PLATTEVILLE, May 20 — The most accidentally interesting thing I discovered last week is that, if your definition of summer starts Memorial Day weekend and ends on Labor Day weekend, this will be the longest possible summer.

That is because Memorial Day Monday is the earliest possible date (fourth Monday in May) and Labor Day (first Monday in September) is the latest possible date this year.

Let’s (not) make a deal: I’m not sure how many politics-watchers appreciate the unusual nature of having a bill introduced by the governor and leaders of both houses of the Legislature (who are of opposite parties from the governor) and then have the bill go down to defeat. But that’s what happened Wednesday when the state Senate defeated the school spending increase/tax cut bill 18–15, with the winning side comprising all 15 Democrats and three Republicans.

This is what can happen when a governor lacks a good relationship with his own party’s state legislators. This is also what can happen when there seems to be no danger of leadership retribution given that Gov. Tony Evers and the leaders of the state Assembly and Senate are all leaving office at the end of the year. This is also what happens when politicians put (what they think is) their own political interests, or the viewpoints of the most extreme voices whispering in their ears, over serving their constituents and the state as a whole, including those who didn’t vote for them.

The prevailing attitude among the opponents seems to be that voters should vote for us in November and we will give you better (however they define that). They seem to forget that election results are not guaranteed, but that’s not all they failed to notice.

• In contrast to some conservatives who dump on public schools for not teaching (their own) values to students, voters support their own public schools, especially if there isn’t a private-school option. (And there isn’t beyond eighth grade in this area, Platteville has no private schools, and in a month the Potosi/Tennyson either won’t have one either.) Private high schools are found in larger metropolitan areas in this state, not here. The front and inside pages of your favorite weekly newspaper show how people in this area take pride in their schools in such areas as state and federal competitions, the Wisconsin Civics Games, deep playoff trips, concerts and so on. Towns empty out for state tournaments; followers of private schools don’t go as crazy over their team.
• On the other hand, advocates of more school funding haven’t done a good job explaining why schools need more money (other than to keep bringing up the Consumer Price Index, which affects taxpayers too) given that (1) enrollment is dropping for demographic reasons, (2) school test scores have been dropping, and (3) about three-fourths of Wisconsinites don’t have kids in school and don’t work in schools, but are paying for schools.
• Given what has happened with gas prices and therefore inflation, that $300 per person income tax rebate would come in quite handy right now. So would not having to pay state income taxes on tip income or on overtime (which is usually more financially efficient for companies than hiring more employees). Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once said, “I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.”
• Even though the property tax cut would have been indirect and affect the smallest of the four pieces of your property tax bill, property taxes have been the number one tax complaint in this state since the year after the state started collecting property taxes.
• Beyond a certain point a budget surplus is similar to a big income tax refund — you have given the feds and the state an interest-free loan for more than a year. At the end of 2025 the state had a budget surplus of $3.9 billion plus $2 billion in its Budget Stabilization Fund.

This is the sort of thing that drives people who watch politics into eye-twitching rage. One side says not enough money is going schools. The other side says not enough money is going to taxpayers. The result is that no one gets anything.

Do you feel a draft? Elsewhere on this page of your favorite weekly newspaper is a remembrance of the era of the last military draft, which ended in the early 1970s near the end of the Vietnam War.

This is a good time to remember those days since Memorial Day is basically a second Veterans Day, and some of the largest protests took place while adults were considering whether to wait to be drafted, circumvent the draft by signing up, or circumvent the draft by heading north to Canada. It would be interesting to see a vet this weekend and ask him what he did and why.