× Expand David Michael Miller

I think we got the point. The phrase “It’s Cheaper to Keep Them” was displayed on the podium and at the top of a chart and repeated by Gov. Scott Walker several times earlier this month as he announced the latest scheme to use taxpayer money to build a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks.

But repetition doesn’t make it true. As University of Illinois finance professor Robert Chirinko wrote in a recent commentary for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,“The critical question to ask is whether investing state-local dollars in the Bucks is better than investing state-local dollars in, for example, infrastructure or primary-secondary school education…. [Until we get more details] there is a strong presumption that the governor is willing to recklessly spend taxpayer dollars on a luxury that benefits team owners and other well-connected special interests in the state of Wisconsin.”

But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the governor’s assertion is correct: that we should hold our noses and subsidize the billionaire hedge fund operators who own the team just because we’d lose more money if we let them go.

Okay. So why didn’t the governor apply the same logic to high-speed rail? Even before he took office Walker famously gave back $810 million in federal money (our own tax dollars) that would have been used to build high-speed passenger rail between Milwaukee and Madison and eventually connecting Chicago to the Twin Cities through Wisconsin. If he had let that project move forward we would have been celebrating the second anniversary of the opening of the Madison station this month.

By any analysis it was much cheaper to take the money than to let it go to other states, where it will just be used to build passenger rail there instead of here. Because Walker broke contracts with Talgo, the train manufacturer, the state may be on the line for $118 million. And even if the state is able to settle the suits for less, every dollar will have been absolutely wasted; the taxpayers will have nothing at all to show for it.

Moreover, Walker argued at the time that he was turning back the money because of a paltry $7 million in annual state operating expenses for the train. To use the same simple (and wrong) math that Walker now wants to apply to the Bucks, at that rate it would have taken the state 115 years to start losing money if it had accepted the $810 million largesse to begin with. And, of course, that’s a senseless calculation because, among many other things, the train would have created all kinds of economic spinoff benefits, travel time savings, and more that probably can’t be accurately calculated.

And while we’re at it, we can ask ourselves why the governor won’t apply the same “It’s Cheaper to Keep Them” analysis to Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. In that case the governor is refusing $345 million (again, of our own federal tax money) over the next two years because he says he fears that the feds will someday renege on future funding. Wouldn’t we rather have the guaranteed reality of $345 million (and, by the way, also insuring 80,000 more people in Wisconsin) over the next two years than reject it over unfounded speculation that we might not get as much funding in future years? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to take the Medicaid money now?

One thing seems certain. It is not cheaper to keep Gov. Walker.