SO THIS IS what we have come to: Raid any fund you can find, cobble together any bits of one-time money you can get your hands on, pray for a federal bailout ... anything to keep layoffs under, what, 2,000 state employees - instead of 10,000? Anything to keep from taking away care for 26,000 of our neighbors who can't care for themselves because of brain and other injuries.
We are so beyond the niceties of proper budgeting as to make our old worries about using one-time revenue to pay salaries seem ... quaint. We are so beyond the shock of having agency budgets actually cut - not just not increased as much as requested, but actually cut - and having to actually lay off state employees, that our old concerns about not giving enough additional money to the schools or the prisons, or our desires to provide medical insurance for more low-income children seem ... surreal.
Last Tuesday a room full of House members clung desperately to the hope Rep. Tracy Edge offered that the Congress might come through with a couple of hundred million dollars more in Medicaid funding to forestall some of the worst cuts. There might be a cloture vote in the Senate that night, he said (there was); but it's no longer clear that the House will immediately sign off on the bill.
That's the unemployment benefits extension/jobs tax cuts/extra Medicaid funding bill that Republicans in Washington (and not a few in Columbia ) are denouncing for being paid for with debt.
The representatives packed into the Blatt Building for the Ways and Means Committee's annual budget briefing were overwhelmingly Republicans, mind you, but nobody in this room raised a peep about federal deficits. They need that money. They'll worry about the deficit tomorrow - or let someone else do that. They understand that real lives are being impacted. And that they are responsible for that.
When Rep. Mac Toole asked why the Department of Disabilities and Special Needs was being cut so much - the programs it provides for the disabled were slated to take the hardest human hit of any in the government - Mr. Edge's response reminded me of the joke about why people rob banks: That's where the money is.
Completely eliminate 50 agencies - half of them - and you still couldn't avoid cutting the remaining agencies; more than half the state budget goes to the public schools, colleges and Medicaid. The next three biggest agencies are the departments of Corrections, Mental Health and - you guessed it - Disabilities and Special Needs.
Rep. Mike Pitts has two disabled relatives, so he understands how much cutting those programs would hurt. "It breaks my heart," he said as we walked out of the meeting into the first springlike day of the year. "But where am I supposed to get the money?"
Ah yes, of course: the federal government. The U.S. House still hasn't signed off on the Medicaid bail-out extension, but budget writers in Columbia are proceeding as if they have. That'll relieve a world of suffering. This year.
As budget writers went through the litany of cuts in their budget, some of which might be mitigated by federal funds, they kept reminding their fellow representatives that as much worse as this year is than last, next year will be worse still, because all the federal stimulus funds will be gone - and nobody believes for a second that state revenues will have recovered; it's not even a safe bet that the state's economy will be on the upswing.
House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper told me he feels like the engineer on a train in one of those old Spaghetti Westerns. He's barreling down the track at full speed, and up ahead, the bridge is out. He's pulling on the brake. And nothing's happening. (Please, no Toyota jokes; I already tried that.)
Education Superintendent Jim Rex summed up the situation pretty well when he told a Senate committee there are no good options left for cutting the budget.
Even if lawmakers go along with his plan to raise the cigarette tax to the national average - and they should, even if they wouldn't get an extra penny from it - that won't take care of all the problems this year, let alone the awful next year.
Even if lawmakers consolidate duplicative agencies and shut down programs that are less important than the schools and police and protecting kids from abuse - and they should, even if it won't pay off immediately - it still wont take care of all the problems.
We can nip and tuck around the edges. And we should, although I'm not holding out any hope for that, because all the nipping and tucking won't take care of the problem, and why make the effort (the legislative thinking would go) if you're still going to be left with awful problems?
Vital programs would be facing cuts nearly as deep, and we'd be laying off nearly as many people, even if we had done everything right in the past, because the revenue would have dried up nearly as much. Of course, if we had done everything right in the past - like not passing ridiculous special-interest tax laws and not paying for festivals (and that's admittedly small change, and way in the past) and not defending duplication and fragmentation and not maintaining an encourage-kids-to-kill-themselves lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax - we'd have started at a better base. Cutting a program from $100 million to $90 million doesn't hurt as much as cutting it from $50 million to $40 million. So yes, we are paying for years of bad decisions.
I do not envy state legislators. But they chose to take on this job. In many cases, they spent huge sums of other people's money in order to win the right to take on this job. They won. Now they have an obligation to somehow find a way to do it well. To not despair and settle for what is truly unacceptable. And we have an obligation to make it clear to them that we can't afford any more years of bad decisions.
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