Fiscal Facts

With the largest surplus on record, state policymakers have an unprecedented opportunity in the 2023-25 budget to make once-in-a-generation progress on some of Wisconsin’s biggest challenges.

Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, remote and hybrid work arrangements remain widespread in Wisconsin and nationally.

Since late 2019, sales of recreational marijuana have begun in two of Wisconsin’s neighboring states, while a third appears poised to legalize the substance soon.

More Wisconsinites are dying in the prime of life, from causes that chiefly include COVID-19 or drug overdoses.

As COVID-19 upended the lives of students around the state, schools across Wisconsin saw a troubling increase in chronic absences.

Amid a brisk pace of development activity in metro Milwaukee, the region’s construction labor market is as tight as it has been in at least 20 years.

Legal sales of cigarettes have plummeted in recent years, meaning Wisconsin state government is receiving much less in revenue from cigarette taxes.

Wisconsin’s state and local tax burden fell again in 2022 to its lowest level on record, due to a $1 billion-a-year income tax cut, tight limits on property taxes, and strong growth in residents’ incomes.

Less than half of graduates from public high schools in Milwaukee are enrolling in college immediately after high school, and only one-third of college students in the region are graduating within the expected time frame.