Yesterday (November 6), someone told me that my county supervisor, Jim “Luigi” Schmidt, voted against restoring some budget cuts for human services because Tosans, unlike people in other districts, only care about no new taxes.

I contacted Luigi, who clarified the misperception and his position. People in his district, he said, will accept some tax increases for good reasons—just not as many as the majority of supervisors were willing to vote for. Thee percent is one thing. More than that is another. His moderate position reflects this understanding of the will of his constituents.

He also told me that most of the people he hears from are the no-tax-increasers, not people like me whose bottom line is investing in people, services, and infrastructure to strengthen communities for the long-run.

I’m not sure the supervisors who voted to restore more cuts were voting at the behest of their constituents. A number of them will be punished for doing “the right thing” for the county, as well as for voting for pay increases for themselves.

Those who knew the risk and took it anyway may be heroes, and they may be out of jobs.

In The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, author Bryan Caplan says that it’s not special interests that keep us from developing good economic policies. It’s the voters’ misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and biases that lead us to elect (and re-elect) politicians who create the bad policies we demand.

This raises so many questions.

• What kind of society do we want?
• Do most Tosans prefer no tax increases over anything else?
• How rational and well-informed are our preferences? Do they get us what we really want? How do we know? How do we decide what’s most important when we have a menu of important things?
• When people see the same thing so differently, who is right?
• What kind of voters are we?

The Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors passed a budget today that will continue to provide some basic and essential services for the people who need help the most.

It will also raise county taxes.

Scott Walker will veto the budget to keep his no-tax-increase pledge. And the supervisors will override most, if not all, of those vetoes.

For that act of necessity, perhaps even decency, they’ll take a lot of heat from the one-idea folks, the no-tax-increase folks.

For no-tax-increasers, the belief that government should be starved to death is much more compelling than the cost to people of losing the things that taxes pay for: decent schools, social security, national defense.

Okay. They still want the national defense. They just don’t want to pay for it anytime this generation.

The county tax increase for this budget could mean about $12—or three lattes at Starbucks--on a $300,000 home. The one-idea folks believe their lives will be better when they have the money for those three lattes in their pockets. It’s a weird idea, but this is a free country, and they are entitled to it.

Personally, I would not yell about keeping my latte pocket change if it means sacrificing  public transportation that takes people to work and attracts business to a city, if it means clogging up the court system with unprocessed criminals.  I want the public transportation for myself, without criminals on board.

I suspect Walker will not be entirely displeased by the overrides. He's a decent man, and I don’t think he really wants the paratransit riders to suffer any more than he wants the Give Me My Latte Money or Give Me Death crowd to suffer.

This way, he gets to keep the purity of his no-tax rhetoric without doing as much harm. This way, well, you just can’t blame him. . . for anything.

Now, what about finding better ways to stimulate the economy than what trickles down from those three lattes?