It’s been humorous the last few days watching Wisconsin’s liberal intelligentsia turn themselves into Elastigirl in the Incredibles, bending and stretching and twisting, because they’re desperate to find Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley an accomplishment.
Liberal pundits (basically Dan Shafer and smarmy Sachin Chheda) are becoming expert contortionists as they try to camouflage the fact that Crowley’s accomplishments are just resume items, and not anything he’s actually done.
I suppose he could talk about how wholesome and family friendly the State Fair is, since it’s in Milwaukee County, but, yeah, maybe not. The brawl that went down at Spin City, on video, last night is basically a Tom Tiffany campaign ad: It’s exactly what everyone outside of Milwaukee doesn’t want to become. AG candidate Eric Toney eloquently brought that point up; Josh Kaul, of course, stayed silent. If he even exists anymore. I mean, I hope he exists. He’s basically a cipher. That’s an old word for zero.
But if Tiffany actually makes it a campaign ad, the same legacy media reporters who are running the video now will write hand-wringing stories about whether it’s racist, and they’ll quote Madison professors who are experts in racial tropes but who were all exasperatingly silent when Democrats and the media conjoined to push the leading black candidate, Mandela Barnes, out of the race with… a racist trope.
Shafer started practically shrieking (if one can do so online), “Eureka, I have found it” – a David Crowley accomplishment, that is, which is about as rare as a 1911 T206 Honus Wagner trading card or a blue lobster (look it up.)
Only it wasn’t really an accomplishment at all because what they chose was… Act 12.
Forget Shafer and Chheda types (Chheda is a Democratic political operative who briefly snagged a cushy job working for Jill Underly and now sits on X spinning narratives). Crowley himself made this claim when squirrelly anti-Trumper radio blowhard Steve Scaffidi asked him for his top accomplishment. Why, Act 12 he said! Even more hysterically, Crowley whipped out a press release that claimed, “Crowley Campaign: Act 12 Proves David Crowley Knows How to Govern.”
Except Tony Evers signed that; Evers and Vos got that done. Vos was calling the shots. All Crowley did was beg to be allowed to increase taxes.
As dumb as this Democrat narrative is, just watch: the narrative will jump from the social sphere and into a Molly Beck story by daybreak. Then the headlines will jump into nasty Democratic campaign ads. It’s worked that way for years.
Hysterically Ridiculous
The only problem is that the narrative is hysterically ridiculous. All Crowley accomplished through Act 12 was jacking up the cost of living on poor blacks and east side college kids who are already stretched thin. Great job!
This isn’t hyperbole. The big “accomplishment”?
Crowley (and #Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson) begged Robin Vos to pass Act 12 so they could increase the regressive sales tax on the poorest people in the state. Which Crowley promptly did, almost doubling it. What this means is that a poor person in Milwaukee pays more for the same goods than a rich person in Grafton. If you live in the city, it’s even worse because you have to pay the extra county and city sales tax too and sales tax for the Wisconsin Center District, where some people think Joel Brennan is about to land, replacing the guy who denied pinching Milwaukee Common Council President Jose Perez’s butt.
Say what you want about Democratic governor primary loser Brennan, but I don’t think we have to worry about him pinching any alderman’s butt at least. Bob Bauman, you’re safe. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Google Marty Brooks.)
Ashley Furniture & Cracker Barrel
Good conservative Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann (who was last seen graciously falling on the party sword so Tiffany wouldn’t have a blood primary thank you Josh), made sure to point this out at the time. “Come to Washington County for the savings, stay for the quality of life! Exhibit A: In the City of Milwaukee, today you will pay an additional $60 for this bedroom set,” Schoemann gloated, attaching a link to Ashley Furniture.
At which point Milwaukee Mayor Chevy Johnson responded by bringing Cracker Barrel into it. Of course, they briefly tried to scrub their logo of the Old Timer, so he might fit right in. I created Jess Notes solely to tell you anecdotes like this.
There was a serious point. No way is this an accomplishment. It gets better.
Why, you might ask, would wily Robin Vos go along with this scheme! Well, Vos was pretty much held hostage. Crowley and Johnson came begging for sales tax increase authority so the city and county would not go bankrupt. And Vos knows if that happened, it would tank the state economy.
Calling that an accomplishment is kind of like a wayward adult son who doesn’t pay his mortgage for six months because he’s blowing the money in clubs and gambling and on ho*kers and ATVs and then runs to rich dad to help him out and frustrated rich dad feels like he has no choice because he can’t let his son, daughter-in-law and grandkids end up on the streets.
So he pays the mortgage,and we all know what happens next, six months later, wayward son needs more money, but now he isn’t paying for the house, the car and he owes some drug debt to the Chicago mob. Basically, Milwaukee County is Hunter Biden before he got sober, went on X and started telling everyone off. (Not literally, outraged liberals. It’s a metaphor.)
So Vos had no choice. It gets even more hysterical.
Crowley and Johnson and their benefactor Evers were playing checkers while Vos was playing 5D chess. So Robin embedded a bunch of Easter eggs in the sales tax bill, which also increased shared revenue to lots of people (Robin did that, and Evers. Crowley was just a recipient.) Anyway the Easter eggs kind of read like a Tyler August or Dan Knodl Christmas wish list. Which means it’s stuff conservatives want but liberals have fought for years.
Robin’s Easter Eggs
You want your sales tax hike, Robin said, fine. He jammed in provisions mandating that Milwaukee not reduce the number of police officers, not use the money for DEI or the Hop street car boondoggle, and not dispatch health officers to shut down businesses. He also managed to eliminate the personal property tax and demanded that MPS agree to school resource officers. There was more, but that gives you a flavor.
And the Democrats had to go for it because Evers knew that Crowley and Johnson were presiding over local government houses of cards held together with old tape.
Hysterically, Shafer points to the year Act 12 was passed to argue Crowley reduced property taxes. Well, yeah because he got a big gush of sales tax money off the backs of poor people purchasing goods and services.
Liberals want to blame shared revenue for everything but guess what Crowley did next? Why he tried to jack up property taxes in 2026 of course – by the highest percentage in Milwaukee County since the George W. Bush presidency (2002)! Don’t take my word for it. That analysis came from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which is not a right wing think tank. The County Board lowered it slightly. He also jacked executive salaries up by 11.5%. And he slashed needed behavioral health services and raised bus fares and cut routes, which hurts, you guessed it, the poor.
Why were Milwaukee County and the City in such bad shape? Liberals want to blame it all on shared revenue, but budgets are about choices. For example, David Crowley blew $45 million on a new museum that looks like a giant humidifier. It will be a nice place to store non-transparent museum honcho Ellen Censky’s beetle genitalia. Actually I don’t really know if she has any now, just that she once studied it. It was in Milwaukee Magazine. Yep she’s a beetle genitalia expert in case you thought public life in #Wisconsin couldn’t get weirder.
In so doing, Crowley signed on to destroy the beloved European village and Streets of Old Milwaukee, two things in Milwaukee that everyone loved. So, yeah, budgets are about choices.
The city and county also have pension liabilities. The city’s pension was more lucrative than the well-run state fund, and that broke the budget. That was a choice too. The county pension scandal predates Crowley by decades. But it was Democratic malfeasance, sending out million-dollar pension checks courtesy of the taxpayers to blah mid-level bureaucrats. Random mid-level Office Space pencil pushers started getting massive gazillion dollar pension checks and a local blogger got wind of it.
Republican Scott Walker got elected in the wake of the same scandal because he rode his stallion into the county to promise “zero tax levy increases forever” and then rode out to the governor’s mansion, but that was 16 years ago. So Democrats blaming Walker for Crowley’s deficits and problems are being ridiculous.
Shafer and his Democrat pals want to paint Crowley as the Phantom of the Courthouse, not really being responsible for anything, just a bit player in a play engineered by others years ago. Giving the Milwaukees what they needed to not go under wasn’t an accomplishment of Vos’s either. It was just pragmatism. The shared revenue part? Vos and Evers can claim that.
At some point, Crowley is going to have to come up with a single reason he’d be a good executive. He can’t run on “Tony Evers likes me, I don’t want to cancel Thanksgiving, I support data centers and a bunch of millionaires parachuted me over the rest of the field” forever. I think.
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