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Who's
in Control Around Here?
Some
say that the cost of the state budget is driven by
factors beyond the state's control, ergo, taxes must
be raised. Don't believe it.
Much
of the current chatter about under-funded state
programs is reminiscent of the nonsense coming out
of the nation’s capital in the 1970s. With the
economy then in a trough, Washington politicos were
still approving massive spending increases.
The
buzz phrase of the 70s was “uncontrollable budget
items.” From the White House to the lowest rung of
the federal bureaucracy, there was a resignation to
constant government growth because numerous statutes
had committed the nation to automatic annual budget
hikes. The more obvious statutes of this type were
those establishing the Social Security and Medicare
systems, but the list continued ad nauseam.
Here
in Virginia, we hear more and more about spending
decisions that have already been made for us because
of factors such as previous legislative commitments,
annual increases in the cost of road maintenance,
the leverage exerted by credit rating agencies and,
believe it or not, the concern that Virginia
colleges might slip a notch in annual ratings
published by popular magazines.
Just
who is in control here? There was a time when
elected officials in Virginia were in firm control,
when hardnosed decisions were made in the best
interest of Virginians, and when the very notion of
an uncontrollable program or budget item would have
been laughable. That was a time when politicians
didn’t gauge how well the Commonwealth was doing
simply by how much we were spending, by where
Virginia stood in national rankings and by how far
we were willing to go to lure sports teams to our
state.
We
need to regain control of state budgeting, but the
view of too many Virginia politicians and virtually
all of the political commentators is that the only
way to do that is by raising taxes. Implicit in
their argument is that major state programs are out
of control and must be funded with more and more tax
revenues.
Some
business leaders are demanding a steep increase in
the gas tax because the cost of maintaining
Virginia’s road system is eating up available
funding for transportation. Their first response
should not have been to burden Virginia families and
businesses with a higher tax. They should have taken
a hard look at why maintenance costs are out of
control.
For
more than a quarter century, Virginia’s highway
maintenance costs have risen at an average annual
rate of 5 percent. That outstrips experience in the
private sector by about 500 percent. Shouldn’t we
try to rein in these cost increases before asking
taxpayers to pay even more?
Presidents
of leading public colleges and universities are
lobbying for another massive “investment” in
higher education just months after the voters
approved a $900 million bond issue for these
institutions. Virginians haven’t even retired the
$472 million debt incurred just a decade ago for
public higher education facilities.
The
argument for increasing higher education spending by
hundreds of millions in the next budget cycle is
based in part on the need to convince a few national
magazines to give our colleges high rankings. This
effectively hands an important budget decision to
outsiders, whose criteria for excellent colleges
are, for the most part, the amount of money spent
per student, per faculty member or per square foot
of space.
Before
we collapse in a collective spasm of guilt about
“underfunded” state programs, we need to take a
much closer look at how these programs operate and
how we might do things differently and at lower
cost.
--
September 8, 2003
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