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News & ArtsThursday, October 27, 2011
Occupy / Olympia Gov. Gregoire Proposes "Dreadful" Cuts to Meet $2 Billion Shortfall, Says She Hasn't Thought At All About Raising Revenue, and Basically Invites You to Occupy Olympia
Posted by Eli Sanders on Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 11:30 AM
At one point during Governor Chris Gregoire's budget press conference today, you could hear the protesters chanting outside. She seemed to agree, at least in principle, with their disgust.
“The work of slashing any budget by $2 billion would be dreadful," Gregoire said. "And let me assure you that is what it is.”
After already cutting $10 billion out of the state's budget over three years, Gregoire said, "we have shredded our social safety net"—cutting thousands of workers, eliminating money for public schools, doing all kinds of things that are "not what I signed up to do when I started."
Her major proposals for this round of cuts:
- Eliminate the Basic Health Plan, ending subsidized health care to 35,000 low-income individuals.
- Cut off medical services to 21,000 people enrolled in the state’s Disability Lifeline and ADATSA (Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Treatment Support Act) programs.
- Trim 15 percent from the support the state provides to colleges and universities.
- Reduce levy equalization, which helps property poor districts, by 50 percent.
- Cut the length of supervision for all offenders, based on severity of offense. Sex offenders will be supervised for 24 months, and all other offenders, for 12 months.
What's to blame for this situation? "The reckless behavior on Wall Street that touched off a financial panic three years ago, along with a European debt crisis, and a Congress that simply can’t get the job done," Gregoire said.
Also, drown-government-in-a-bathtub conservatives. “For some, none of this seems to matter," Gregoire said. "Their view of government is that it works best when there is no government. They are wrong.”
She talked about how Washington State has one million more people than it had 10 years ago, yet 2,000 fewer public servants. She said that "rows and rows of cubicles are empty at state offices," the she now has "a demoralized workforce," that she and her budget preparers endured sleepless nights in the lead-up to this morning's proposed cuts.
“This morning is not about cold, hard numbers," she said. "This is very personal. We’re talking about real Washingtonians. Our Washingtonians. They are all around us… And they have needs that we will no longer be able to meet.”
But here's something this morning was conspicuously not about: The governor showing any leadership on raising revenue to forestall some of these "dreadful" cuts when the legislature meets in special session on Nov. 28.
“I have not thought about revenue," she said in response to repeated questions about, well, whether she's thought about revenue.
Which is just not credible after, as she mentioned, $10 billion in cuts over three years—and who knows how many conversations about the possibility of raising revenue to prevent some of those cuts.
What's going on here is the same old kabuki theater. The governor, instead of leading, hides behind her duty to present a budget that works within existing revenue. (“I simply have to be honest with the state of Washington," she said. "While my heart is there, my pocket book is empty.”)
She could make a mad-as-hell case for more revenue, but instead she's just proposing we ask questions: “We have to ask ourselves now: Do we want to look at alternatives of revenue? What might they be? And do we want to go there?”
What's becoming more clear, however, is that Gregoire basically agrees with the Occupy Wall Street movement—"[This] is what Wall Street has done in it’s meltdown, and it’s handed it to our state and our country"—and is inviting people to Occupy Olympia if they want to see something other than cuts, cuts, cuts.
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But she's gutless and looking forward to her cush retirement working for a back east law firm that feeds off the banking industry.
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That's effectively a death sentence for many of those people. Gregoire can add mass-murderer to her resume.
the next step is hipster blood in the streets......
no doubt you girls won't be able to connect the dots between this post and Dan's Girl Scout post below...
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Buy your canned goods along with guns and lots of ammo. you're gonna need it.
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Nothing about unsustainable growth of the state budget over the last decade?
Fuck, scrap the sales tax and institute a state income tax already. What's the problem?
Currently, she receives $197 in cash, $200 in food stamps, and medical insurance. With these cuts, she will receive none of those.
Mass murder is exactly the right term.
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Fools play the game designed by their opponents.
Real Governators change the battlefield.
Forcing the inevitable lawsuit that tosses the 2/3 rule for revenue as unconstitutional.
Check it out here: edcored.org
But your original claim was that "Eyman" was the reason for the 2/3 majority and/or for Eyman's ability to raise taxes without consulting the legislature. That, like Chewbacca, does not make sense.
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Yes... because clearly there hasn't been enough money put into education over the years. That's been the problem:
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/obama-job…
And clearly we should trust the government's reporting of how much we actually spend on education.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzvKyfV3J…
Yes, funding is the problem with education.
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Once upon a time (when I was a hairdresser), BHP was the only option I had to provide health insurance to my children. My middle son had severe asthma at the time (also suffered a broken arm during that period) and without it, I have no idea what I would have done.
This is a sad day indeed.
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you girls worship Darwin then when he culls some of the useless refuse from the gene pool you get all teary eyed....
we notice you @15 aren't giving any of your OWN fucking money to your "friend"....
too bad this state is full of big hearted secular humanists who are all talk and no giving....
the next step is hipster blood in the streets......
Of course, it remains to be seen if (1) this $10B cut will actually happen, and (2) it is a real cut compared to what they spent the previous year or just a "cut" compared to what they had wanted to spend this year.
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And now the leftist echo chamber wants an income tax. I guess your memories are pretty short. Outside of lefty Seattle and San Juan county, the income tax failed miserably--including King County, which also passed Eyman's 2/3 tax raising initiative. Which means tons of Dems voted against the income tax and for Eyman. So, go ahead and keep whining about an income tax. Income taxes in downturns kill state budgets. Despite its regressivity, sales tax is way more effective in funding gov't. Oregon and Calif. do much worse than WA in down times because they rely on income tax and we rely on sales tax. There is no sales tax on food and medicine so low income people are not as burdened as you lefties think.
Gregoire knows the people are skeptical of more taxes--and rightfully so. The Dem dominated state gov't has shown no real innovation, no real change of culture and no real ideas for moving past this old paradigm. Why aren't we legalizing weed? $100 million or more in taxes in being left on the table because the elected leftists are too timid for that. When 1183 passes, using the state stores as weed stores would be their best use.
And blaming Wall St? What a croc. Sure, the clowns who sold those crappy mortgages that you took out and who sold insurance on those and those who bought that junk are certainly blameworthy but have minimal to do with WA's budget problem, except showing that we were overly dependent on real estate tax.
Getting rid of tax breaks is one idea but some of those actually help create jobs and/or prevent a loss of them to other states. There are no easy answers but whining about no more cash for drunks and junkies in Seattle and calling for an income tax is a total waste of time.
When the private sector is not willing to spend, the public sector can and should take its place.
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By Aubrey Cohen Seattlepi.com Published: Nov 4, 2011 at 7:24 PM PDT
so we get the cuts what fools we are...
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the gov and the legislature, and there corporate mentality are the problem We need people in there who see through the eyes of the "99%" not the greedy eyes of professional political hacks, We need to make the the corporations pay a fair share, NO LOOP HOLES, Tax and regulate marijuana (initiative 502) save money on law enforcement. http://www.newapproachwa.org/ We need a new kinds of green industry not short sighted short term scheme's Look how much the world and our state has changed in 50 years. So try and forget about the media and the political hacks this time around (2012) get out ask your own questions and make them good questions.
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