| Anyone who has followed the news recently has seen that Montana is facing a very tight budget this next biennium. There are some solutions that we should be discussing that we aren't -- a second round of stimulus would be ideal, frankly, both for the state's long-term needs and for the economy.
But Washington, DC, seems cowed by short-term deficits and is willing to accept lots and lots of pain in order to avoid offending hypocrites like Congressman Rehberg, who supported deficit spending during good times only to oppose it when we need it (actually, this isn't so much hypocritical as it is stupid or opportunistic).
Regardless, we've got some painful options in Montana. One proposal I saw would make up less than 1/3 of the gap by cutting state support for education by roughly 1/3. That lost money would presumably be made up by either massively jacking local property taxes, consolidating classrooms, or simply killing children perhaps. I'm not sure how we ask schools to take 15% cuts to their budgets without significantly decimating their mission. Perhaps an "expert" on the right can inform me.
There are another set of options that need to be on the table -- eliminating the oil tax holiday; cracking down on high-income folks, especially non-residents, who got great tax breaks out of the Martz Administration; and maybe even a real estate transfer tax on high-end property sales.
The reality is that we can make some cuts, but we already run this state in a pretty lean fashion. I had a 1.5 hour wait at the DMV recently. I'd hate to turn that into half a day over budget cuts.
There will be a lot of meaningless rhetoric thrown around about waste in government. Here's my advice for anyone who honestly is aware of waste in government -- share your information with the Governor's office, with your legislator, and with MPEA and MEA-MFT. These folks will be looking more than anyone to eliminate true waste this year in order to move resources into valuable programs.
But vague sentences about waste don't actually help anyone find it. And if we just pull out a chainsaw and start cutting in the hopes of eliminating waste, my sense is that we'll cut a lot of damn important stuff out as well.
Update -- And here's Paul Krugman explaining why more stimulus is a good idea since many folks seem to think that we need to piss our pants over deficits these days. |
