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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > February > 11
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Editorial: Strickland’s budget just doesn’t hold up
You can’t blame Gov. Ted Strickland for wanting to spend some money. After all:
— His first budget two years ago was a low-growth one.
— Economists of all stripes are insisting that the economy needs to be stimulated through government spending.
— The federal government is close to giving states some amount of money to help their ailing economies, which, in theory, should create opportunities to support initiatives that otherwise might not be affordable.
— He has staked his success as governor on improving the state’s schools. Everyone has always assumed that would require some new spending. Give him these considerations, but the more analysis his $55 billion spending plan is subjected to, the worse it looks.
For example:
One-time money
There’s almost $5.3 billion in his plan that won’t be available in two years when the next budget has to be written. That represents 10 percent of the proposed spending. It’s reckless to set the state up for a bad fall in two short years when this money will have evaporated.
Relying on Congress
Most of the one-time money comes from the federal stimulus that Congress is considering. Specifically, the governor has been counting on $3.4 billion from Washington. The Senate pared back what the House wanted to give the states — reducing the pot from $70 billion to $39 billion.
If the agreement that was reached Wednesday, Feb. 11 holds, the governor could be short a billion dollars or more — hardly a small number. In the last year, the governor has agonized about how to trim almost $724 million from the current budget. He would never say that effort has been a cake walk.
Spinning the numbers
The governor says he’s going to increase spending on schools by $925 million. But year-over-year, he’s hiking school districts’ funding by only about two-thirds of that amount. Understanding that is important because his new initiatives — all-day kindergarten, a longer school day and school year, for example — are costly. Districts wouldn’t have as much money to pay for these reforms as they might think they’ll be getting.
Dropping revenues
In January, state tax revenues were 3.2 percent below what had been projected. Even granting that estimating revenue in the current climate is difficult, that doesn’t change the fact that the state’s best estimates have been wrong consistently.
Unions may not be buying
The budget assumes savings of $170 million to $200 million in payroll and benefit cuts. But the state’s unions have to agree to taking home less and to contributing more toward their benefits to realize this amount.
The question is not whether this is a good idea — the governor hasn’t really laid out his case except to say that everyone needs to sacrifice — but whether he will have this money at his disposal.
Republicans are having a heyday picking apart his assumptions and plans that they think are dubious. In so doing, they are not just pointing out where the governor is overpromising and beating him up for doing so. After all, they control the Senate, and they, too, will have an identifiable hand in making the changes that will be required to write a more realistic financial plan.
What’s obvious at this point is that Ohio isn’t even close to having a spending plan that makes sense for the long term or that meets the constitutional requirement of being balanced.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio politics
Editorial: Professor Austria’s history lesson goes awry
(NOTE: Here’s a link to the audio referred to in this editorial.)
Some people complain that politicians don’t know as much about history as they should. But that’s only part of the problem. The larger problem is that so much of what they do know is wrong.
They often get their information from partisan sources, with results that are catastrophic to truth. Exhibit A for the week is Congressman Steve Austria, the freshman who represents Greene and Clark counties and points east.
The other day he was speaking with journalists at the Columbus Dispatch. He was going down a list of conservative talking points about President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan. He ventured into Japanese history, giving the sound-bite conservative take on that country’s efforts to get itself out of economic doldrums a while back. He talked up the allegedly positive effects of tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and Jack Kennedy.
And he spoke of the Great Depression of the 1930s. If you’ve been following this debate, you know that conservatives like to say that President Franklin Roosevelt’s big-goverment approach did not succeed in ending the Depression. That has some truth.
But Rep. Austria took the point a step further, saying FDR actually caused the Depression.
“The last time this was done,” he said, speaking of borrowing and spending so much, “was under Franklin Roosevelt, and when Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a great depression, to be honest with you.”
Rep. Austria was given a chance to make clear whether he was really blaming FDR. He repeated his point, saying, “That’s just history.”
Actually, it’s just nonsense. President Roosevelt inherited an unemployment rate of 25 percent in 1933. By 1937, it had dropped to 14.3 percent, an extraordinarily fast drop in percentage terms. Then there was what some economists call a “mini-depression,” and the rate went back as high as 19 percent. But overall, from 1933 to 1940, it dropped from 25.2 percent to 14.6 percent.
Meanwhile, the national economy grew by a third in his first term — a growth rate that would look pretty good right about now — and by half over two terms.
Apparently, Rep. Austria, after listening to some conservative thinkers talk with unrelenting disparagement of FDR, assumed that the case against that president must be overwhelming, rather than that the partisans simply left out the parts they don’t like.
The day after Rep. Austria distorted history so seriously (twice), he withdrew his statements, saying he never intended to blame President Roosevelt for the Depression.
So he learned by talking and getting feedback. But there’s a certain flaw in that sequence. People who learn that way don’t change their mind, just their pitch. He’s already committed to the position he took.
That a member of Congress doesn’t know basic, relevant history is sad. (For more sadness, check out the audio excerpts of the interview for the congressman’s difficulty with the name of the most important liberal economist of the 20th century.) But sadder still are the pretense of knowledge and the assumption that one can talk knowledgeably about history after hearing about it from partisan sources.
If Rep. Austria got from all this a history lesson about FDR, good. Hopefully, though, he got another lesson, too, about whom to listen to, and how carefully to listen.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics
Hockey and tax breaks — a solution for downtown?
Looks like the big news of out of Mayor Rhine McLin’s state of the city address this morning was a huge new tax break for companies that agree to locate or create new jobs downtown. Couple that with the other big news from today’s paper that the Dayton bombers want to build a $30 million hockey arena downtown and you have quite a surge of sudden interest in improving downtown.
Some quick thoughts on these two developments:
—Tax breaks. Dayton feels it needs something extra to tilt board in its favor for companies weighing the advantages of being downtown vs. those of moving to a grassy suburban commercial site. The city is holding a press conference with more details this afternoon, but one question is whether its a good idea to exempt new jobs from payroll taxes when those revenues are an important source of income for the city. And the really big question: does this idea create enough of an advantage for downtown to get CEOs to take the idea of moving or expanding there seriously?
—Hockey arena. This move creates a big rift between the city and the county, which has been trying to help developers of the Austin Road interchange find a way to build a hockey arena there. While the idea of a $30 million development downtown has to be attractive to the city it is not at all clear this would be a worthwhile investment of resources. Bombers hockey is not UD basketball or Dragons baseball. Even in a nice venue, would the Bombers ever draw enough interest to generate an economic ripple effect.
Share your thought about this ideas in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Miami Valley Politics, Scott Elliott, Sports and Recreation
