May 12, 2008

Fixing the Budget: This is a Test

By George Lightbourn

It’s now official: both John McCain and Hillary Clinton have been caught with their demagoguery showing.  Of course it wasn’t official until the New York Times called it and last week the nation’s paper of record called it.

McCain, the Republican standard bearer and Clinton, the Democratic spear chucker, thought it would be good to, well, you know, give people some money.  Exactly how much money, we can’t say since they wanted to pass it out in the form of a gas tax holiday.  The more we drive, the more we get.

Why McCain was first into the tax holiday pool is anyone’s guess.  Hopefully he’ll return to the straight talking, anti-pandering John McCain that endeared him to enough Republicans to avoid the slow motion train wreck that passed for the Democratic primary.

For Hillary, on the other hand, the tax holiday seemed the perfect issue for the times.  She was a Pit Bull locked in a fight with a Bichons Frises and somehow she was losing.  It made some sense then how, in a testosterone-fueled moment, to steal a bad idea from John McCain.  But then she did went the extra mile and managed to make a flawed idea significantly worse.  She not only supported the tax holiday idea, she suggested that it wouldn’t cost anything if we would just stick it to big oil.

To my surprise, the voters in North Carolina and Indiana saw through Clinton’s desperate gift and people with blue, white and sating collars pulled the lever in surprising number for Obama. 

Granted, the idea of a gas tax holiday represented government pandering 101, but it’s a ray of hope that the body politic saw through it.  The voters in North Carolina and Indian passed the test.

We’re about to have our own little test right here in Wisconsin.  While most of us have been preoccupied with the weekly blizzards of February and March, state government found a hole in its budget; a $652 million hole.  But, upon hearing the size of the deficit, the halls of the Capitol were filled not with gloom but with hope.  Only this was another kind of hope.  Our elected leaders were hoping the problem wouldn’t get any worse – a distinct possibility – and hoping that no one would be paying attention to the budget fix that would ultimately be signed by the Governor.

Let’s face it, the state budget is big and complicated and just talking about it makes our eye lids droop.  And besides, don’t those guys in Madison always take the easy way out?

Well yes, all of that is true.  So here’s a way to keep it simple so anyone can follow along and see how the Madison crowd goes about fixing a budget problem.  Think of it this way, when money is tight, there are only three things to do:  

·        cut spending – something almost no one gets elected to do,

·        get more money – sort of like our having to get a part-time job when we can’t make our payments,

·        borrow – disguised in state government circles as bonding, refinancing or delaying.  Any time they delay something, they’re really borrowing money.

We’ll be tracking the budget to see how much of the final fix comes in the form of cuts or tax increases or borrowing.  We’ll be keeping score, just like the voters in North Carolina and Indiana kept score.  If voters think that the budget fix in Wisconsin is as irresponsible as Hillary’s gas tax holiday, maybe in the fall we’ll stand up and show we’ve been paying attention.  I know a lot of people in Madison who are hoping that won’t happen.