My quick take on the Legislative Fiscal Bureau's new revenue estimates. Which say that there are NO new revenue estimates, and no change in the budget .
1. This budget is officially fucked, because it leaves no room for adjustments or switching funds around, due to past and current Walker budget tricks. The UW System is especially jacked, as are local communities in need of additional state aids.
2. The GOP is running scared, and now are trying to work out an accounting trick that would keep school payments the same, but delay the payments into the next fiscal year. First, you get ZERO credit for keeping school funding the same when all other costs are going up, and second, this adds at least $250 million to the deficit in the next budget through the same tricks Scott Walker said he wouldn't do as the "brown bag" candidate in 2010.
3. All of these tricks could be avoided if the GOP stopped being pig-headed and ALEC-owned, and simply followed the guidelines laid out by the Wisconsin Budget Project.
4. This is Exhibit 10,000+ of what has been true for the last 35 years. TAX CUTS DO NOT RAISE REVENUE, and organizing a budget around that premise will fail every time.
All who signed into this garbage must go. Every last one.
I got some rare Dogfish Head to get to this evening, but I'll have more on this debacle later.
Hi Jake,
ReplyDeleteI've re-examined the tax collection releases from the DoR for the past two periods and re-read the LAB release several times and I am dumb-founded. We had to wait for the tax collection information (two months of wildly varying collections when compared to past periods, with extensive data adjustments to conclude: "nah, everything looks pretty close to being on track almost") for the LAB to conclude that things are pretty much the way they are, but since Moodys has down graded the economy we'd better do the same here.
How does one follow the other?
Or--or--they already had concluded that there weren't going to be any additional monies coming in a couple months ago, but let's let people think that: 1) there might be hope, 2) the Administration is using its think-o-meters to cipher out the course of the economy, and 3) the fiscal situation is what it is, and there's nothing to be done and no one to blame, so just move along already.
What a charade!
In the LFB's defense, they wait in every budget year till after the tax-season months end to give the updated estimates (which is why they give them in early May).
DeleteThe DOR numbers from February, March and April are...interesting, but also skew higher due to the lower tax refunds from this year. And as I mentioned in another post today, any shortfall of the projections in May or June not only will make it very tough to not have shortfalls in the 2015-17 budget, but it'll also mean a shortfall in this fiscal year, with no breathing room to spare.