In the months ahead, the Legislature and Gov. Gary Locke will make agonizing budget decisions, because they must. The real challenge will be to find savings that do the least amount of harm to the people of Washington.
Legislators will have to fill a $1.2 billion hole as intelligently as possible. If they can increase revenues a bit, the cuts will be a little less severe. But the legislators and the governor will have to do the overwhelming bulk of the balancing through cuts.
It is a given that taxes won’t be raised generally. Even if initiatives hadn’t sent rather clear messages, this would be no time to put a tighter grip on family budgets already squeezed by recession. In previous downturns, there have been moderate tax hikes on businesses. But there is absolutely no room left for further business-tax raises. If anything, too large a share of the state’s tax bill comes from businesses.
There is some talk of increasing revenues with entirely new forms of state gambling. Any effort to sharply expand gambling deserves, at best, extreme skepticism.
The governor last week proposed rather promising ideas for using state construction projects as a modest economic stimulus program, to be funded in part by lottery moneys and long-term bonds. Later this month, he will propose a transportation funding package, which could also serve the dual purposes of meeting state needs and providing good-wage construction jobs. Such steps can modestly help ease the recession’s effects on both workers and state revenues.
The Legislature, however, will inevitably face huge questions of where to cut programs and services. The easiest but not the most effective approach will be heavy reliance on across-the-board cuts. The governor has asked agencies to look for entire programs that can be cut, a somewhat more promising approach. It’s more scandalous than ever that Olympia’s political gamesmanship has blocked any serious use of performance audits that should be helping to guide such cutting.
As the potential savings measures are being unveiled, representatives of social service and health care groups are already becoming fearful, for good reasons. The cuts will deprive many people of vital services while further threatening the stability of institutions like hospitals, mental health agencies and nursing homes.
Gov. Locke earned praise from lawmakers in both parties for his early efforts to identify savings. He launched the effort with a primary goal of protecting both vulnerable individuals and education. The pairing, worthy as it is, carries unintended irony, because state flexibility for protecting vulnerable populations has been limited by education spending initiatives passed last year. Unless Locke and lawmakers summon extraordinary resolve, teachers will receive initiative-based pay raises that, in many cases, over-adjust for inflation even while the sick, pregnant women and the mentally ill see their favorite programs chopped away.
When it comes to health care, in particular, there’s a dangerously fatalistic tone coming from Olympia that suggests Democrats have given up the battle to maintain decent levels of support even before the Legislature assembles. Rep. Helen Sommers, the House Appropriations Committee chair, has been going around to newspapers outlining the rising costs for health care and saying the state must pull back.
Even though neither the public nor the politicians are going to enjoy the necessarily contentious debates ahead, hard work and a degree of creativity — rather than fatalism — can foster decisions that are as reasonable as possible. There will be plenty of time for resignation and acceptance of losses after the budget work is done.
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