Chanting Points Memo: The Non-Cut Cut

Last week, Tom Emmer released his education plan.

The left’s been sputtering ever since.

We’ll come back to that.

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Education in Minnesota, like most entitlement programs, is a “baseline” program.  It doesn’t start from zero every year; it starts with the previous years’ budget, and adds to it.  What what you add is where the political fun and games start.

P.J. O’Rourke, in his classic exposition of American government Parliament of Whores, explained baseline spending.  I’ll paraphrase.  Say there’s a state Human Service program to help provide treatment to deranged leftybloggers.  It gets $10,000,000 a year in 2010.  For the 2012 biennium, the DFL will claim that there will be a 10% hike in utilization, and the program will thus required$11 million dollars.  The Republicans can say that trying to make leftybloggers sane has diminishing returns, but raise appropriations for the program $500,000.  Both sides can say they’re raising program’s budget; the Dems can say the GOP is cutting the program; both are telling the truth, and both are lying.

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So too with the education budget.

Mark Dayton’s eduation budget, in his four-page “plan”, calls for a $15.6 billion educatino budget.

Emmer’s proposed  budget $13.8B – identical to the current budget (and actually a slight hike, since the 2008 budget inluded half a billion in federal stimulus money that, trust is, is wasted, gone forever, never coming back.

So that means $1.8 billion in new spending going to the classroom, right?

Wrong.

Dayton proposes to pay back “the shift” – money deferred to subsequent years in previous budget solutions – next year.  Minnesota’s education budget usually pays 90% of the annual allotment in the current year and defers 10% to the subsequent year; under the budget compromise, the deferral rose to 27%.   That means that Minnesota schools are floating 1.8 billion in various borrowing against future state payments.

Dayton wants to pay that back next year.

No, wait.  Let’s be accurate.

Dayton wants to crank your taxes up by $1.8 Billion dollars next year – $300 for every man, woman and child in Minnesota – to cover the shift.

Now, in normal times, with the economy ticking along and revenue coming in in surplus lots, that’d make some sense – but in those kinds of times, there’d have been no need for a shift in the first place.

Tom Emmer proposes to wait on paying the shift back to 2014, when, with a little luck, the economy will be doing better (which will itself be more likely if Emmer is in office), rather than saddling the taxpayer with it right now, at the depths of the Obama Recession.

Here’s where the DFL is trying to fool the people; the DFL’s spinbloggers are portraying he difference as a “$1.8 Billion Dollar Cut to education!”.

It’s a lie, of course.

The Emmer budget will keep the actual money to the classroom the same as in the current budget; the main difference is the shift.

“But what about inflation?”, the left countercaterwauls.  Simple; the biggest element in education’s inflation is union labor costs.

I think they can tighten the ol’ belt for a year or two like the rest of us.

What do you think?