The smiles on the faces of state budget-cutters are likely to turn to frowns.
Conservative legislators in Kansas and most of the other 49 states have done a spectacular hatchet job on state budgets. And because the nation’s cities depend to some extent on state aid, the reductions will be passed on down to the town and city level.
A boon to taxpayers? Only temporarily.
State and local governments are forecast to shed up to 110,000 jobs in the third quarter, according to IHS Global Insight. Job losses at state and local levels is not new. The public sector has been shedding jobs at about 23,000 a month for three months. But that trickle will become a flood July 1, when many state fiscal years begin and this winter’s budget-cutting takes hold.
Because of the recession, the public sector has lost 510,000 jobs since August 2008. The numbers prove that bureaucracies can shrink as well as grow; that government, itself, is not immune to a slowing economy.
Moreover, the trend is still accelerating. In Kansas as elsewhere federal stimulus money made up a significant part of state and local spending. That source of funds evaporates this month, which was one of the reasons why K-12 spending was cut so deeply in Kansas. Tax revenues are rising here as elsewhere as the weak recovery continues but the upswing is not nearly enough to prevent budget reductions so deep that Kansas schools will have to operate at levels not seen since the 1990s.
AS THE CONSEQUENCES of budget-slashing seep into the national conscienceness it will be interesting to see how the public reacts. Government exists to give citizens a way to pool their resources to do together what they cannot do separately.
When it begins to become apparent that we can no longer give students from pre-school age through graduate school an excellent education, will we accept that or demand a bigger education budget? When the consequence of using the highway department’s revenues for general government rather than maintaining and improving the state’s highways, will the people say, OK, better potholes than more spending on roads? When the courts must take furloughs and their workers accept lower incomes as a result, we will shrug and say, the rule of law isn’t that important anyway?
OUR HISTORY answers these questions. Over the years the American people built their public sector — the cities, states and federal government — stronger and stronger to meet their needs and fulfill their aspirations. As the na-tion grew wealthier, it spent more on education, on public health, on the nation’s infrastructure and on America’s ability to deal with threats from without its borders and to raise the quality of life for us all.
We have left that path temporarily. We will return to it.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
