There won’t be another shutdown of state government. The legislature passed a budget last night. But Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says even bigger problems loom ahead.
Hear
Audio Story
Well, the good news is that the legislature actually finished the budget, and the state didn’t go through another temporary shutdown. True, they originally planned to get this done three months ago.
But these folks operate on Lansing time. There was one genuinely funny moment last night, though our lawmakers didn’t get the joke. At the very end, Majority Floor Leader Kathy Angerer proclaimed, “We have completed the budget long before the deadline.” And her fellow lawmakers actually applauded.
“Long before the deadline,” meant a little more than twenty-four hours before the state would actually have closed up shop.
But hey. What she didn’t say was what everyone under the Capitol Dome knew. Which was that they managed to get this budget done only because Uncle Sugar, aka Washington, poured well over a billion dollars in onetime federal aid into Lansing, $660 million in the last month alone. This helped our term-limited lawmakers to get out of town unscathed, in many cases forever.
To be sure, there are good things about the budget they just passed, at least in the short term. They restored a bunch of money to the schools that was cut last year -- at least $154 dollars per student; more in some lower-spending districts.
Poor children who receive Medicaid will get back vision and dental services. Colleges and universities did take a cut, but less than they’d feared when this all started. Corrections took a cut too, and will have to close a prison even though the lawmakers told them not to close a prison. The good news is that they can handle that.
The bad news, however, is that the lawmakers mostly avoided doing the job they should have done, and left instead a ticking time bomb for the next governor and legislature. They needed to make major reforms in the way the state gets and spends money.
But they didn’t do that. They didn’t have the guts or the political will. Now, that wasn’t completely true. The lawmakers did reform the public school employee retirement system in a sensible way, though the teachers’ unions will fight this in the courts.
The lawmakers made a stab at doing the same for state employees, requiring them to pay three percent of their wages into a health care trust. But they only found the votes to pass this as a three-year temporary measure. Making it permanent or even fighting to extend it will be the next governor and legislature’s problem.
And make no mistake about it; the next governor and legislators will have big problems. Whatever happens in the elections, we can expect no more federal stimulus money from Washington. That means that when they start the budget process next year, they’ll be looking at a deficit of at least $1.6 billion dollars.
They won’t be able to tackle that with accounting tricks. They’ll have to make cuts so huge it will change the nature of government in Michigan, increase taxes in some way --or both.
There simply will be no other choice.
But at the last minute, the current legislature did do a little something that may come in handy next year. They voted to legalize the sale of alcohol on Sunday mornings.
I wonder if they were trying to tell us that we’re going to need it.
Comments