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Spending Commitments?
The
General Assembly is not obligated to sustain
programs funded by previous legislatures, much less increase
spending. Lawmakers need to ask tough questions
before passing a budget.
There
has been a lot of loose talk from those pushing for
huge tax hikes in Virginia about spending
commitments. The truth is that when the General
Assembly adopts a budget every two years, it has the
prerogative to write on a virtually clean slate.
Except
for the legislature’s obligation to appropriate
money to service outstanding state debt, to restore
the Rainy Day Fund, to fund the state’s retirement
system, constitutional offices and the court system,
and to satisfy the Commonwealth’s contractual
obligations, it has no obligation to spend money.
Every General Assembly can start from scratch on the
budget.
No
session of the legislature can bind future
legislative sessions. Programs established at
previous sessions are not obligations of the General
Assembly that convenes in Richmond next Wednesday.
Those programs can be eliminated or simply not
funded unless the Constitution of Virginia says
otherwise.
The
Constitution establishes a policy of environmental
protection, but that provision does not require the
General Assembly to appropriate any funds for that
purpose. There is also provision for maintaining a
public education system of high quality, but it
doesn’t define “high quality.”
Gov.
Mark R. Warner, among others, claims there is a
constitutional mandate to appropriate what the State
Board of Education says is needed for schools.
There is no such mandate. The legislature is the
final arbiter of what should be spent.
The
nub of the debate over taxes and state spending is
what it has always been. What functions should
government pay for and how much should it spend on
each? These are political questions.
Senate
Finance Committee chairman John Chichester,
R-Stafford, frequently refers to the Commonwealth’s “core
functions.” That is not a defined term.
For
decades after the initial state constitution became
effective, the Commonwealth had no system of public
schools or public roads. The federal government had
not yet begun to coerce states into adopting
programs such as Medicaid or the Cooperative
Extension Service. “Core functions” can mean
different things to different people and in
different times.
Although
Virginia had no statewide system of public schools
or public roads for most of its first century after
independence, those two programs are now broadly
believed to be core state functions. That doesn’t
mean that increased funding for either is
necessarily sound policy.
Every
state program should be carefully scrutinized to see
if its objectives can be met more efficiently or more effectively by a different approach. That
hasn’t been happening.
The
extreme version of this approach has been labeled
“zero based budgeting,” where every program and
every dollar spent on it must be justified from
scratch. As a practical matter, the General Assembly
can’t adopt this approach in its pure form, but
the legislature can select at least several major
programs for such a review every biennium.
Before
insisting that taxpayers swallow a tax increase, the
governor and members of the General Assembly have an
obligation — not a legal, but a political
obligation — to ask tough questions of those
proposing higher spending levels. Why should
taxpayers be asked to pay more for state road
maintenance when the state is spending twice what
the private sector spends for the same result? Why
should public school spending continue to increase
ten times faster than the growth in enrollment? Why
should Medicaid patients enjoy greater benefits than
those available to state employees?
It’s
time for some late-night budget sessions.
--
January 19, 2003
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