New Democrat Update - December 2003
OWENS' TRICKS AND "TREATS"
While constantly zig-zagging on Colorado’s constitutional straitjackets here at home and despite the howls of leading state Republicans, Governor Bill Owens shamelessly touts TABOR to national conservative audiences, most recently in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Merely pretending to hate ”big government,” he continues to avoid the very hard choices TABOR poses, preferring instead to pass the fiscal buck to his successor. The following commentary by State Sen. Dan Grossman, co-chair of the Colorado DLC, is a response to Owens’ op-ed.
We in Colorado are grateful that Governor Owens is spending his valuable time and energy touting the virtues of the Centennial State in the national press. We just wish he would spend more time providing leadership here at home to address the biggest budget crisis in our state’s history brought about, in large part, by his irresponsible fiscal policies and the very fiscal straitjackets that he now is recommending to California Gov. Schwarzenegger in his October 16th Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Owens described Colorado’s TABOR Amendment - which limits the state to revenue taken in the year before, plus an allowance for inflation and population growth - as responsible for Colorado’s bright fiscal and economic situation. In reality, the problems it has caused are unprecedented. Unfortunately, his leadership on meeting its onerous requirements has been far from inspiring.
Instead of a thoughtful debate on the budget and the role of state government, Owens has chosen the easy fiscal way out - engaging in Enron-like accounting gimmicks and passing the problems on to his successors. His tunnel-vision budgeting has failed to consider the real priorities of services, missed cost-saving opportunities, and neglected eliminating overlap and waste across state government. It also has masked the real problems and postpones the day of reckoning.
Twenty-five percent of his total “cuts” were merely creative accounting changes. For example, he proposed that the legislature shift last June 30's state employee payday to July 1, eliminating one month’s payroll from the last fiscal year (the state’s fiscal year is from July 1 to June 30). Another $116 million in “savings” came from changing how Medicaid revenues were reported and raiding the state’s education fund, which was created by the voters to safeguard funds for public schools.
In addition, over the last three years, his budget took over $1 billion in user fees, supposedly dedicated to covering part or all of the cost of a related function, and used them to “balance” the budget. Some of these funny-money transfers were so large that they depleted their funds, causing the legislature to hike the related fees.
User fees typically are charged to the people who use that service. The main idea is that only those who use the service should have to pay for it, eliminating unfair subsidies from non-users. Interestingly enough, Owens did the exact opposite - taking fees from specific users and subsidizing the rest of the budget!
Just before Halloween of this year, Owens "treated" Coloradans to yet another budget "trick," urging the legislature to sell the state's revenue promised under the settlement agreement with the tobacco companies. His proposal would have the state sell off 35-years worth of payments from the tobacco companies (valued at almost $3 billion) to bond dealers for an up-front payment of $800 million. He would use this one-time money to meet the shortfalls related to K-12 education and prisons, created, in large part, by TABOR and Owens' failures to make hard choices.
Owens’ proposal is a short-sighted easy fix that does nothing to repair our long-term fiscal problems and betrays the original purpose of the tobacco settlement fund - preventing kids from starting to smoke and helping those already addicted to quit the deadly habit.
Owens’ other major shortcoming has been to look superficially at the existing budget and cut costs haphazardly here and there, until total spending fits the available revenue. He has also viewed the budget agency by agency, rather than taking a comprehensive look at the big picture and crafting a budget that reflects policy priorities.
Instead of starting with current spending to try to meet the forecasted revenue, we should be looking at how government should be spending all of the taxpayers’ money in the first place. Rather than implementing cuts agency by agency, we should be conducting a top-to-bottom review of every state service, ranking each government function and determining which should be kept and which should be cut. That way, we can focus on state government as a single enterprise, achieve results at less cost, reprioritize spending, eliminate programs and consolidate similar activities in different agencies.
To promote more strategic and long-term thinking, we should also implement biennial budgeting and use some recent federal funding as seed money to implement cost-saving initiatives. We must also make it much easier for the public to understand just what state government is doing.
I call on Gov. Owens to rethink TABOR and Colorado’s other constitutional fiscal straitjackets, rather than recklessly advocating their emulation in other states. In the meantime, I also hope he will lead an effort to implement a truly thorough, comprehensive and thoughtful process, producing budgets that reflect citizens’ priorities, make the necessary tough choices, stay within our means, and redefine the truly important roles of government.
Colorado Democrats and Republicans together should take the opportunity this crisis presents, to remake government services as if the public really mattered. That is much better advice for California’s new governor.
THE COLLAPSE OF BUSHISM
The latest edition of Blueprint magazine, "The Collapse of Bushism," argues that if Democrats are to replace President Bush, they must offer more than caustic criticism. Our party must provide a clear political vision of how to solve the problems Bush has not.
In December 1991, after the first President Bush's victory in Iraq, the DLC predicted the "collapse of Bushism" on the cover of The New Democrat, the predecessor publication of Blueprint. This month, Al From and Bruce Reed say that Bushism is collapsing again. This Bush administration has also left the middle class behind, saddling families with record increases in college tuition, health care, and the deficit - as well as stagnant incomes and a greater share of the tax burden. The parallels with his father are incredible - "a bigger deficit, a squandered international triumph, divisive politics, huge job losses, and a broken political system."
The best chance for a Democrat to win the nomination and the presidency is to offer a compelling vision that will save the middle class. From and Reed outline a New Democrat vision for America, including an opportunity agenda that makes college, health care, and the tools to get ahead available to those willing to work. In addition, Robert D. Atkinson presents a progressive alternative to Bush's retrograde economic policies that have helped decimate manufacturing jobs - more than two million lost since 2001.
On the national security front, Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall offers a tough internationalist Democratic alternative to replace the Bush administration’s constant foreign policy blunders in the war against terrorism. Another piece looks at how an unengaged Bush administration tragically lost the initiative in the Middle East.
"Bush could still survive if we let him put us back in that old liberal stereotype and fail to offer a compelling new vision of our own," From and Reed conclude. "If we tell the American people exactly what we'll do for the country, and what we'll ask of them, the 2004 election is no longer Bush's to lose. It's Democrats' to win."