February 18, 2008

By the People Or... To the People

By George Lightbourn

While most eyes were focused on the tinsel of the presidential primary, the editors of papers throughout Wisconsin found space to tell of the gash the worsening economy has left in the state budget.  Bob Lang, the stoic head of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, informed the Legislature and the Governor that the current shortfall stands at $652 million and could get much worse.  Unspoken in Lang’s letter was an ominous message; the $652 shortfall will happen even without a recession.  If the economy goes into recession, there will be no maybes; the budget picture will get much worse.

Just two weeks previous, Lang had set the deficit at $300 - $400 million.  Just a few months ago in the fall when the budget passed the Legislature, everyone was feeling pretty chipper and expected tax receipts to roll into the treasury.  What a difference a few months or even a few weeks can mean.  As someone who had a front row seat the last time the state budget felt the sting of an economic slowdown, I have to say that this current script seems eerily familiar.

Yet however familiar the script seems, the circumstances surrounding this downturn differ from the last downturn in two significant ways.  First, it has only been six years since the last downturn and it is obvious to the world that little has been done to protect the budget from even a minor downturn.  All of the legislative leadership was around for the last downturn.  But special culpability is reserved for the Governor since his first election to state budget deficits.  It has taken six years for his 2001 election year charges of profligate spending and fiscal mismanagement to echo throughout the halls of the Capitol.

The second change is that the public has had it up to here with partisan bickering.  They expect their government to be more than a debating society.  Every time the public has been asked lately reveals the same sentiment shouted by Howard Beale in the movie Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.”  In the most recent WPRI poll, not only did we find a palpable disillusionment with government, forty percent of the respondents eschewed either major party and have begun identifying themselves as independents.  Can the disillusionment be made any clearer than the current fascination with John McCain and Barack Obama, two politicians perceived as swimming far outside the mainstream of their party?

So the message to the Governor and the Legislature is a simple one: fix it.  Fix the budget.  Rise above the predictability of past sessions, roll up your sleeves and fix it.  Don’t string it out the way the budget was strung out.  Fix it.  It’s a simple message but it seems to be the only one the public is willing to accept.  We’ll see if our leaders are paying attention.