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When
the General Assembly convenes in January, it must
grapple with a $66 billion budget proposal that Gov.
Mark R. Warner will submit just before he leaves
office. That's an awful lot of money, Barnie. I can
remember when the state biennial budget was only $1
billion.
State spending has grown far faster than the rate of
increase in the state's population and the rate of
inflation. Are we stuck with this pattern? That's
the major question the General Assembly must
confront in a few months.
Barnie, you and I could hardly be more apart on this
issue. You say that it won't matter much whether the
current $2.2 billion budget surplus is spent for
more government, given back to the taxpayers or
thrown in the river. After all, you argue, the
surplus is only 3.3 percent of the whole budget.
(See "Jingle in Our
Pocket," Oct. 17, 2005.)
If Virginians want to understand why the state
budget has mushroomed in recent decades, you just
provided a good lesson. We've lost sight of what
fiscal discipline really means.
Many of our elected officials believe that fiscal
discipline means raising taxes rather than
eliminating wasteful spending or low-priority
programs. They all pay lip service to
belt-tightening, but few are willing to follow
through.
Cutting government spending is always more
politically difficult than refusing to approve the
spending in the first place. Once a program is in
place, a special-interest group is created that
resists any reduction and inevitably lobbies for
more.
The first action Warner took as governor was to
appoint a Commission on Efficiency and
Effectiveness. A year later, he embraced that
commission's recommendations to cut state spending
by more than $1 billion a year, but refused to
discuss those recommendations a year later when he
proposed a large state tax increase. Had he
implemented those recommendations or just some of
them, there would have been no case for a tax
increase in 2004.
It says much about Warner that he has never bothered
to respond to a 2004 resolution approved by an
overwhelming majority in the House of Delegates,
including Democrats, Republicans and independents,
asking for a report on his implementation of the
recommendations to eliminate wasteful spending. If
the members of the House don't insist that Warner
provide that information before he leaves office,
we'll know they aren't committed to a disciplined
budget process. We already know most senators
aren't.
Cutting wasteful spending is important. Equally
important is a regular re-evaluation of state
programs for the purpose of deciding whether they
should be reshaped, reduced, expanded or
discontinued. That's the only effective way to
control state spending, especially when the budget
is so large and complex.
Unfortunately, too many of our elected officials use
the size and complexity of the state budget to avoid
the hard task of regular program evaluation. It's
much easier to put 96.7 percent of state spending on
automatic pilot and concentrate instead on how to
spend the budget surplus, which is only 3.3 percent
of the budget.
The reason is not simply that legislators lack
sufficient time and expertise. They are reluctant to
revisit previous political deals that resulted in
various formulas for state spending.
When Warner cut spending in 2002 instead of
proposing a tax hike to deal with the $2 billion
budget gap, he made the right choice. For whatever
reason, he then failed to pursue further cuts that
he acknowledged should be made and proposed instead
a tax increase to fund "long-term
commitments."
Now that there is a surplus, there are calls to
spend it on other "long-term commitments."
Is there no end to this?
--
October 31, 2005
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