Today's Blog: Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie My husband and I and a couple hundred friends watched in Green Bay as ...(more) Search Archives

Blogs

Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie (6/28/2011)

Time for Gov. Walker to talk more about the cake (3/4/2011)

Today, reality hits home (3/1/2011)

FoxPolitics News going on hiatus (1/28/2011)

Brown County Executive candidate forum Feb. 8 (1/28/2011)

Education done right (1/27/2011)

To Obama, the ‘We’ is Government (1/27/2011)

(more)

1. Take money away from the purpose for which it was raised, and 
2. Exacerbate the budget process, using one-time smoke and mirrors to balance the budget one year, increasing the funding problem in future years.

Revenue comes in to special funds to be spent for very specific purposes. But no matter how high and how strong the barricade is to prevent its being used for other programs, a very real risk exists that any fund will be raided for completely different programs. For example, as well intentioned (well, maybe) as the $1.25 cigarette tax is, the raid is exactly the problem. The new tax is plain and simple one more new source of revenue for the governor and legislature to spend.

I digress. The fund raids for the current budget (we haven’t even gotten to the 07-09 budget!) start with Recycling. The government has raided this fund repeatedly. Dang it. This time it was another $1.5M, peanuts compared to the $20M already taken in FY ’05-06. The fund’s money comes from an add-on to tipping fees – paid by municipalities all over the state. In other words, paid by guess who.

The Agrichemical Management Fund – that one was raided to the tune of $1.5M.

The Insurance Commissioner’s license fees were raided by $8M! These are fees (just recently increased) paid by the insurance industry. They are absolutely not meant to fund shortages in the General Fund. Grrrrr.

And lastly, the Forestry Account. This is a line on your tax bill that usually says “State.” It’s $20 or so, depending on your assessed value. Under $100, anyway. But it mounts up. And it’s our property tax dollars, meant to be used specifically for forest maintenance. $10.6 million of it was stolen to pay for forestry stuff that the General Fund is supposed to budget for.

That’s a total of $21.6M stolen from specific funds to make up shortfalls in the General Fund and to make the governor look good, increasing his ending balance by $10M, from a measly $65M to an almost as measly $75M. Batten down the hatches for the upcoming really big (2007-2009) budget discussion.

Of course, FoxPolitics readers know a “positive ending fund balance,” no matter how big or small, exists only in smoke and mirrors. Ours is a budget that hasn’t been balanced in decades. And that’s a whole separate, sad and dreary discussion.

Post a Reply

Print this Article

Email Article to a Friend