You may have seen an excerpt of this devastating anyalysis By Tom Hefty and John Torinus in Sunday's JS, but here is the complete story from the new issue of Wisconsin Interest. From my editor's note:

The job-killing tax and fee increases in the new state budget were bad enough. But even worse was the epic disconnect between what was happening in Madison and the economy in the rest of the state.

The $3 billion tax hike will hit an economy that has already shed more than 133,000 jobs (almost all of them in the private sector) in the last year. The state’s job loss was the biggest in more than a half a century, but Gov. Doyle signed a budget that raised taxes on virtually every aspect of the state’s economy, especially business.

This head-banging disconnect between our political culture and our economy is especially striking in light of the analysis in this issue of Wisconsin Interest by veteran business executive Thomas Hefty and journalist and entrepreneur John Torinus Jr.: “Wisconsin Flunks Its Economics Test.”

Even before the current budget, they report, Wisconsin had been falling behind the rest of the country, to the point where Wisconsin now risks becoming “the Alabama of the North.” Despite the administration’s attempts to obscure the extent of job loss by using “rosy or smoky” counting methodology, they note that during the Doyle years Wisconsin has “managed to slide to below-average wages and below-average job growth…the worst of both worlds.”

Their study comes too late to affect the passage of the current budget, but the data they assemble could set the terms of the debate over Wisconsin’s direction, especially going into the 2010 elections.