State budget is bad bet for Wisconsin's future

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A Wisconsin State Journal editorial

You must do better than this.

That should be Wisconsin's response to the state budget proposal to go before the Assembly for a vote this week.

This budget amounts to a huge, irresponsible gamble likely to haunt the state for years.

Rather than seizing the current economic downturn to put the state's fiscal house in better order for the future, the Legislature's budget committee shrank from the opportunity.

The committee, closely following Gov. Jim Doyle's flawed blueprint, simply slapped patches on budget holes. They tapped one-time federal stimulus aid and reached down paths of least resistance for tax increases -- on everything from cell phones to cigarettes to oil -- and for cuts with effects they could delay -- most notably reductions in aid to schools that won't be fully felt until 2011.

The result is a budget built on the bet that the economy will be humming along, and tax collections rolling in again, in time to bail out the state by the time this budget ends in two years.

The co-chairmen of the budget committee confirmed that view in a meeting with the State Journal editorial board last week.

"Growth will be back" within two years, predicted Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison.

"What we're going through now is what we all hope is a one-time hole," said Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona.

Hope is a wonderful thing, but not when it is the foundation for a $63 billion budget.

Following the last three recessions -- in 1981, 1990 and 2001 -- states nationwide found that it took three to five years for tax collections to recover to the level where they were at the start of the recessions, according to a report from the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

The forecast for the current recession, which has produced the biggest drop-off in state tax collections in 50 years, calls for tax revenue to require more than five years to return to the starting point.

"This is an awful time for states fiscally, but they're even more worried about 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014," Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, told the Wall Street Journal.

In Wisconsin, the worries ought to be compounded by a 2009-11 budget plan that blindly assumes the future will be rosy.

Even if the lawmakers' gamble with this budget pays off -- despite overwhelming odds -- the state will simply return to the precarious position it was in when this year began. That means lurching from budget crisis to budget crisis because of the way Legislatures and governors for years have spent money and put off the day of reckoning to the next budget in the hope that economic growth will bail them out.

All because the state this year passed up the chance to reform the way it does business.

There is still time to improve this budget. The State Journal editorial board has already recommended important changes. On Friday we called for the removal of millions of dollars in pork inserted at the last minute by the budget committee. On Saturday we pushed for elimination of non-fiscal policy items from the budget so they can be considered as separate bills.

The budget as it stands falls far short of the budget Wisconsin deserves. Lawmakers should fix it.

View original story here.