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Fri, 13 Jun 2008
What kind of government do you want?
As discussions about next year's state budget gets down to plastic tacks painted to look like brass, it's worth putting our heads up from the weeds for a moment to think about what our government should be.
For example, I would very much like to live in a world where my government was more efficient. Wouldn't you? I wouldn't mind lower taxes, but even more I'd prefer a government that could provide some of the services friends of mine who live elsewhere get from their governments. In Virginia, a friend who left here recently reports that there is an extensive network of community swimming pools, with youth teams that train and compete in them all summer. In Portland, Oregon, a fabulous and cheap light rail system whisks people in and out of downtown, creating new and prosperous business districts around its stations. Further afield, in most of Europe, college tuition is free or negligible, and a student's choice of university to attend is limited only by his or her grades. And of course, in most of the rest of the world, health care is paid for either by the government or a state-run insurance pool
Ok, I live near a beach, so I can do without the swimming pools, but transportation, college tuitions and health care are three of the biggest expenses my family faces. (Well, the tuitions won't hit us for a couple more years, but it's near enough to begin to scare me.) In other places, government helps families with those expenses. Why not here?
Yes, yes, I know. Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, you're a sissy or a communist if you so much as murmur a faint longing for the easier life better government services might provide. Well, here's news: Oregon and Virginia are part of the US, and Great Britain pretty much invented cut-throat industrial capitalism, and they still manage the transport, tuition and health care hat-trick.
In truth, people here get so worked up about government spending that we have created a state government completely unable to deal with important problems. A better RIPTA, for example, could save us all millions, improving air quality and traffic while providing a cheaper way to get around, but it would require investment up front, so it doesn't happen. Investments in education and our environment could pay back even more, but are off the table, too, as are little savings we could find, like in the processing of welfare applications. A sensible, single-payer, health care system could save you and me and every business in the state tens of millions of dollars or more, but I don't see any prominent politician advocating for that, either. At best we get advocates for tiny little half-measures, like Lt. Governor Elizabeth Roberts's health care package.
What's worse is that come July 1, after all the cuts you've heard about, next year's budget is not going to be balanced. There are a number of places in the budget where the anticipated cost savings simply will not happen. For example, yes it is true that home care is a more economical way to care for poor elderly and disabled patients, and regulations that encourage it are a good thing. But it is not true that $67 million of that savings can be realized in a single year, which is what the governor put on the table when he proposed the new regulations. To put that in perspective, that's a 10-15% cut in service. Home care is cheaper, but that's a big savings, and from testimony at budget hearings, it's not at all clear that the state has a real plan to achieve it. Home care is irrelevant to many of the patients in Medicaid-paid long-term care because they no longer have homes to which they could return, and haven't for decades. Will we wheel them down to the curb and leave them?
There are also personnel savings anticipated that probably will not come to pass. Some of these, like the furlough days, likely won't happen because the unions haven't agreed to them (at least not yet) but others simply won't happen. For example, if you retire from state service after next September, you won't get free health care. (This was a part of the supplemental budget passed last month.) Naturally, most state departments are experiencing a rush to the exits by people who have a choice about when to retire. So the cost of that health care is going to spike up, which will probably erase most or all of the anticipated savings.
From my seat in the bleachers, it looks like we're going to get huge and unprecedented budget cuts this year, along with property tax increases to make up for lost state aid, and my bet is that next year we're going to have a big deficit again because lurking in the savings estimates of this awful budget are going to be lots of little presents just like these.
Oh, and one more thing: remember that all this is being done in the name of lowering your taxes.
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