“I hate my budget,” was the literal money quote from Governor Gregoire, who went on to add, “in some places, I don’t even think it’s moral.”
For the non-budget wonks among us, it’s hard to square cutting $4.6 billion out of the 2011-13 two-year budget, so that it still totals a staggering $32.4 billion, with the scorched earth that’s being reported: per the Seattle Times, say goodbye to the State Arts Commission and Tourism Office, the Basic Health Plan (an additional 66,000 without health insurance), the Disability Lifeline, state parks funding, and programs for gifted children and juvenile offenders. Here’s an itemized list.
(Last Friday, the governor went on to suggest $1.1 billion in cuts from this biennial budget, starting early axe-work on the Basic Health Plan and Disability Lifeline, plus the Children’s Health Program, state food stamp assistance, and education funding that supports poorer schools and smaller class sizes.)
Washington Budget & Policy Center
So what are we spending $32.4 billion on, exactly? That’s the question I asked the Washington State Budget & Policy Center‘s Remy Trupin the day the state announced a $5.7 billion deficit. You might be surprised to learn that the state’s prime directive, as it were, is to fund education. Over half of the state’s budget goes to schools ($13.6 billion in 2007-09), higher education ($2.2 billion), and job training ($1.4 billion).
Because education is the state’s top priority, that means that health and social services, environmental protection, and things like worker childcare assistance get cut first. But what sounds like a “reasonable” downsizing of the total budget, say six percent, is actually being repeatedly carved out of a much more limited area. Depending on how you slice it, you could be talking about cuts of 25 to 30 percent from budget sectors, and that’s when whole programs suddenly go missing.
Some analysts think this “sharing the pain” is just and proper, but on Budget Schmudget (the Budget & Policy Center’s blog), you learn that tax subsidies are harder to cut than funding. So while health insurance for the working poor goes away, we’re still supporting “a $10 million per year sales tax exemption on nose jobs, face-lifts, and other cosmetic surgeries.” The Budget Schmudgeteers argue that in addition to putting tax subsidies to a simple majority vote, legislators need to include expiration dates for these subsidies (currently almost 90 percent of tax subsidies on the books have the gift of immortality).
Washington Budget & Policy Center
Unfortunately (depending on your viewpoint), the reform that we actually see at the moment is the unconstitutional (I’ve argued) I-1053, requiring a supermajority vote for tax changes and such things as ferry fare hikes and road tolls. I-1053 and other legislative handcuffs are supposed to rein in “out of control” state spending–though the numbers show that state spending on public services, as a percentage of personal income, has declined since the late 1990s. (Not coincidentally, the state’s population has grown 14 percent since 2000.)
All that I-1053 accomplishes is to put a club on the legislative steering wheel at precisely the moment you’d like more responsive taxing-and-spending handling.
Well, as is so often the case, much depends on your choice of metaphor. You hear a lot about “cutting the fat” or “cutting to the bone”–but what if it’s really an amputation? After all, your foot makes up only some percentage of your body mass, and as a percentage, it seems like you’d hardly miss it. But my understanding is that if you do, in fact, cut off a foot, you really do notice a change out of proportion to its size. It was actually accomplishing quite a lot.
As the legislature looks at cutting program after program, you have to wonder if the only thing worse than the amount of money the state spends on public services is what we will end up paying if we don’t have them.
Apparently, various sources are reporting that the human head is 8% of the body’s overall mass.
I don’t think we should cut off the head of the government, but rather tax the rich and end tax subsidies for things that don’t reasonably generate income.
And tax the shit out of soda.
yep.
well said, Troy
If only the people in this state knew what it would mean to repeal the soda tax I am sure they would have voted differently. Instead the State did not even make a case for it, but now Gregoire throws out ending Basic Health and other programs for the poor so easily. Why didn’t she mention it would end BEFORE the election to educate voters? Because she doesn’t care. As long as her precious Indian Casinos and projects are safe, all is well. Now she acts like she is going to cry, why not make that effort BEFORE the election? If she really cared she would have.
The recent census numbers tell all. Population in WA State grew 13 percent — the slowest in 70 years.
But the budget? It grew 50 percent in the same time period!
WA State is a bubble predicated on super high growth.
That growth ain’t happening.
Hence the budget should be cut all the way back to 2000 + 13 percent.
due to the upcoming redistricting. That will send more Fed funds our way, so the budget, while painful, is also reflective of our current lack of real-world Fed representation and appropriation. The next two years will be less bad than the budget indicates, betcha a dollar, despite Republican and Tea Party interests.
John, I think first we have to agree on what we call the “budget.” The overall budget includes federal dollars, which I think most people would agree it would be short-sighted to have refused. But if we look at what the state actually spent on operations in its general fund over the past 10 years, we see an increase to a high of $31.5 billion (in 2007-09) from $22 billion (in 1999-2001). The bulk of that increase, about $7 billion, was for health and human services and public schools. The bulk of the human services went for medical assistance. You can cut that “all the way back to 2,000 + 13%” but you’re just shifting around costs. If uninsured people get sick, the state still ends up paying for ER visits. As for public education funding growing, that’s something the majority of people in Washington state tend to vote for again and again. If you’re against that, but then…why am I even bothering? “2000 + 13%” is clearly an arbitrary number, and you have no credible argument in response to this post’s point, which is that being penny-wise and pound-foolish can create even greater future costs.
Fight the personal initiative (I-1053) that is KILLING WA state in the courts. Somebody needs to grow a backbone and stand up for what is right. Why doesn’t the governor FIGHT BACK! How dare anyone KILL DEMOCRACY!!!!!!!
There’s a difference between paying for “education” and paying for teachers to retire early with benefits for life while others work into their 70’s to pay for them. Taxing the rich just means taking money from those who earned it and subsidizing those teachers, and other public employees, who get to retire and not earn it. Taxing the rich might make nice rhetoric, but it won’t solve any problems, it will only make things worse.
Actually, both sides of this argument are correct in certain areas.
Michael, you are correct, that cutting health costs simply shifts it around, so that it’s essentially making the problem worse.
However, John is also correct. That amount of money can actually be cut from education.
The reason is:In college, we learn about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Basic physical and safety needs for human beings come before “enrichment” needs such as learning and self-improvement.
People have to eat, before they go to school.
That’s more important.
In the show “Man Vs. Wild” Bear Grylls, uses an acronym for survival that says this nicely:
P.R.W.F.=Please Remember What’s First
Which stands for: Protection, Rescue,Water, and Food.
This is what is basically needed for survival.
Things like food assistance, and elderly care, which funds people to go to people’s homes and make sure they didn’t have a stroke, which is a basic safety thing, are more important than schools.
On a state level what this means is:
Protection: from the elements as Shelter and utilities assistance, such as housing assistance, as well Police, and Emergency disaster funding as well as fire departments.
Rescue: Medical funding, road funding, power-grid and city maintenance funding in case of disaster, etc, as well as aid for mothers who otherwise wouldn’t be able to support their families without some child assistance.
Water: this is pretty self explanatory, but means basically keeping our drinking water supply working and potable.
Food: Food assistance programs, and food bank aid.
These are our basic, human priorities.
Keep people sheltered, safe, and secure, with medical health access, with clean water, power, and access to food.
Schools are not on this list.
Schools come later, when basic needs are stabilized and you can do more, then you invest in things like STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) programs to research and develop new jobs and create a technically trained work force to improve the long term economy.
Basic priorities first though, and so voter’s priorities are irrelivant, what we want doesn’t matter, what we NEED is at hand.
We’re at the level of dealing with our basic survival needs here, education funding is not a physical and safety priority.
Other people are also quite right, the tax increase by two thirds majority is preventing people from making better choices.
And quite frankly, I moved here from Colorado a few years ago where we have a state income tax, and nine bucks out of your paycheck from everybody on minimum wage would go a long way to paying for covering these basic needs.
John is correct that we can actually cut back that funding things like nose job subsidies we don’t need.
And the money from taxing the rich would help.
They’re dying for cash here, people might be starving, literally malnourished, because of not cutting schools or raising taxes.
This is America, not Zimbabwe. We do have our priorities.
A middle ground is what we need here, and remembering our basic needs first.