Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: One Cheer for the Governor - 11.6.09

The state House of Representatives passed a bill yesterday that would use the remaining federal stimulus money to restore some of the cuts to public schools… However, it may not pass the senate. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at what’s going on...

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For some time now it has been clear that there won’t be a penny of the federal stimulus money left for next year’s budget. A few months ago, the politicians in Lansing were talking as if there would be a billion bucks left to help them with the next deficit.

Know how much is left now? Near as I can tell, a mere $184 million, and that is bound to be tossed at some portion of the ever-growing gap in this year’s budget before many more weeks go by.

With that in mind, the state of house of representatives passed a very sensible bill yesterday, HB 4860, which the governor correctly embraced and said she would sign. The bill would use the last of the stimulus cash to replace the money the governor eliminated a couple of weeks ago, when revenues once again were lower than expected.

The bill also provides some, though not enough, money for school bus inspections. Most people don’t realize this, but in its zeal to balance the current budget without raising taxes, the legislature entirely eliminated any funding for school bus inspections.

I hope someone exposes who was the genius behind that if some bus’s brakes ever fail. Anyway, this bill would put about $800,000, a little more than half the inspection money back.

The bill also would restore the additional funding the governor cut from the so-called high-spending districts, some of which have lost as much as $600 a student. However, the house is on a little shakier ground here. The bill specifies that the $52 million the governor cut would be restored from the Michigan Future Fund.

That would be fine with me, except for one thing. There isn’t any money in the Michigan Future fund. We should find it some.

For if this state is to have a future, it depends on properly educating our kids. We might as well use the last of the stimulus money for that purpose, before somebody decides to spend it on landscaping the new state police headquarters, or something.

But in an astounding bit of ideological blockheadedness, the Republicans in the state senate are apparently opposed to this.

Matt Marsden, the mouthpiece for Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, called the proposal to spend this money on the schools “absolutely ridiculous.“ This is a bit strange, since his boss was loudly criticizing the governor a few days ago for making these cuts in the first place. Marsden said the house has $100 million from the Earned Income Tax Credit freeze bill that the Democrats refused to use.

That’s a bit like saying a hungry man should go get a sandwich in the middle of a minefield. That money would come from the state’s poorest taxpayers, and would be available only if the governor agrees to cut the business tax in a way certain to drive up the deficit.

Michelle Pugh, a parent of three kids in Utica, understands what’s at stake better than the lawmakers. “This is not right,“ she told the Detroit News yesterday. “This is about our kids.”

She said the legislature needs to get it together so that they don’t do further damage to our classrooms.

If I were her, I might consider letting my friendly local state senator know directly, and exactly, what I think.

Essay: Sacrificing Our Kids - 10.22.09

Lawmakers are now battling Governor Granholm’s veto of some money for some school districts… which came at the same time that the Governor was calling for more money for the schools. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at what’s really going on…

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American values have evolved over the years, but one thing has been consistent since the first immigrants came off the boat.

We’ve always wanted our children to have more chances than we did. Americans believed in sacrificing for the next generation.

That‘s why our ancestors died at Valley Forge and Omaha Beach, and that‘s why we established and funded public education.

That is, until now. Our politicians in Lansing have already damaged our children’s future, and are now using Michigan‘s children to play a dangerous game of chicken.

Whatever happens, we all lose. In an effort to cope with a huge and growing deficit, the legislature agreed on a compromise earlier this month to cut the amount of money they give the schools by $165 a student. Now, keep in mind that this is for the ongoing school year. This is money the schools were promised and counted on, and now are losing in the middle of their budget year, which means these cuts are much harder to make.

This is happening now because the lawmakers did not do their jobs and agree on a budget when they were supposed to.

And if you think that is bad, this week things got much worse. Governor Jennifer Granholm shocked just about everybody when she vetoed some funding for some of Michigan’s largest school districts.

This means some middle class districts are really going to be clobbered. Harper Woods, a small middle-to-working class district, will lose almost $500 a pupil. A woman I know with a child in the system wrote her state representative. Democrat Tim Bledsoe, to complain, saying, “Our community and our families are working class to middle class and don’t have a lot of money.

“How does this make sense?”

Bledsoe agreed. “I am angry that the Governor and Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop would use our schools as though they were poker chips in a high-stakes political game,” he told her, adding he would do what he can to fight it.

Bishop says the governor is doing this to try and force Republicans to agree to a tax increase to save the schools, but vowed once again that it wasn’t going to happen. As for Bledsoe, while he may think the cuts are terrible, he opposes the one serious attempt that has been made to get new revenue, a small tax on physicians. You see, he has a lot of doctors in his district.

Meanwhile, members of both parties scrambled to try and find the votes to override the governor’s veto of that appropriation.

But it looks like they’ll fall short.

And then yesterday, the governor said, “We must invest in our children, who are going to be the workforce of the future.” She then called on Senate Republicans to be, in her word, “reasonable.”

By the way, she said that after also vetoing a $1.6 million appropriation that has been helping provide a good start for disadvantaged children under the age of three. I think that’s called cognitive dissonance. It is clearly a mess. More school districts than ever are now in danger of receivership. Our leaders have failed us, and the system has broken down.

And somehow, we need to find a way to force them to fix it.

Essay: Does This Make Sense? - 10.9.09

The Michigan Legislature passed an education budget last night that severely cuts per pupil spending for the next fiscal year. Michigan Radio Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry is wondering if we have our priorities straight…

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Consider what your state legislature did late last night. They approved a budget reducing state aid to the public schools by $165 dollars a pupil. That is a staggering blow to education in this state, though not as bad as what legislative leaders originally wanted to do, which was to cut schools by $218 dollars a child.

Earlier, when they came up with the higher figure, lawmakers claimed that they had no choice given the enormous deficit. So, how will they find the money to lessen the impact?

Well, we don’t exactly know yet, but indications are that they may do so pretty much in the worst way possible. As in, on the backs of the poor. The state senate voted to freeze an income tax credit, not for millionaires, but for low income families. That would wring another $160 million out of their already frayed pocketbooks. The upper house also went after the newly expanding film industry. They voted to limit tax credits for perhaps the only major growth industry in the state. They made out-of-state workers ineligible for tax breaks and tied future film credits to job creation.

That might be nice … if it doesn‘t drive the film industry back out of state. Now, we don‘t know if the senate bills will finally become law, but we do know two things:

First, nobody is even discussing solving the deficit in what MSU economist Charles Ballard says would be the smartest and least painful way: Raise the state income tax from 4.35 to 5.1 percent. That would barely be noticed by those of us working, especially when our deductions are factored in.

But nobody is willing to think about doing that.

The other thing we learned was that the famous $2.8 billion dollar deficit the state has been struggling to close is now even bigger. Tax collections through September were down another $130 million.

What that probably means is that the last of the federal stimulus money will be long gone before this year ends.

That was money they’ve been planning to use to balance the books next year, but hey. If we aren’t willing to come up with a sensible and intelligent strategy, we can just always hope, like a character out of Charles Dickens, that something will turn up.

By the way, the governor is now also pushing another bizarre new revenue idea. She would allow bars to stay open till 4 a.m., provided their owners buy an expensive new permit. They would also be allowed to open at 7 a.m. on Sundays, and you would no longer have to wait till noon to buy wine at the grocery store.

The package liquor sale part makes sense. But letting bars stay open until four is a prescription for early morning highway mayhem. This would supposedly bring in less than $14 million a year.

Do we really think that would be worth it?

The bottom line is that we need educated young people, and we ought to make up our minds to just pay for this, even if it isn’t easy. Even if it involves on our part an old-fashioned concept called sacrifice. If we care about our future, it just might be worth a try.

Essay: Promises Made, Promises Broken - 9.24.09

In Lansing yesterday, a series of state legislative conference committees voted to slash spending for both higher and K-12 education. Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what that means.

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The state legislature in Lansing took a giant step yesterday towards destroying our chance of a better future. They eliminated the Michigan Promise grant for college students. That means that 96,000 college students who have been promised aid by their government are now being told: Guess what.

You aren't going to get it.

The lawmakers also cut support for students in elementary and high schools by $218 for every child in Michigan public schools. They also further cut aid to higher education in Michigan, after five years when Michigan, a state which desperately needs a better-educated workforce, had cut higher education funding more than any other state in the nation.

Let's be very clear about what happened here. The state lawmakers decided, in a series of conference committees, that the present is more important than the future. Among other choices, they had this one: They could have saved the schools and given our kids a better chance at the future by increasing the personal income tax by a few bucks on people like me, grownups with jobs.

We would scarcely have noticed it. But no. I am a middle-class white male with no children and a good life. But our leaders in Lansing thought it was more important not to raise my taxes than it was to save our kids. They never even talked about the option of raising taxes. Democrats control the state house of representatives and the governorship. They actually even got more votes for state senate in the last election, though Republicans won more seats.

But the Democrats, led by Speaker of the House Andy Dillon, are rolling over and adopting the Republican budget. There were a few dissenters. State Rep. Joan Bauer, a Democrat from Lansing, chair of the higher education conference committee, voted no. "We made a promise to students," she said. State Senator Jim Barcia of Bay City, who used to be a congressman, agreed. But other Democrats fell in line. George Cushingberry of Detroit rammed the bill through, saying that maybe he could later get Republicans to tax bottled water and put a new tax on physicians to replace the lost revenue. He'd be better off trying to get Tinkerbell to bring the money from the Magic Kingdom.

Michigan has a less educated workforce than the national average. That's a legacy of the old muscle-based assembly line economy. Those days aren't coming back. We can either produce a better educated work force, or become something like West Virginia, poor, declining and washed-up.

There are a few final chances to avoid this. The full legislature could vote no. The Senate Democrats could announce they will refuse to give the budget immediate effect.

Or the governor, who has been nearly as silent as Greta Garbo lately, could veto it. Her spokesperson denounced the cuts yesterday. But she refused to say if Jennifer Granholm would veto them. That would require taking a stand and making an unpopular decision.

That would require being a leader.

If you care about this stuff, you've got a day or so at most to call your legislators and make your feelings known. Otherwise, well, maybe your kids can hope that someone will reopen a coal mine.

Essay: Educating Michigan - 9.8.09

A number of Michigan school districts planned not to let their students watch the president's speech to school kids today. Jack Lessenberry, Michigan Radio's senior political analyst, wonders about this.

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Something rather astonishing happened today, if various Michigan school superintendents did what they said they were going to do. Namely, censor the President of the United States.

President Obama gave a speech at noon today aimed at the schoolchildren of America. Had this happened when I was in school, every classroom that had access to a television would have shown it without hesitation. This would have been the case whether the President was a Republican or a Democrat. Yet not today. Our culture has been corrupted and corroded by the slashing attacks of talk-show bullies, mainly of the right-wing variety.

What is most disgraceful is the way in which their ranting is destroying normal, non-political, civic life in this nation. For weeks, we've been treated to idiots complaining that the President of the United States was planning on using this speech to indoctrinate the youth of America on behalf of his so-called "socialist agenda."

Well, it is a free country. Thanks to the First Amendment, everyone has the right to say anything, no matter how stupid. But what was really disgraceful is that the superintendents of some school districts -- many of them in Michigan -- took these ravings seriously, and caved in to them. Which meant they refused to allow their students to watch the President of the United States when he wanted to speak to them. Gary Rider, the superintendent of the Thornapple Kellogg district, said he would record the speech and review it to see if he thought it was appropriate for students to see later.

What I would like to know is why he thinks he should be able to censor the President. Barack Obama was elected last year by a landslide, especially in Michigan. He even carried Kent County. Since then, he has done nothing to disgrace the nation or the office.

In the world in which I grew up, any superintendent who did that probably would have been fired. Today, sadly, too many administrators seem most afraid of angering the lunatic fringe.

By the way, just what did President Obama tell the kids who did get to listen? Did he call for abortions without parental consent and forced gay marriage? 

I read an advance text of his speech last night. This is what he had decided to say: "You can't drop out of school and just drop in to a good job. You've got to work for it and train for it and learn for it." He told them to "show up" at school.

"Pay attention to those teachers, listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults, and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. We can have the best schools in the world and none of it will matter unless you fulfill your responsibilities."

What the President told the children could have been said by anybody in American public life over the last century, from Dennis Kucinich to Ronald Reagan. Yet some school districts chose to put politics over patriotism today, and not let their students be inspired by the president. Hopefully by now they are embarrassed.

They missed an opportunity for the President to connect with their students, many of whom need all the inspiration they can get.

They should also be ashamed.

Essay: Does This Add Up - 9.4.09

The Michigan Legislature is on the brink of ending the requirement that all students pass Algebra II. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks we should think about how these types of decisions are made…

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You may think our state lawmakers are grappling with the enormous budget deficit full-time, but they’re not. Only a select few are, in fact. The rest are still doing other business.

And one thing they are about to do is eliminate the requirement that all students pass Algebra II to get a high school diploma.

State Superintendent of Schools Mike Flanagan isn’t happy either. But the state house almost unanimously passed a bill doing away with the requirement. The state senate earlier passed a different bill doing much the same thing. So it seems likely that, before long, mandatory Algebra II will be history.

How should we feel about that?

Well, I think there are a couple of valuable lessons to be learned here. First of all, it is dangerous to have politicians micromanaging the way in which a profession works. Any profession. I consider myself reasonably intelligent and well-educated. But I wouldn't presume to set standards for cosmetologists or chiropractors. Even if I boned up on those professions, it wouldn’t behoove me to tell them what kind of equipment they could use. I think the lawmakers who passed the Michigan Merit Curriculum requirements, which included Algebra II, screwed up.

Now, they screwed up for an admirable reason. There is no question that Michigan needs tougher graduation requirements. Our schools are behind the times in many ways. The long summer recess is a relic of a long-vanished agricultural society.

Requiring four years of math makes perfect sense. But not everybody needs Algebra II. I managed to pass it more than forty years ago, but only with great difficulty and because I had a merciful teacher. Today, I use math every day. I have had to learn to calculate percentages in my head. But I have never once knowingly used algebra, and I think that’s true for most of us.

The bill the state house just passed does retain the requirement for four credits of math, but would allow some courses, for example, “personal finance” to be substituted for Algebra II. This may need to be toughened a bit. Many college students I see have difficulty doing simple arithmetical functions, like calculating an area in square feet or figuring out millage rates even when they are explained to them.

Whatever makes sense. But as a rule, the lawmakers should set general goals, and then rely on educators to take us there.

The other lesson to be learned is that it is a terrible idea to require new standards but not provide the money to get it done. When the state passed the Michigan Merit Curriculum, it didn’t give the schools any extra money or personnel.

Nor did they really analyze the implications of requiring Algebra II. The most sensible comment I've seen about this came from the superintendent in Rockford, a community near Grand Rapids.

The days of one-size-fits all education are over, he said. Knowing Algebra II is not always necessary. But any student who fails to get a high school diploma, will have no career prospects.

You don‘t have to be a math major to realize that as far as outcomes go, that one is less than zero.

Essay: Community Colleges and Our Future - 7.15.09

President Obama came to Michigan yesterday to announce a major new initiative aimed at strengthening America’s community colleges. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about their real importance...

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Four years ago, Lt. Gov. John Cherry presided over a high-powered commission that took a hard look at higher education in Michigan. Not surprisingly, it concluded that we needed a lot more of it. The Cherry Commission called on this state to double the number of students who get bachelor’s degrees within the next decade.

That’s a fine idea. But the Cherry Commission’s report gave essentially short shift to community colleges, and virtually ignored the need for vocational training and retraining.

That‘s a big part of the mission community colleges have in this nation and perhaps especially in Michigan, where there are nearly a quarter of a million community college students.

Yesterday, President Obama took a major step to give community colleges new respect, and shift the focus of higher education thinking in this country. He did that at Macomb County Community College, which has been a leader in this field for many years, and has gotten too little notice. If you thought this was some place that offered welding courses and taught remedial reading, you couldn’t be more wrong. This spring, Macomb presented an intellectual and cultural series examining the 1960s in America. It attracted the likes of Ted Sorensen and Andrew Young, and compared favorably to something Harvard might have done.

And it has tried hard to be on the cutting edge of trying to train workers for jobs that actually do exist and which will increase, which is, I believe, why President Obama chose it to propose what he is calling his American Graduation Initiative.

He said he doesn’t intend to just blindly throw money at the nation’s community colleges, though he is pledging $12 billion of it. The President made it clear that he is going to require, “Innovative, results-oriented strategies in exchange for federal funding.”

What he wants, plainly, is results. “We‘ll create a new research center to measure what works and what doesn‘t,” he said.

“Schools themselves don‘t have the facts to make informed choices about which programs achieve results.

“If a worker is going to spend two years training to enter a new profession,” they better know that it is actually going to lead to a job, Mr. Obama said. And businesses need to know that the graduate’s degree or certificate really means something.

That’s not the only role community colleges have. More and more, students bound for a four-year degree start at places like Macomb to get their skills up to speed, and to save money.

The President’s speech was also remarkable in that it was both visionary, and no-nonsense. He noted that we’ve lost a lot of jobs in Michigan, and told us we are going to lose more.

That means we and our institutions have to step up. President Obama did say one thing that wasn’t quite right, “My administration has a job to do, and that job is to get the economy back on its feet.

“That’s my job,“ he said.

Well, not exactly. The President’s job may be to give us the tools and maybe even a jump start. But we, by working hard and working smart, have to create the new economy ourselves.

Essay: Farewell to the Future - 6.24.09

The state Senate has voted to cut funding for the Michigan Promise Scholarship. This has Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry worried about our state’s future...

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Yesterday, as the state senate was getting ready to vote to wipe out the Michigan Promise Grant and some other college scholarship money for poor students, a few voices were raised in opposition.

Nancy Cassis, a Republican from Novi, tried to get her fellow senators to fund the program at a much-reduced level. Liz Brater, an Ann Arbor Democrat, said to eliminate the promise grant was more than just breaking a sacred promise to Michigan’s college students.

It is also a move designed to sabotage our state’s future economy. But Tony Stamas of Midland, the chair of the appropriations committee wasn’t sympathetic. He said “we don’t have the dollars,” which, in a sense is true. The state is running an enormous budget deficit, and painful cuts have to be made.

But then, according to the respected Gongwer News Service, Stamas added that the state also has a promise to keep prisoners behind bars. Well, nobody has been suggesting turning our serial killers loose to roam the streets. But I am struck by his choice of priorities. For years, it’s been clear that a big part of our economic problem in Michigan has been an insufficiently educated work force.

We have a smaller percentage of young adults with college degrees than our surrounding states, the ones that compete most heavily with us for jobs. There’s no great mystery as to why this is so.

For many years, you could come out of high school and get a good-paying job slapping fenders on cars or bending metal on an assembly line. Those jobs have vanished now, and aren’t coming back. Michigan needs to transition from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy, as fast as possible. The Michigan Promise Grant is designed to help do that, by providing scholarships worth up to $4,000 to college-bound kids graduating from Michigan high schools.

Lt. Gov. John Cherry knows how short-sighted eliminating the grant is. Five years ago, when times were still relatively good, he chaired a special commission that looked at higher education in the state. Its members concluded that we needed to start by doubling the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded within a decade. We are now running far behind that pace, and zeroing out the promise grant will set us back even further. “It’s so basic to your state’s future,” the lieutenant governor said yesterday. Ninety-six thousand students were depending on promise grant funding this fall.

The lieutenant governor argued that eliminating the promise grant would be like a farmer eating his seed corn.

But he failed by a single vote to sway the Republican-controlled senate. The senators also cut funding for other need-based programs, including competitive scholarships and tuition grants. They slashed money for nursing students at a time when Michigan has a dramatic shortage of nurses and has to import them from Canada.

Now, what the senate did isn’t the final word. The Democrats control the House, and some of this money may yet be restored.

But the senate’s action is profoundly dismaying. Our elected leaders are supposed to try to give us a better future.

And sadly, this bunch just isn’t there yet.

Essay: Taking Responsibility - 4.7.09

It was learned in the last week that the Detroit Public Schools' deficit is $100 million larger than originally estimated. Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about what's at the root of the problem.

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In the early years of our nation and our state, our politicians spent a lot of time debating actual political philosophy. Should we have a strong central government, or a weak one? Should we tax goods from foreign countries extra, and if not, why not?

Now these guys -- and back then, they were mostly all guys -- were still politicians. In the middle of debating whose philosophy was best suited to creating the best possible democracy in America, they were apt to fire personal insults.

Alexander Hamilton was charged with stealing money from the treasury (he wasn't) and of having an affair with a would-be embezzler's pretty young wife (which he was). Thomas Jefferson was charged with selling out to France (false) and of fathering children with a slave girl (true). Still, there was a lot of high-minded stuff, and actual debate, at the bottom of which lay two core ideas:

First, the goal was to create a government that did the best job possible of preserving freedom and servicing the citizens.

Second, whatever we stood for, we all ought to be personally and professionally responsible for our actions.

Those two ideas are critically important, and, I think, a large part of the reason we've gotten so far off track in this country, and maybe especially so in Michigan, and in some of our larger cities.

Which brings me to the unbelievable mess politicians have made of the Detroit Public Schools. They've undoubtedly behaved badly elsewhere, but Detroit is the biggest and worst example.

For years, top administrators and the members of the elected school board failed to exercise any financial discipline or oversight whatsoever Four months ago, the state superintendent of schools warned that a state of financial emergency existed. The schools had a large and improper deficit, and like General Motors today, had failed to file an adequate plan for dealing with it.

So the state took control, and appointed Robert Bobb, a very distinguished public servant, to clean up the mess. He's been on the job just a few weeks, and has already discovered that the deficit was three times as large as first feared.

With students fleeing by the tens of thousands and revenues dropping, school administrators padded the payroll, threw parties, and traveled at the expense of poor taxpayers. When they learned how bad things were, board members still elected to fly to California to attend a conference. I'm against capital punishment, but feel like somebody needs to be shot. What are these people thinking?

I got a clue from a posting on our website the other day. A man said, "I draw the line at (paying to educate) everyone else's children. I got enough to think about with my own daughter."

That's not a conservative attitude. That's an attitude of selfishness that has created the mess we're in, and which threatens the survival of our state and way of life. We all hang together or we all hang separately, they used to say during the American Revolution.

We need to see that this is even more true now.

Essay: Teacher Pensions - 1/30/09

I have no direct personal stake in the vast majority of the issues I talk about here, except in the same way we all do as citizens of the state of Michigan. But I have a closer connection to the issue of teacher retirement. My wife is an advanced placement history teacher who, is, in fact, eligible to retire, and has been for some time.

Frankly, I don’t know if she would choose to retire now if the legislature passed what is being billed as a one-time incentive. I know that she would think about it. Financially, it would seem to make a lot of sense. Her income, eventually combined with Social Security, would be barely less than she makes working full-time.

What I do know is that it would be a loss to her school district. My wife has devoted herself to teaching, largely to the exclusion of anything else, for more than thirty years. She is a superb teacher, and that is not a subjective statement. She received the prestigious Gilder-Lehrman award as top history teacher in the state last year. She was also third runner-up for top history teacher in the nation, and won an award this year as the best history teacher in Michigan from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Her students regularly score higher than any others in her district on placement exams, and people in all walks of life have told me that her letters of recommendation have been a major factor in getting them into the University of Michigan or Princeton or Harvard.

Nor is she alone in terms of dedication to what she does. Now -- do these folks deserve sweetened pensions? Certainly they do, and the fact that this would help state finances right now would seem to make passing this a no-brainer. It would also create jobs for the many teachers in the state who can’t find them.

But there is still something that bothers me about all this. If my wife retires, as she undoubtedly will, and should, someday, she is likely to be replaced by a 24-year-old recent graduate. Is this person going to know as much about history or teaching as my wife does?

Certainly not. They may be a bundle of energy, and I know very well that the rhythm of life means that sooner or later, we all must and should be replaced. (Except for me, of course.)

However, if our school districts lose a higher percentage of their most experienced teachers all at once, it’s hard not to believe that they are going to be intellectually and academically weakened.

To me, it would make sense to try and keep some of these folks on as master teachers or curriculum specialists, or something.

Most of us have had our lives altered by a good teacher at some point. That doesn’t mean the present proposal is a bad idea. It does mean that we ought to think of education as something more than one more cost center in a badly out-of-balance state budget.

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