Thomas Jefferson declared that “to preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.”
A growing number of states are choosing economy and liberty and suffering the indignities of the bureaucrats and special interests whose privileges are threatened. Florida is the latest state to reject the high-speed rail money pit while Washington begs for another opportunity to waste transportation dollars. Wisconsin joins New Jersey in the battle with the bureaucracy that continues to rule in Washington. Olympia seems to prefer perpetual debt.
The state’s budget for biennium 2009 through 2010 was about $72 billion. Yet the Great Recession persisted and the tax collector came up short. It was time to make more cuts. So Governor Gregoire proposes more than $75 billion in spending for 2011 – 2013. Politicians call that a cut because they cannot take enough from you to fully fund their wish list.
Last week the governor signed a short-term budget bill cutting about $242 million from the wish list and pretended that another $125 million transferred among various accounts was a savings. That still falls far short of a balanced budget.
The bureaucracy is happy, its salaries and privileges remaining largely intact. The poor covered under the state's health-care program, the disabled, and the students throughout the state did not fare as well. The budget made retroactive cuts to education of $25 million, especially penalizing those schools that are responsible in their budgeting. The House Republican Caucus refused to join the others in supporting the budget proposal because of that issue. That caucus released a statement saying, “This is perhaps the most critical of our priorities, as this is money that has already been budgeted and in many cases already been spent.”
The 36th District’s neo-hippy, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, thinks legalizing marijuana will fill the state’s coffers, allowing the spending spree to continue. Such measures, like tax-the-rich schemes, always bring in less than projected but remain in favor with the left. The advantage for the politicians is that a stoned populace may not object to having their pockets picked if the state keeps the munchies coming.
State Rep. Reuven Carlyle says the “state government is mired in short-term thinking, not simply because of a budget deficit, but because of our comfort with a well-worn institutional infrastructure of campaigns, lobbyists, agendas and advocacy. . . . We look at Detroit, Cleveland and other major cities of our nation and simply ponder how anyone could go so wrong.”
He may know that no other city in the nation has received more Federal funding than Detroit, beginning with President Lyndon Johnson’s Urban Renewal programs and continuing for decades after. Few cities have a history of more progressive politicians happy to dictate tax-funded programs and regulations for every imaginable “problem.” With the possible exception of Berkeley and a few other circus cities, nowhere has the philosophy that government is good and business evil been more thoroughly defined than in Detroit’s codes. Detroit’s progressives killed the can-do spirit that made the city synonymous with manufacturing might. Their counterparts in Lansing infected the rest of that state with Detroit’s malaise, making unemployment offices its only growth industry.
Can Olympia do the same? It may take another step in that direction before finally balancing the budget. Jefferson warns that taxation follows public debt “and in its train wretchedness and oppression.” Structural changes, not tweaking the margins, are needed in Olympia and Seattle.
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