I’ve been fiddling about with trying to find more oblique, writer-y ways to say it – but sometimes the direct approach is best.<\/p>\n
Talk of a $6.2 Billion deficit is a fraud.\u00a0 People who refer to is are mistaken at best, lying at worst<\/strong>.<\/p>\n What we have is not a $6.2 billion deficit. \u00a0It’s a little more like this:<\/p>\n Imagine you take your kids to McDonald’s once a week. \u00a0Your son, a budding DFLer, demands that you add a weekly trip to Murray’s for the family once a week. \u00a0You refuse. \u00a0 Your idiot child goes to the media and tells them that you are “cutting the budget by $300 a week<\/em>“.<\/p>\n What do you do?<\/p>\n Give the kids the trip to Murray’s and quit complaining?<\/p>\n You must be a DFLer.<\/p>\n The Budget Deficit Is Based On A Wish List<\/strong>:\u00a0The “deficit” that the DFL and media – and even a few Republicans – are talking about is exactly the same thing. <\/em>It’s assessed against the “2012-2013 \u00a0 Budget Forecast<\/a>“.<\/p>\n Which, you may note, is a forecast<\/em>. \u00a0Not a “budget”; a forecast. \u00a0The “budget” is something the legislature hashes out on odd-numbered years for the following even-and-odd-numbered pair of years (called a “biennium”); in 2009, the Legislature passted the budget for 2010 and 2011.<\/p>\n That, and only that, is the “budget”.<\/em><\/p>\n The “forecast”, on the other hand, is what the budget will be in the following <\/em>biennium, assuming that the budget increases according to current assumptions, legal mandates, and legislative wishes.<\/p>\n So the forecast comes partly from “baseline budgeting” – starting with the current budget for a deparment and guesstimating how much more of that department’s “services” will be “needed”. \u00a0In some cases, there are legal mandates involved, And in most of them, there’s the DFL’s urge to leave \u00a0a huge budgetary turd\u00a0the GOP’ doorstep.\u00a0\u00a0Because whatever the cause, the DFL legislature that just got sent packing “forecast” the budget jumping from $30.266 billion to $38.591 billion – a 27.51% jump<\/em>.<\/p>\n Did <\/em>you increase your <\/em>family budget 27.51%?<\/p>\n No. \u00a0And either did the government – yet. \u00a0Because the budget process – the one that leads us to the actual budget<\/em> – just started, really, last week.<\/p>\n The “Structural Deficit” Is A Cop-Out<\/strong>: It is true that there are legal mandates to increase parts of the budget. The answer is deceptively simple; if you have a structural problem, the best – albeit not necessarily easiest – way to fix it is to fix the structure<\/em>. \u00a0Put another way,\u00a0 \u00a0these mandates need to be reassessed, and most likely abolished. <\/em>House File 2,<\/a> sponsored by Rep. Banaian, will be a good start; it’ll start to chip away at the current practice of increasing spending for programs on autopilot; every government department will have to justify its spending and, in its most gratifyingly Scandinavian feature, sic the Legislative Auditor on state agencies with an aim toward sunsetting them when their usefulness has passed.<\/p>\n The most important thing to remember, though – and tell your co-workers and family members and neighbors, if the topic comes up – is, once again, this:<\/p>\n The “Budget Deficit” is a fraud<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been fiddling about with trying to find more oblique, writer-y ways to say it – but sometimes the direct approach is best. Talk of a $6.2 Billion deficit is a fraud.\u00a0 People who refer to is are mistaken at best, lying at worst. What we have is not a $6.2 billion deficit. \u00a0It’s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dayton-dustbowl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17453"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17458,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17453\/revisions\/17458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}