Cut your 2013 budget by 10 percent, Gov. Sam Brownback told state department heads last week.
Gov. Brownback explained his decision to the people by saying that “Kansas is a high tax state. In order to get taxes down we must cut spending.”
In last week’s interviews with newsmen he didn’t repeat his now-hackneyed phrase, “We can either grow government or grow the private sector.”
But the message was there.
What the governor did not do was talk about the consequences of cutting back state programs. He did say he would try to hold spending on the public schools at current levels and would “protect” planned highway projects.
He didn’t say he would protect state jobs.
Across-the-board spending cuts logically will lead to across-the-board cuts in personnel. The meat ax approach will also rule out salary and benefit increases.
At a time when the Kansas farm sector is flat on its back because of the drought, a decision to add to unemployment by chopping off 10 percent of the jobs that state government creates will raise eyebrows.
Keeping state employee wages frozen is another whack in the gut to the middle class. Inflation has been very low. But it still erodes the purchasing power of the dollar by a penny or two every month. The inflation rate for 2011 was 3.16 percent. It has been above 1 percent every month this year, with the January rate over 1.9 percent. Freezing wages amounts to cutting wages because the effect of inflation is ignored.
It should not be necessary to point out that reducing the state payroll and cutting back the purchasing power of the wages earned by those who do not lose their jobs will slow the growth of the state’s economy. A dollar spent by a highway patrolman has exactly the same stimulating effect as one spent by a newspaper reporter, or any other private sector worker.
BAD ECONOMICS is not the main flaw in the governor’s assault on state government. It is wrong-headed to order across-the-board spending cuts because that approach assumes all state functions are of equal value to the people of Kansas. This is obviously not the case.
Perhaps Gov. Brownback’s office will not suffer if he and the administrative staff remaining take a 10 percent salary cut.
But let’s be fair and say that there are many state government offices that are well run and have important jobs for all of their employees to do. If that is the case, as it certainly should be, then slashing those department budgets will result in a reduction of services to the public. Ten percent fewer highway patrolmen and KBI agents, 10 percent fewer court clerks, 10 percent fewer department of agriculture employees and so on through the state’s organization chart.
If the Legislature follows Gov. Brownback’s instruction, it will also reduce appropriations for the state’s regional libraries, its community colleges, the subsidies it provides private colleges and the funding of the state universities — and, of course, the money it spends on itself.
Such reductions would be justified if they were needed. They are not. Kansas, like the rest of the nation, is recovering from the Great Recession. Budget crises loom in Topeka only because this year’s Legislature passed irresponsibly huge tax cuts that now threaten to reduce our state government to caretaker status.
The only remedy that lies in the hands of the people is to elect a Legislature and a governor dedicated to efficient, effective government — with excellence and progress as its goals.
The road ahead must start with a 180-degree turn.
