We tax for baseball?

I spent my summer surveying citizens in and around Menomonie and faculty, staff, and students at UW-Stout. The goal: to find out how much the community values a cleaner Lake Menomin and which cleanup policies they would be most supportive of.

I asked people whether or not they’d be willing to support three different payment mechanisms that would fund a lake cleanup—an additional 0.1% sales tax, a $10 monthly water bill addition, and a $120 annual property tax addition.  

I found that, by far, the greatest support is for an additional 0.1% sales tax. In my sample, almost 90% said they would pay the sales tax if it cleaned the lake for the whole summer (67% if it cleaned the lake for an additional month of summer), while only about 50% supported both the water bill and the property tax additions.

What this means for policymakers is that if they need to implement some sort of tax to bring in revenue to fund a lake cleanup, they should choose a sales tax addition and not a water bill or property tax addition. If a 0.1% sales tax were put to a popular vote, it would pass with a substantial majority

Sales tax additions of 0.1% have worked in Wisconsin (think of Baseball Stadium District tax in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Washington, and Waukesha countries), and the overwhelming support in my survey suggests it would work here as well. If people can get behind a tax to fund a baseball stadium, certainly they can get behind a tax to protect their health and livelihoods.

A 0.1% tax, or a mere $1 for every $1000 spent, sounds small. But when applied to the entire Dunn County, it could bring in close to $400,000 annually. Keep this tax for a few years, and the county will have generated over $1 million for lake cleanup efforts. I don’t know if $1 million is enough to clean Lake Menomin, and it may not even be a dent. But it’s a start, and with lake toxin levels at dangerous levels for human and animal health year-round, we need a start.

Belay is on

I grip the rope tightly with both hands. I look down, eyes moving over my hands and stopping briefly to consider the strange new calluses at the base of my fingers. I look back up and meet the eyes of the rock wall instructor. He stares back at me expectantly, waiting. I know what to do, I know I need to pull the rope down with my left hand and up to the right with my other hand at the same time, then lock the rope in place with a quick downward jerk, then rapidly move my left hand under my right so I can shift my right hand back into place. I’ve practiced the move a dozen times at least in the last ten minutes.

Just a boy throwing some starfish

This week, we were asked whether we, as just-starting-out researchers in an era of abundantly available information, could realistically expect to change the entire world.

As the question clearly suggests, the odds are not in our favor. Few people would look at an undergraduate student researcher in the era of the Internet and smartphones and expect me to have any significant impact on the larger world.

But I can’t help thinking of the starfish parable (cliché, I know, but stick with me). For those of you who aren’t familiar, here it is:

De-lofting

I walk into my room in Red Cedar Hall during my second week at Stout. I look up and see my lofted bed, raised to its highest setting. I need to lower this, I think. I’ve waited too long. I drop my bags, cross my arms, and look at the wood and iron structure raising the mattress and bedframe.

It’s high up, and not just because I’m short. Really high, high enough that I need to fully extend my arms to reach the bottom of the metal frame.  I test its weight. Heavy.

I step back again, re-cross my arms. This is going to be difficult. But I don’t need help. I do things like this alone.

I go under, lift, and begin to lower. Right away, I know the weight is too much. I try to shift my legs, but loosen my grip in the process, and the heavy frame crashes down onto my left shoulder. [insert expletive here] I yell. My housemate sticks his head in the door. Do you need help? he asks. No I quickly reply.

Where's all the cheese?

I can summarize what I expected to see when I entered Wisconsin for the first time in one short word: cheese. Despite having family that has lived in Wisconsin for my whole life, cheese was all that I knew about this midwestern state. I expected cheese sales on the side of the road, free cheese samples are the grocery store, cheese head hats like the ones I see on TV—cheese and cheese everywhere.