State Budget Proposals: Bad, Worse, and Worst

Yah, there's a lot of yappaflappa goin' on out there about how 'the Democrats do this' and 'the Republicans do that.'

But what they ALL do is overspend. Big time. There are three different proposals: Doyle's, the Dems', and the Pubbies'.

And there's a resulting problem: the State's balance sheet continues to deteriorate. And by "deteriorate" we mean that Wisconsin's 'structural deficit' places it at 48th in the country for prudence.

48th!! in a contest where 50th is the Grand Booby Prize Winner.

The state 's non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau found the 2007-2009 budget proposal by Doyle, a Democrat, would leave a potential shortfall of $669 million that officials will have to deal with in the following two-year budget by raising taxes or cutting spending. The budget passed by Senate Democrats will leave a shortfall of $728 million while Assembly Republicans would leave the largest such shortfall -- $877 million.

Sounds vaguely familiar? McIlheran pointed to an article which (in effect) says the same thing; we summarized it here.

"Here's a "DOH" for you: in general terms, the "Supply-Side/Republican" people don't care about deficits--they reduce taxes because it's politically popular. This is called "starve the beast" rhetoric. Conversely, the Democrats care about deficits--and figure that the "right thing to do" is to increase taxes. But when they increase taxes, they ALSO increase program expenditures, continuing the deficits. Sometimes (Clinton is an example) they actually reduce the deficits, but leave massive downstream minefields."

The current State budget proposals, thus, fit the model quite well. The only difference is the level of financial drunkenness.

Sadly, the Pubbies manage to be the worst of all.

And that's saying a lot.