hear the pregame on several civic media stations then again brewers off tomorrow back against the Phillies on Wednesday evening and again on Thursday afternoon.
All right coming up in just a bit Selena Heller is going to be talking about women's health care and real examples of what's at stake if abortion bans were to take effect.
Then later, why Wisconsin is part of a billboard campaign to remind you that the big bloated boondoggle wasn't a beautiful bill.
It was a giveaway to billionaires and you don't have to stand for it.
That and so much more ahead on this Labor Day.
Hope you've had a good weekend.
Have plans to enjoy one more full day of it before we all head back to work.
From the Heart of America's Up North here on Lake Wissota, thank you for making this a place to spend part of your Labor Day morning.
I'm Pat Critello.
You're listening to the Civic Media Radio Network.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Stay up to date on the latest news and information for your local community and Wisconsin by signing up for our free email newsletter.
Visit civicmedia.us slash email to get started.
Hey, we're back live tomorrow.
We're going to have Dan Schaefer from the Recombobulation Area joining us tomorrow at 8.30.
And then on Thursday of this week, Congressman Mark Pocan will be making one of his regular monthly visits to give us an update on things in Washington, DC.
Again, that's Thursday morning at 7.30, Congressman Mark Pocan.
You know,
We're playing some of our best clips over the summertime, but we can't get them all in there.
And so that's part of the value of having this show as a podcast as well.
I'm looking back over the list.
And for example, there was our reaction back on August 22nd.
Do you remember when Cracker Barrel was going to change their logo and Mega World lost their minds?
because the old white guy and the barrel weren't going to be in the cracker barrel logo anymore.
Yeah, you could go back and listen to that, for example, or any of the other shows that you miss or that you want to hear a second time, go over to Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a follow along with other shows across the Civic Media Radio Network.
All right, let's get back to some of our clips from the summertime.
This one with Selena Heller and a feature about women's health.
All right, let's give a listen first to a report that Selena did for Up North News on abortion care.
Do you want to set up the piece really briefly Selena?
Megan is from La Crosse County.
She is 41.
She loves volunteering and has rescue dogs and all sorts of things.
And now a legislative Democrat you'll hear from Senator Kelder-Royce of Madison in this piece.
They're behind a bill to protect Wisconsinites like Megan whose access to reproductive health care saved her life.
So here is Megan.
I am alive today because abortion saved my life.
You know, my doctors saw the fetus in the uterus.
They're like, you're fine.
It's probably just a cyst or whatever over in that ovary.
going back to the exam room, I have another spell.
So I had probably four different spells of where my I actually was going into.
shock.
I was rupturing and internally bleeding and going into shock.
Megan was rushed into emergency surgery where doctors found a rare and dangerous heterotopic pregnancy, which means there was one embryo in the uterus and the other outside of it.
Megan's doctors had to remove the pregnancies and it's for scary situations like Megan's that state senators like Kelder Roy's have introduced the abortion rights restoration act.
This is just healthcare.
This is a procedure that saves people's lives.
And the only person that should be able to make that decision is the person going through it with their provider.
I didn't have the time to wait for somebody to decide that I was dying enough.
All right, so there is Selena's report from a little earlier today.
And Kristen, you might be hearing that for the first time, but wanted to get your reaction to one of
how many cases you hear just like Selena's report?
Hey, I'd like to start just by saying Megan is an incredibly courageous woman to share her story.
And also to invite our listeners to consider, have you ever heard of a heterotopic pregnancy?
Because it happens.
One pregnancy in the uterus, one pregnancy
outside of the uterus where it can't survive, these are the types of situations that people are unaware of that we need to treat in order to save people's lives.
And when there are abortion bans in place, it prevents us from taking care of our patients.
Selina, this is not the first person you've talked to, again, for whom abortion care was medically necessary, not like some kind of a...
convenient choice, some kind of a luxury or whatever it is that politicians like to say.
I've talked to a lot over the course of the last few years.
And for Megan, she saw a post on our Facebook page and she commented on it.
And that's how I found Megan.
And she was very kind of she wanted to tell her story and she never had.
And so Kristen, this kind of goes along with your storytellers.
Like she thought about it.
She wanted to get her story out and she was like, and you reached out to me and I got to tell my story.
And so now she's a little more wanting to kind of get her story out there and tell how important it is.
And I never heard of heterotopic pregnancies.
I had to look it up and I was like, oh my goodness, I didn't know idea.
Well, and think about it, one in four women in this country have an abortion.
So there are a lot of stories floating around out there, but we don't hear those stories because they're emotionally charged.
They're hard to tell.
They're societally not acceptable to tell.
So a lot of people keep those secrets even from the people that they are closest to.
So to be able to come out and tell a story like this is, like I said, it is incredibly courageous.
As Tony writes on YouTube, dying enough is a phrase that shouldn't exist, especially to determine whether you get medical care or not.
Selena Heller, thank you so much for your report.
Have a good start to the day.
Dr. Lirely, have a great start to the week.
We'll talk to you on Friday.
Hey, did you know that besides having a newsroom with statewide reach, just like us at Up North News, our friends at Civic Media also have you covered with local news updates that you can get from each individual station.
Just head over to civicmedia.us, find your local Civic Media station, and up near the top of that station's homepage, you'll see a daily news roundup that you can listen to right there at the website.
You can also sign up for email versions of their daily updates while you're there as well.
Again, you get it all through the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.
All right, still ahead, we're going to be talking about a billboard campaign in Wisconsin to remind you that the big bloated boondoggle may have passed through Congress, may have been signed into law.
But that does not mean that you have to settle for letting Derek Van Orden and Tom Tiffany and Ron Johnson and everyone else who voted to raise your costs to pay for tax cuts for billionaires off the hook.
That billboard campaign is one way to keep that message in front of voters.
We've got that and an interview with Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez talking about her campaign for governor before we're done on this Labor Day morning from Lake Wissota here on the Civic Media Radio Network.
I'm Pat Crightlow.
There's no shortage of ways to describe the ways in which the Trump mega bill is Predominantly geared toward corporations and the very wealthy there is a massive cut to the corporate income tax rate that is made permanent There have been multiple analyses on the bill that show that for example
The people in the bottom 20% of earners will see a 0.5% increase in their after tax income compared to about five times that amount for people in the top 20%.
But not everybody knows that.
And so that's what led to a discussion that I held yesterday with a gentleman who runs a group that's putting up billboards all around the country, including here in Wisconsin.
Let's visit now with Faz Shakir.
He's the founder and executive director of the media organization, More Perfect Union.
Faz, thank you for being here by the way.
Let's start with a description of what More Perfect Union is.
Well, Pat, we launched this thing in 2021.
And we're a media organization of buying for working class people to tell the stories of economic justice through their lens.
You know, when I launched in 2021, I had just come off with managing Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign.
And I felt that there was a challenge of trying to tell the stories of real working class lives in this environment in which we feel like the perspectives of the wealthy.
is really captured in a lot of traditional media outlets.
If you're watching CNBC or reading the Law Street Journal, they're really often telling you the perspective of the C-suite, the executives, the big shareholders.
My frustration has long been, but what about if you're an Amazon worker who's organizing?
What if you're a national park ranger who's having to go about your job in the struggles of what you're trying to deal with in this modern economy?
So the goal of the organization is just tell.
the stories of working class people try to tie those to solutions.
Well, we were just noting on our show yesterday on Wednesday that is the 60th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid and the number of Amazon workers and McDonald's workers and Walmart workers who are also on Medicaid is astonishing.
And I don't think people are necessarily aware of it.
Similarly, the billboards you're putting up tell a story for something that I think some of us take for granted, but many people still don't know about the budget cuts.
in the Trump mega bill and how they're not necessarily savings, this is essentially a transfer of wealth.
Is that pretty much the story behind the billboards?
They are takings, right, Pat?
So that's right.
As the billboards that you're referring to say, we make, they take.
And the takings that we're referring to here are Medicaid, people on Medicaid who are working.
I mean, the great mythology as you're referencing is that somehow people on Medicaid, Medicare are not working or haven't earned these benefits.
The real truth of them is if you work 20 hours a dollar general, right?
Who's stopping you from working 40, 45 hours a dollar general?
It's often dollar general.
The bosses are.
A lot of workers are trying to get to a place where they're earning more and having more benefits.
If you're driving Uber 30 hours a week, Uber isn't giving you health care.
They aren't giving you retirement benefits.
So a lot of these major corporations are saddling the federal government with the responsibility of providing health care, providing any degree of retirement to working class people, and they're making billions of dollars.
So in our view, here you got a bill.
that says, well, we're going to give tax breaks to the richest in this country because they are the great creators of our economy.
They need more money.
And what they have been doing with this money is literally taking away health care and retirement.
That is what Amazon kind of created, right?
The modern economy is we're going to have thousands of workers and none of them will have health care.
None of them will have decent retirement benefits.
So they are literally taking now at the stage that the actual little health care that many of these workers had.
Well, it's like I was saying, for the Medicaid anniversary, there's 71 million Americans on it.
And a lot of Republicans say, well, see how big that number is?
So many people that say their income is low enough to qualify for Medicaid, which to me begs the question, then why don't we do something if so many Americans make so little that they qualify for Medicaid?
This is as much a wage problem as it is a health care issue.
And an easy solution that's frustrated me for a long time is you want to compel
McDonald's, which has tons of franchisees.
Again, it's a problem with having a major corporation that is largely executed through franchises.
You have Uber.
You have Amazon.
You have Dollar General.
A lot of these make Walmart.
A lot of these companies that are billions of dollars in profits.
And why not compel them?
You have to provide health care to your employees.
you have to provide a retirement benefit to your point.
You remember, Pat, there's just a few decades ago where that was the assumption.
If you were going to go work at a major corporation, you are going to get a decent benefit that raised the standards of everyone.
And now, of course, you got union busting all over the place.
You got companies trying to exploit workers in every which way possible.
And now they are refusing to provide even the basic minimum.
of what you need to live and now you're right that there's been a transfer right so that federal government's owning more and more of this responsibility now that the public can say well oh it's just growing so much we have to we have to take it away well you could compel the corporations of america provide health care to your to your employees this would solve a major problem
the billboard campaign was announced to be launched across nine states including boards in milwaukee is that still the case or has the campaign changed at all since the initial rollout
No, you got it right, Pat.
We're going to try to be as many places as we can, trying to tell a story that's more than just the anti-Trump perspective.
I think a lot of people got that, right?
That Trump has a certain vision and ideology and he's executed now this twice, right?
First tax bill, now second tax bill, this first term, now second term.
So I think people got that sense.
But what we're trying to do is also make sure that there's a narrative and a story of who is benefiting.
And it's not just Donald Trump, right?
It's the beneficiaries are these wealthy people that you see.
And we mentioned, you know, Musk is one of them, Bezos.
is another Zuckerberg.
These are the people who've really thrown in with Trump and are now getting the return of their business model thriving under Donald Trump.
And yeah, those billboards, they do have the different billionaire CEOs.
You mentioned Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos, Peter Thiel from PayPal is on there as well.
Have they essentially
made themselves the public face of this transfer of wealth.
I mean, do you feel, I think Elon Musk is a pretty easy one because of his role with the Trump administration, but between the four of them on there, do you feel like that creates the best narrative for the middle class who would drive by these billboards to understand the way wealth is moving toward those four individuals, among others?
at least three of them.
You'll remember, you know, Elon and Bezos and Zuckerberg were sitting right behind Donald Trump as he was inaugurated.
They volunteered that we, you know, the billionaire class are throwing in with this guy and are so proud of it that we're going to sit right here and feel like we have a degree of ownership over the direction of this country.
And to my mind, you know,
it's trying to pull this a little bit out of the partisan politics.
I would hope that more people see and understand the major problem we have is, you know, Bezos would love to buy the Democratic Party too, right?
It isn't just like he's got the opportunity with the Republican Party because they got the trifecta.
They own the presidency, the Republican Senate and the Republican House.
So that's where he's going to be spending his money, his effort, his energies to try to extract gains for himself.
But if the tides were to turn, he would also love and has in the past given money to try
purchase, you know, a direction.
of a democratic side or any other side.
And it's the job of people who want to serve in public office to operate with integrity and fight for people beyond themselves.
That is really, to my mind, the meaning of being in public life, that you are willing to use power and authority to fight for other people besides yourself.
And we are in a state, sadly, Pat, where there's a lack of integrity, the corruption of a system, both politically and economically, is at heightened levels.
And I think we're all hunting and searching for the people
who want to be willing to take on powerful actors, know that it's going to be painful, but do it with integrity on behalf of actual working class folks.
We're talking with Fash Shakir.
He's the founder and executive director of the media organization, More Perfect Union, which has launched a billboard campaign in Wisconsin and other states about the Trump mega bill and the tax cuts for billionaires.
Is this is not your first billboard campaign if I'm not mistaken that you've also called out the the doge cuts earlier and Do you already have something in mind for where you're going from here to keep these issues top of mind for Americans as they see these billboards?
Yeah, well, in my view, you know, a lot of these billboards have been put up in places that are, you know, we'll call red or purple, at least, you know, places where they are not core democratic voters.
They're trying to speak to people who may have voted a different way.
and the first billboards that you mentioned were about the cuts to national park rangers and national park staff and really unnecessary heinous efforts to attack people who in my mind serve as the best ethos of america and i was talking about integrity with you before pat right that here's national park service staff whose whose job they don't make tons of money off these jobs they they do these to improve your standard of living as you come into a national park national parks are available to all people regardless of income great thing that we want to maintain and yet doge said oh this is this is
place we want to go after.
And I thought when we did the first billboard campaign, there were a lot of Republicans can start to say, Hey, you know, I like Donald Trump.
I like some of the things he's doing.
This is a step way too far for me.
And I'm trying to own that persuasion mindset in this moment.
I can appreciate respect that people will vote for Trump, vote for Republicans for a whole host of reasons.
But I want to want to explain it.
on the issues of class and who fights for working people.
It is, in my view, the issue of our time.
And it is the issue that is often least covered through traditional media, thanks to you and others who are trying to do it through alternative forms of media.
And it requires like having a, you know, trying to get messages through to folks because they aren't ordinarily going to see it.
They are only going to hear about, oh, doge cuts on national park staff.
They're not going to hear about, oh, Jeff Bezos is making out like a robber baron with his tax bill.
I want to make sure as we get through the course of the next few years that class-based conversations are had.
And it's beyond the billboards as well.
I note that on your YouTube channel, it notes that you're an Emmy-winning non-profit newsroom.
You can go to More Perfect Union on YouTube and see all the other multimedia ways that you're trying to get this message out.
That is the principal way we try to get this message out.
I have a staff of 35 people.
And we do journalism every day.
We're all over the country trying to tell stories of, you know, data centers right now, for instance, they're taking over a lot of communities and towns, pilfering the water, pilfering electricity, raising energy costs on working class people.
Also, all just so Elon Musk can create grok or, you know, that we can have some kind of AI chatbot, you know, like really to screw with workers that in that way, we really have a fundamental problem of too few actors.
have way too much power.
And you see this particularly in big tech with the onset of AI.
And our job at More Perfect Union is just to tell, make sure we're telling the stories from those who are getting screwed right now.
And to suggest there could be a different way, a better way.
Apart from the YouTube channel, is there anything else that you would like to motivate people to do if they see the billboards, if they see the videos?
Well, I'd love for them to sign up on our email list.
I mean, if you go to perfectunion.us, you'll see our website.
there and you can sign up for our email list there and then also all our other channels we're on tiktok instagram all the all the major platforms and thankfully we're doing quite well with views and
you know
growing very well at this point in time but i would love love even more more support
please.
A couple of more notes on, again, the impact of this bill on taxes, because we've talked so much about in generalities.
But here are the numbers as the bill has been studied.
From the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center, nearly 60% of the tax cut benefits go to the top 20% of incomes.
So 60% of the benefits going to people earning $217,000 and above.
you know, millionaires and billionaires.
And then Penn Wharton looked at a budget model with an impact on lifetime income.
Once you figure in the effect of cuts to Medicaid and food assistance households in the bottom 20% will experience a lifetime value of loss of $27,500.
By contrast, in the top 20%, they will gain value of $65,000.
And then what about the folks right in the middle?
Well, you'll get a slight, maybe $500 benefit lifetime from the tax cuts.
But if you need any of those programs that are being cut, you are going to be out of luck.
A local update is next for some of you.
Others, some more news and notes from here on Lake Wissota, across the Civic Media Radio Network.
I'm Pat Rightlow.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.
Hey, we would love to have you sign up for our newsletters.
We have a weekday version one that our intern Henry is putting together for us.
race weekly and then I've got my Sunday morning one about Wisconsin politics, also a question of the week all the time.
And of course, I'm also working on a new website story, a headline, something along the lines of who's running for governor.
it may take less time to tell you who's not running for governor.
We go through at last count, I think 19 different names on there of people who may run for governor, who are running for governor, who have said they probably won't run for governor, including a couple of surprises.
I was asking around yesterday with folks and saying, you know, give me a long shot.
Give me a surprise that might be running and we just don't know about it yet.
And some interesting thoughts on that from folks.
So we've got a long way until nomination papers have to be taken out.
That's April 15th of next year.
They have to be turned in by June 1st if memory serves.
And so that's when we'll know who the official candidates are.
But from now until then, a lot of people making announcements one way or another.
So.
By all means, continue to follow what we're doing through our newsletter and on our website upnorthnewswi.com and in our social media feeds as well.
During the commercial break, I can confirm the breaking news that State Representative Angela Stroud of Ashland is not running for governor.
I found one who's not getting in the race to this point.
Representative Stroud, good morning.
How are you?
Well good.
It's part of our way up north segment that we're now doing in this time slot on Tuesdays.
It's great to get some perspective from much closer to Lake Superior where life is, this should be my new slogan, life is just a little cooler up there.
It's
cooler by the lake and
it's just a cool place to be.
as well.
So you've come through the state budget process and of course the governor Evers announcement.
Let's take them in reverse order here.
Let's start with your reaction to the governor's announcement.
And then we're going to go back and talk a bit about the state budget and the issues with that whole process.
But first you take on the governor not running for a third term.
People said, what's your gut feeling?
And I'm like, don't have one.
I'm real, really 50-50 on it.
Tony Evers is a true public servant.
He's not one who was in this for ego, not one who had a really hard time letting go of power, I think.
And so he did this to serve.
He really served well.
He, you know, two terms is a lot for a governor.
It's a really hard job.
He deserves to spend time with his family.
He's a truly decent person who I think just wants to go back and be a grandpa and a husband and live life and enjoy it.
So I'm really happy for him that he gets to do that and grateful for his service.
The state budget bill, that's the one bill that must pass, you know, theoretically.
And so it gets so much shoved into it that, like you say, would never pass as a standalone measure.
For me, the most obvious of those would be the voucher school program.
In 30 years until two years ago, it never was up as a standalone bill.
It was always crammed into a budget bill, and that's how it got to be the behemoth that it is now.
So we have the model that we're going to have for a while yet, and it is a matter of, again, how you're using leverage and negotiations.
But now that that window is closed for this session, what are your priorities in terms of, you know, trailer bills, follow-up bills, or just, you know, separate legislation that you want to be working on?
I mean, there's big picture of stuff.
You know, a lot of what Democrats are doing right now is preparing to govern after the next election.
We know Robin Boss is not going to move any Democratic idea forward in the assembly.
That's just a fact.
He's made that very clear.
And so what we're doing now is setting the groundwork for when dynamics change.
I mean, we'll keep trying.
There's no quit in assembly Democrats, but
And so for me, there are good governance issues to work on.
There are specific pieces of legislation around air quality and environmental issues.
There's specific legislation around the UW system.
And so I'm working on a range of things.
For me, it's always district specific.
And the 73rd has some problems to solve it, and that's what I'm here
for.
did not have a uh so we say a representative voice for a time because of gerrymandered maps because uh and now we have uh some leadership that is going into this thing and well as much as you want to be productive you know with the capital p sometimes a lot of it is just simply setting the table for next year and
letting
voters know well if democrats were in charge this is what we would do and so when people say why don't you do these things when you're in the minority you have to leave a record that's the whole point of what you're doing here it sounds like
Well, you've got to show voters what we could be doing, what's at stake.
And if voters understood what happens in Madison more, which is why I so appreciate what you're doing with civic media, if they understood it, Republicans wouldn't win another election in the state because they're not looking out for people.
And so what we're trying to do is make that contrast, make it clear what we would be doing, which is governing responsibly for the people of the state and accountably.
Like you said, vouchers could never pass openly.
And yet it's been one of the biggest priorities of that party.
That is not democratic.
It's irresponsible.
We're just very different.
From Alicia on YouTube, I always love hearing from Representative Straut.
She gives such intelligent and well thought out answers.
And that's just some of the fan mail that we get here from State Representative Angela Straut from Ashland.
Thanks for visiting with us today.
Appreciate it so much.
Anytime.
Thanks for having me.
Now a quick note about our shows and the Civic Media Radio Network.
We are all about local radio.
It's the foundation around which civic media has built these statewide shows throughout the day.
There's Jane and Greg, Todd Alba, Maggie Dawn, and more.
On this program, you do hear us yodeling from six to nine a.m.
But some of our stations also take a break every so often to give you the latest local news.
So if you ever want to tune in to what we're saying back here in Chippewa Falls during those breaks, you've got options.
We're live on Facebook and on YouTube, the Up North News, Facebook and YouTube pages, the Civic Media Facebook and YouTube pages.
You can also listen to the Civic Media app on our stations in Eau Claire, La Crosse, Oshkosh and Amory, where they hear us continuing to chat through the local breaks.
Or as I like to say, you can pod this program by going to Spotify or Apple, wherever you get your podcasts and listen to us on demand that way.
You can also go to the website to listen in, and while you're there, give a listen to some of the Civic Media weekend shows and podcasts that are there.
All right, coming up next, after the news, we're going to have our interview with Lieutenant Governor Sarah Rodriguez, right after she announced that she was going to be a candidate for Wisconsin governor in 2026.
Thanks for spending some time with us as part of your mornings powered by Up North News.
We'll have more from Chippewa Falls coming up here on the Civic Media Radio Network.
I'm Pat Krightlum.
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