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No
issue facing the 2006 General Assembly is more
important than the next state budget. This is so
even though the state treasury is currently brimming
with cash. Our worst budget decisions have come when
the economy is roaring and tax collections are high.
During
the economic boom of the late 1990s, our elected
officials spent as if the business cycle no longer
mattered. This made the spending cuts in 2002
even deeper and more painful when an economic
downturn occurred.
The
extraordinary economic growth that Virginia
experienced at the end of the last decade prompted
politicians to embrace new spending programs and to
begin talking about long-term “commitments.”
Perhaps
Virginia’s proximity to the nation’s capital is
the reason many state elected officials began to
sound like their federal counterparts.
If
the 2006 session of the General Assembly repeats the
mistake of the profligate 2000 session, spending
cuts during the next economic slowdown will be far
worse than those Gov. Mark Warner had to make in
2002 and Governor L. Douglas Wilder had to make in
1990. Voters should reject politicians who promise
to enact new “spending commitments” as if
economic growth will continue unabated.
Although
funding goals are acceptable, the legislature should
abandon the very idea of “spending commitments.”
That
notion is utterly at odds with Virginia ’s
constitutional scheme. We can be thankful that our
scheme doesn’t approximate the accepted rules in
Washington, D.C., where the government is not
required to balance the budget and can inflate the
currency to hide its lack of fiscal discipline.
Every
two years following elections of all members of the
House of Delegates, the General Assembly must
approve a new, two-year budget. In theory, voters
can elect an entirely new House of Delegates every
two years. Whether the House membership changes or
not, the General Assembly writes on a clean slate
when it approves a new state budget. No legislative
session can bind a future session, and no session
can authorize any state spending beyond two and a
half years of its final adjournment.
This
constitutional arrangement doesn’t assure
stability and continuity and isn’t meant to. It
also doesn’t permit long-term “spending
commitments.”
There
is an obvious disconnect between this constitutional
imperative and the statements of Gov. Warner, State
Senate Financial Committee Chairman John Chichester
and other state politicians that there really
won’t be any surplus next year because those funds
in excess of revenues appropriated to meet current
budget requirements are already “committed” to
the next state budget. This is legal nonsense.
Increasingly,
voters feel their government is out of control. As
it has grown larger and more remote, it has become
more wasteful and inefficient. Pro- spending lobbies
exert more and more influence over elected
officials. Efforts to streamline government by
cutting unnecessary programs or positions become
increasingly difficult.
One
proposed solution is to allow Virginians to vote on
a constitutional amendment to limit increases in
state spending and to return budget surpluses to the
people. I actively support such a constitutional
limitation and have done so since the 1970s, but
more is needed.
True
fiscal discipline depends on the willingness of our
legislators to use the appropriations process to
restrain unnecessary new spending, to eliminate
wasteful activities and to evaluate the
effectiveness of existing programs. They should
demand that Warner answer a formal House request for
a report on how much of the $1 billion in wasteful
state spending he identified in 2003 has actually
been eliminated.
Restoring
legislative discipline will begin to restore voter
confidence.
--
October 3,
2005
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