By Brian E. Clark
WisBusiness.com
MADISON – Fifteen years ago, the average Wisconsin salary was higher than Minnesota’s. Since then, however, Minnesota’s economy has surged while the Badger State’s has only chugged along.
Per capita income one state to the West is now $37,322, some $4,072 more than Wisconsin.
Bill McCoshen, executive director of Competitive Wisconsin Inc., would love to close that gap between the two states, which he said are remarkably similar.
“We can do it,” said McCoshen, a state Commerce Department secretary under former Gov. Tommy Thompson. “Minnesota thrived because it focused on high-wage jobs and organically grew new companies. And they went through a terrible recession in the 1980s.”
If Competitive Wisconsin’s ambitious goal can be accomplished, McCoshen said the Badger State economy would grow by $22 billion and generate $$1.32 billion in new tax revenue without a tax increase.
Competitive Wisconsin received praise Wednesday from Gov. Jim Doyle, who told the group’s board of directors that he’ll soon unveil a “Next Generation Manufacturing Plan” for Wisconsin to keep the state’s important $47 billion industrial sector strong.
Doyle said the state will invest in “programs we already have in place to help our small and mid-sized manufacturers adopt lean principles and new efforts to prepare them for the pace and the needs of the new economy.”
McCoshen’s nonpartisan group – made up of agriculture, business, education and labor leaders – spent the spent the past 18 months reviewing research conducted by top professors from the University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, and a multi-state survey conducted by the Wisconsin Alumni Association.
The result is the “Competitive Mandate,” which urges state policymakers to create a
competitive economic climate favorable to high-paying jobs and higher per capita income.
The mandate would:
- Foster the retention and expansion of existing businesses and farms and increase worker productivity.
- Accelerate business start-ups by increasing research and development, encouraging technology transfer and by modifying tax policy to nurture a creative, pro-growth, entrepreneurial climate.
- Recruit and develop high wage earners and raise per capita income.
- Promote fiscal restraint of state spending and strategic budgeting with priority in areas that will grow the economy such as K-12 and higher education, entrepreneurship, worker training, health care, property tax reduction, infrastructure and marketing.
McCoshen praised Doyle for his efforts to streamline regulations and bolster the state’s economy, but he said policy makers can do more.
McCoshen said his group studied the reform policies of former Minnesota Gov. Rudy Perpich to rebuild the economic infrastructure of the North Star State.
“Many of those reforms are in existence 25 years later, and they are a big reason for Minnesota’s economic success,” he said. “We used a lot of their ideas in the Competitive Mandate.”
McCoshen said Minnesota did a good job of “incenting” some of the key companies around the Twin Cities like 3M, Pillsbury and Honeywell to produce new technologies.
“And with that came spin-offs and more high-tech jobs for the state of Minnesota,” explained McCoshen.
McCoshen stressed the importance of investing in education in this state.
“We need to grow the number of people we have here who have bachelor’s degrees by 170,000,” he said. “Our public universities do not have the capacity on their own.
“A combination of our public and private universities still probably do not have the capacity to do that, so it will have to be a combination of graduating more people and we will have to recruit people with degrees back into this state,” he said.
But McCoshen said Wisconsin needs to do a much better job of marketing itself to graduates of state colleges who have left and would consider returning to work here, start businesses and raise families.
