The budget sausageânow leaner than ever!âis currently being made in Olympia, with house Democrats introducing their plan the other day and house Republicans doing the same.
There are important (and very predictable) differences between the two parties' proposals, of course, and there will be even more differences to come next week as the Democrats and Republicans in the state senate unveilâdon't soil yourselves with excitementâtheir plans.
However. When you step back, the biggest budget news is best summed up in a statement Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown made today at a sit-down with reporters: "We will balance the budget without revenue."
Meaning: No new revenue. (Aka, another all cuts budget.)
This turn of events traces back to the recent not-as-terrible-as-usual state revenue forecast, which predicted $96 million more coming in during the current biennium than previously thought. Hooray!
Everyone's immediate reactionâincluding the governor'sâwas to flush plans for a half a penny sales tax increase right down the toilet and instead find ways to nip, tuck, and use tricky accounting if need be to deal with what's now a relatively small (compared to previous years) $1.1 billion shortfall.
The biggest message of Brown's chat with reporters is that this nipping and tucking should be easy, at least compared to previous sessions. âIt doesnât seem to me that any of the budget spending differences are that insurmountable," she said when asked to compare the various plans already floated or in the works. âCommunicationâs going well⌠Everybodyâs talking.â
However, in the absence of a plan from the state senate (which will come on Tuesday), what most people are talking about is the house Dems' plan, which manages to preserve Basic Health and Disability Lifeline (though it does do away with some programs to help the developmentally disabled). It also saves money by temporarily delaying certain payments to schoolsâa tricky accounting maneuver that the Seattle Times dismissed as "akin to floating a check" and Representative Reuven Carlyle (D-36), a member of the house Ways and Means Committee, said was more like a very responsible family deciding to just make the minimum payment on a credit card for one month rather than paying the whole balance down every month.
In addition, the house Dems' plan deals with the inevitable cutbacks to social services that come with an all-cuts budget by allowing cities and counties more freedom to raise taxes to help cover those cuts. Brown noted that while this might be helpful to, say, King County, it doesn't do much to help smaller cities and poorer counties.
Carlyle called this critique "completely legitimate pushback," but then said: "At the same time, itâs also a legitimate pushback to question those who pretend like itâs possible to sustain what you could call King County-level services in places where thereâs a dependency on a massive infusion of state dollars to accomplish that goal."
Carlyle didn't say this, but I translate his sentence as: Fuck 'em. If poor conservative areas of Washington State want to slash state services because they don't like Big Guvmint, then let them realize how much they actually depend on the services of Big Guvmint, and how much those services are actually subsidized by the wealthy areas of the state they claim to hate.
Thisâas alwaysâwill be one of the main areas of debate as the budget is made over the next two weeks: If we're not raising revenue because conservative areas of the state won't stand for new taxes, and we're slashing services because conservative areas of the state say they want that, then how much pain will Democrats let themselves inflict on those conservative areas of the state?
Brown's statements suggested: Not much.