Capitol Chronicle: Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing

Of the various budget proposals floating around the Capitol, my favorite thus far is Gov. Perry's (as accompanied from the choir by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Speaker Tom Craddick). Perry is calling it a "zero-based budget." "This budget starts at zero," he declared, "because in tough budgetary times, every dollar spent by government must be scrutinized to determine whether it justifies consideration as a priority."

Unfortunately, the governor's budget also ends at zero -- literally. This entertaining 15-page document, available at the governor's Web site (www.governor.state.tx.us/budget), lists all the line categories of state expenditures, with the current biennial figures followed by the "Governor's Recommendations" for 2004-2005. We're currently spending $49.6 billion on education, through August. For the next two years, the governor recommends "0." Public safety and criminal justice are costing us $8 billion? The governor recommends "0." Health and human services ring in at $38.7 billion? The governor says we can get by on "0."

You can't beat that with a stick. This may be the first government document in history that is officially not worth the paper it's printed on.

The accountants apparently forgot to tell the governor that a zero-based budget still has to come up with actual numbers -- i.e., set spending priorities. The word at the Capitol is that his office had actually prepared such a budget, based on Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander's original estimate of a $5.1 billion deficit. When Carole Keeton Strayhorn abruptly doubled the ante, some bright spinmeister decided what the hell, let's zero the damn thing out and make some headlines with it.

This is the policy equivalent of the band's amps in Spinal Tap: They go up to "11" because, "It's one louder than 10!"

Gardner Selby of the San Antonio Express-News reports that zero-based budgeting was tried before in Texas, borrowed via Jimmy Carter's Georgia from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. In the meantime, the USDA had quickly discovered that the method "did not significantly improve program efficiency or effectiveness, but did produce overwhelming amounts of paperwork." Unlike Gov. Perry, the Ag folks must have actually tried to fill in the blanks.

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The 7% Solution

In fact, the Perry/Dewhurst/Craddick budget now officially begins at 93% -- at least for this fiscal year, that is. The Iron Triangle told all state agencies last week that they must immediately cut 7% from their current budgets, in an attempt to make up the $1.8 billion the comptroller says we need just to get even by August. The only programs exempted, said the governor, are "the Foundation School Program, Children's Health Insurance Program, and acute care Medicaid services." That's actually a great leap forward -- at least the governor has identified three programs that need to be closely reviewed before, like the Red Queen, we just lop off their heads. Public schools, children's insurance, and the dying -- it's not much, but we've got to start somewhere.

While the governor's edicts were grabbing the headlines, another official budget was quietly released: the Legislative Budget Board's recommended baseline appropriations for 2004-2005. (It's also available on the Web, at www.lbb.state.tx.us/LBE/2004-2005/Documents.htm. It's not as much fun to read as the governor's, but it makes a lot more sense.) The LBB's budget was also made obsolete by the Strayhorn stratagem, but not before this group of free-spending radicals -- then chaired by Bill "Bolshevik" Ratliff and Pete "Lefty" Laney -- had duly made its estimates of the public needs for the next biennium: an increase of $7.4 billion, or 6.3%. The extra money was to be spent on such wasteful purposes as new school materials, fully funding state employee health insurance, additional college students, children's Medicaid, and -- oh yes -- catching up on payments deferred from the last Legislature.

That must have been the "party" to which Comptroller Strayhorn referred when she accused the 77th Legislature of gleefully dancing away all the taxpayers' money. GOP Sen. Teel Bivins, not exactly legendary for his liberal inclinations, told the Amarillo Globe-News, "If the Legislature partied, then she was the bartender."

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Life Among the Clouds

Not surprisingly, the $7.4 billion growth estimate of the LBB, added to the $9.9 billion deficit now calculated by the comptroller, is in the same ballpark as the $15.6 billion real deficit estimated by the Austin's Center for Public Policy Priorities, which has spent the last few weeks (and will spend many more) trying to get the new legislators to pay attention to the obvious. According to the CPPP's analysis, the $15.6 billion will be needed to "tread water" in health and human services while simply allowing for population growth and inflation for the rest of the budget. ("Treading water," notes the CPPP, "means more than 60,000 Texans on waiting lists for community care services; more than 52,000 children on waiting lists for low-income child care subsidies.")

The governor's office curtly dismissed the CPPP estimates as the ravings of a "tax-and-spend liberal group." But the governor himself, not quite so innocent of budget horse-trading as he likes to pretend, has already hinted that a couple of CPPP proposals -- closing the loophole on the corporate franchise tax and mandating business property rendition -- might be up for consideration, despite his "no new taxes" pledge. "They're not new taxes," said Perry, "if someone should have already been paying them." Dewhurst and Craddick are balking, but we may speculate that before spring, old hands like Bivins, Ratliff, and even Laney will lead at least a few horses to the water.

Can they make 'em drink? Right now the new GOP is still celebrating, and its bankrollers and deep-thinkers in the Texas Association of Business and the Texas Public Policy Foundation are determined to hypnotize them into believing that all that campaign rhetoric is literally true. Schools, prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, and highways can run on liquid ideology, and taxes -- that is, shared community burdens -- are liberal hobgoblins to be wished away by Libertarian moonshine. Unless and until they come down from laissez-faire Cloud-Cuckoo Land, it's going to be a very long session.