Budget Battles Bloody All

by Gongwer News Service
October 30, 2009

Adlai Stevenson, once one of the nation’s leading politicians but now a name vanishing in the mists, said: “I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.”

Are we now at the stage of the budget fight for 2009-10 that when, and if, the budget is resolved we will be unworthy of resolving it?

The budget fight has now grown so ugly, so fraught with anger and fear, one wonders if the Crips and Bloods couldn’t reach accord easier than the legislature and Governor Jennifer Granholm.

As this is being written, the state has two days left in the continuation budget for 2009-10. Most of the 2009-10 budget has been enacted, but Ms. Granholm has yet to sign six of the largest budgets and to issue vetoes from them. She will likely finish that work, administration sources say, sometime Friday afternoon, October 30. It is no exagerration to say that people are terrified of what those vetoes may portend.

The fear that funding could be cut for the Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service at Michigan State University put MSU on overdrive trying to come up with a way of financing those programs without state funding. The MSU public relations operation has highlighted cooperative extension and the Ag Experiement station in its releases. Hundreds, and maybe thousands, of angry emails and letters have flooded newspaper online comment sections and legislators about the chance the programs could be cut. And because those programs were not scheduled to be vetoed, that informal campaign may, in fact, have played a significant role in helping spare those programs.

But the outrage over Cooperative Extension and Ag Experiment has had to muscle its way past furious school officials now facing the specter of seeing their appropriations cut by nearly $300 a student. Ms. Granholm said in issuing a proration letter to cut school funding by another $127 a pupil, on top of the $165 a pupil cut already enacted, that the School Aid Fund is short money. Republicans said the action was an attempt to extort a vote on tax increases. The simple answer is both are right.

Add to that brimming outrage the anger the public is now showing. Those opposed to any tax increases have appropriated the title “patriot,” and Facebook and Twitter alarms sing out for “patriots” to show up to protest any effort to raise money. It is not said but certainly implied that if anti-tax advocates are “patriots,” then anyone who would back revenues must be…a…“traitor”?

So far, Senate Republicans are not yielding, which is to say not yielding beyond the tax changes they have already enacted, which affect mostly the low income and the film industry. In return, House Democrats are not yielding to the Senate GOP (approving instead a tax on physicians, which the Senate summarily rejected). Who are the patriots and traitors in this standoff?

And yet, listen to the public and one hears two messages: they don’t want tax increases, but they also don’t want to see any more budget cuts. How then to resolve the budget, to at least get it beyond this standoff?

It is an anguish shared by lawmakers of every stripe. Sen. Cameron Brown (R-Fawn River Twp.) said recently on his Facebook page that he was not backing any tax increases, and yet when asked in a radio interview if he was sent to Lansing to cut schools and police protection, the conflict he faces was evident in his voice.

Another Senate Republican said the caucus was so far determined to demand that government “right size” itself rather than seek increased revenues, but acknowledged the definition of right-size is undecided and that “no one wants these cuts.”

“If we just got rid of Dillon, Bishop and Granholm, we could get a deal,” one long-time observer of state government snapped, referrering to Speaker Andy Dillon (D-Reford Twp.) and Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop (R-Rochester) as well as the governor. Possibly so, but probably not.

When November dawns, the ongoing fight will go on a while longer. State officials may think themselves worthy of a rest, at least from fiscal struggles, but rest requires truce, and so far it is clear no one is willing to put down the rhetorical weapons.