by Jack Stapleton, Jr.
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by Jack Stapleton, Jr.
Members of this year’s Missouri General Assembly have enough trouble finding adequate revenue to fund existing programs without adding to their discomfort. But as the old saying goes, “No one has ever been punished for adding to the discomfort of politicians who are standing in danger of losing whatever popularity they ever had.” Or something like that.
Despite the admonition, I think it’s time to provide a heads-up bulletin to all of Missouri’s state representatives and senators, as well as our financially harassed Gov. Bob Holden. They certainly don’t deserve the fate that is staring them in the face at this moment. It’s one thing to be inundated with higher program-cost estimates with federal funds being supplied at previous levels. But it’s quite something else when the $5 or $6 billion in federal dollars that pour into our state each year to help fund congressionally mandated programs suddenly begin fading from the Missouri Treasury’s computer screens.
I’m talking about the fiscal crisis that has already started appearing in Washington as a result of lower tax revenues and mind-boggling increased outlays for the proposed invasion of Iraq and other naughty nations within the framework of George W’s axis of evil. No less an imposing financial figure than Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan warned that the years of budget deficits the White House is proposing will spin out of control. His statement came at the very moment informed members of Congress were saying that the administration’s numbers of a $1 trillion deficit through 2008 don’t even include the cost of war in Iraq followed by a “nation building” military occupation of the country.
A more candid Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has told Congress he will need billions more than the president’s estimate of $380 billion to wage the opening of a war against Baghdad. Rumsfeld mentions the $1.5 billion-a-month cost of assembling U.S. forces for an attack, an expensive change from the Cold War estimates of containing our foreign enemies.
It’s hard to remember that a $5.6 trillion budget surplus was projected only two years ago.
Federal sharing of states’ costs for housing for the poor, children’s health programs and spiraling unemployment claims will directly impact on this fall’s revenue distribution from Washington to state capitals around the country, appearing just in time to feel the effects of new tax-lowering levels for the nation’s affluent, not to mention the budget’s instructions to states and cities to boost the minimum rent collected from low-income tenants in all federally supported housing.
An equally imposing factor on the mental health of legislatures in Missouri and other states is George W’s enthusiasm for taxing consumption rather than income. This is another way of saying federal sales taxes, which prompted even the Wall Street Journal to say that the administration’s plans suggest the President “has a fuzzy math problem.”
Some figures are painfully sharp, however, including the $4.8 trillion decline in the value of stock shares in the first two years of the Bush administration. That decline was a deeper Wall Street slump in percentage terms than in the Great Depression crash under Herbert Hoover. Add to this, the fact that unemployment is up by four percent since 2001.
Plans are afoot in Washington to transfer the cost of the decades old, well-regarded federal Head Start program, which provides important pre-kindergarten training for nearly one million poor children.
The Bush plan to shift more of the cost of Medicare to the states was met with such bipartisan alarm on Capitol Hill that the administration had to backtrack, promising cost shifts would be incremental and subtle enough not to arouse widespread public anguish just before the 2004 elections. Whew, that’s a relief!
This just in: the new chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Oklahoma’s James Inhofe, has hired a coal mining industry lobbyist to oversee the committee’s consideration of the administration’s new clean-air proposals.
Now, on to Baghdad!
[Missouri News & Editorial Services, Inc. Copyright (C) 2003 MNES Corp.]