Getting The State Budget In Order
The Des Moines Register ran an article today detailing the Iowa House GOP budget outlay.
Iowa's cigarette tax won't be raised if House Republicans get their way.
House GOP leaders released a $4.8
billion state spending plan for the 2006 budget year that they said
covers the rising cost of Medicaid, the state-federal health care
program for the poor.
The plan, in addition to containing
an $82 million school aid increase, sets aside an extra $40 million for
targeted education programs.
The $40 million increase is about
$100 million less than Gov. Tom Vilsack wants for an array of education
initiatives: teacher pay, preschool and child care, school sharing
incentives, and state support for the community colleges and state
universities.
Conspicuously absent from the GOP
plan is the 80-cents-per-pack cigarette tax increase recommended by
Vilsack, a Democrat. The current tax is 36 cents a pack.
Setting a state budget that doesn't
require any tax increase “is good news for taxpayers,” said Rep. Bill
Dix of Shell Rock, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. An
overall spending increase of 4 percent “ought to be enough.”
…
Democratic legislative leaders heaped criticism on the Republican plan.
“It is based on deception and broken promises,” said House Minority
Leader Pat Murphy of Dubuque. He accused the GOP of reneging on
promises to improve teacher quality and creating the illusion of a
balanced budget while tapping cash reserves.
During the last four years, the
Legislature has borrowed heavily from other funds in order to balance
the state's general operating budget. Rather than repay all the money,
the House GOP plan calls for writing off about $1 billion owed to a
tobacco endowment and other funds.
What's missing from all of this is what has been alluded to this week, notably in David Yepsen's column: the state is not building a firm financial footing on which to operate.
To be honest, this probably won't be settled one way or another until
the Legislative deadlock is somehow broken – or we start having honest
discussions about what the state's “priorities” are rather than having
Stuart Iverson decide for the entire state what our “priorities” are.
The truth here is that Medicaid assistance is being slashed at the
Federal level, and we're going to have to pick up the tab – and find
creative ways to do so other than draining every cash reserve we can
find and reducing educational funding, law enforcement funding, and
nearly everything else. Draining funding from a program that
promised a certain service (like draining the Senior Living Trust Fund
as Tom Vilsack's budget proposed) without 'killing' the program is about as dishonest as it gets in legislative terms.
John Drury was right the other day in this column: Iowans need to have a serious dialogue about what we expect out of our government, and how we're going to pay for it.
The insistance by the Legislative GOP leadership that we're somehow
“meeting Iowa's priorities” is a sham. Maybe if we repeat it
enough we might begin to believe it – or maybe not. Iowans
deserve more from our state government. In 2005, we're not
getting it.
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