"Doomsday Budget" Stirs National Reaction

From Jim Leach, Publisher of State School News Service

In presenting a no-tax-hike “doomsday budget” – 14,000 teachers would be laid off; 650,000 citizens would lose health services – Gov. Pat Quinn put the bloggers in a frenzy Monday.

Some say the people deserve to know the consequences of the legislators’ failure to raise the revenue they need to cover all their spending impulses. Others say the governor is just using “scare tactics” to force them to accept his proposed 1.5-percentage point income tax increase.

Our friend Jim Leach, a respected broadcast journalist in Springfield, tweeted the Huffington Post site with a poignant question: “Is it wrong of me to think that, just once, a governor ought to actually sign a doomsday budget so everyone can see what it’s like?”

Quinn’s “dear citizen” message addressed the issue as simple math. The budget hole is $1.6 billion deep. Of the federal “stimulus” money, $4.1 billion can be used in FY 2010, leaving a $7.5 billion gap that can be bridged only with spending cuts.

Quinn’s analysis spreads the fiscal pain fairly evenly. From K-12 education, representing about one-third of state GRF spending, the governor would slash $1.5 billion – 20% of the cuts – costing about 14,000 teachers their jobs and eliminating pre-school for 100,000 kids.

College students, about 400,000 of them, would lose scholarships and MAP grants to save $1.2 billion. Local governments would lose $1 billion. Hundreds of thousands of senior citizens, veterans, disabled and children would lose state support they have come to rely on.

There’s a public safety component. A doomsday budget would doom 1,000 state troopers to joblessness, and force the “early release” of 6,000 inmates. The cuts would include services thought of as frills. There would be no state fair. Parks that Quinn recently reopened would be closed.

So what is it, a scare tactic or just information citizens need to know about what the state would look like if the legislators continue to be bold about spending and weak-kneed about raising the revenue?

This is a problem that frequently confronts school districts. When they need to pass a referendum, they are hit with the demand to know “or else what?” When they respond with the lists of cuts they will have to make (band, art class, clubs or – Oh, no! Not sports!) they hear the same thing.

“You’re just trying to scare us.”

Legislators are just like the general public. That’s not a bad thing, but one aspect of that is that they need to be shown the alternative before they’ll make a sacrifice. You have to show them “death” before they will accept “pain.” Perhaps my friend Jim Leach has a point.