It’s popular to talk about providing tax relief, but time and again Democrats have proven that they don’t actually want to help hardworking Wisconsin families.
Tax Day. The annual tradition where everyone becomes a Libertarian for a day due to the ridiculous amount of money we send to our governments. It’s worth pausing to remember the money that never made it back to our pockets—thanks to Governor Tony Evers and his fellow Democrats.
Not long ago, Evers vetoed two straightforward bills that would have delivered immediate relief to working Wisconsinites—no tax on tips and overtime. Up to $25,000 in tips could have been exempted from state income taxes—mirroring the federal policy already helping servers, bartenders, and DoorDashers. The Department of Revenue estimated it would have saved taxpayers more than $53 million in 2026 alone. Wisconsinites working overtime could have deducted up to $12,500 or $25,000 for joint filers, resulting in $474 million going back to hard-working people through tax year 2028.
A typical Democrat talking point on why we can’t have these tax cuts is because it puts the financial situation of the state in jeopardy or creates a structural deficit. Never mind that Wisconsin is sitting on billions in surplus that could have been sent directly back to you.
These vetoes join a long pattern. In 2023, Evers gutted a Republican $3.5 billion income tax cut package, slashing it to just $175 million for the lowest income bracket while effectively killing rate reductions for middle-class brackets. In 2024, he vetoed another $3.2 billion tax relief bill and called the proposals “fiscally irresponsible.” Throughout Evers’ tenure, he has signed very minimal cuts that are peanuts compared to the surplus and proposals proposed by lawmakers.
This is the Democratic record in Wisconsin, plain and simple. Despite endless rhetoric about “working families,” Evers and his party have voted against or vetoed meaningful tax cuts time after time. They prefer bigger government, more spending, and higher effective taxes on the very people they claim to champion.
The human cost is straightforward: a tipped worker keeping an extra few thousand dollars a year for groceries. A nurse or truck driver taking home more from that overtime shift instead of handing it over to Madison. Multiply those stories across hundreds of thousands of households, and the vetoed bills represent hundreds of millions that Wisconsinites could have kept.
Democrats love to campaign on “relief” for the working class, but their actions speak louder. Evers has signed some modest, targeted cuts when forced, then touts them as his own. Yet when given the chance for broad, pro-worker tax relief, I guess we just have to “deal with it.”
