Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
GOVERNING LIKE A CONSERVATIVE
March 1, 2010 Posted by John at 9:45 PM
Here in Minnesota, Governor Tim Pawlenty is the only person standing between us and rapacious Democratic majorities in the state legislature. A friend who knows the governor well likes to say that whereas Ronald Reagan talked like a conservative but governed like a moderate, Tim Pawlenty talks like a moderate but governs like a conservative.
There is a lot of truth to that. Pawlenty is a gutsy administrator, as demonstrated most recently by his line item veto of $381 million for a health care program for low-income adults. This, of course, was part of his overall effort to balance the state's budget, as is constitutionally required. But the Democrats reacted predictably; they tried to stir up hysteria in the press and made a strong effort to override the governor's veto.
Governor Pawlenty stuck to his guns:
Governor Tim Pawlenty followed through on his pledge to rein in state spending with or without the legislature. He used a line-item veto to surgically remove $381 million from a health plan for low income adults without children.
The cuts to General Assistance Medical Care, or G.A.M.C., will take effect in July of 2010, according to Human Services Commissioner Cal Ludeman, and strip eligibility from 30,000 persons. He told lawmakers Friday those persons must earn less than $7,800 per year to qualify for the program....
Along with the Democrats and various demonstrators, both the Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis and the Saint Paul Area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America protested the governor's line item veto of GAMC. But Pawlenty was unfazed: ...
Well, I'm an Illinoisan, too, and I say "Fuc* no."
Illinois stuck in a historic, epic budget crisis
Talk of major tax increases coupled with draconian spending cuts is building in Springfield
By Bob Secter, Tribune reporter
5:56 PM CST, February 23, 2010
Illinois government is staring down the barrel of an explosive financial mess, and perhaps nothing frames the danger better than two big numbers.
The first is $26 billion, the grand total that lawmakers have allotted this year for the meat of what the state does: funding education, health care, child welfare, public safety and the machinery of government itself.
The second number is $13 billion, the total of red ink in the state's main checking account that, by law, has to be erased at least on paper before a penny can be set aside for day-to-day operations in the fiscal year, which begins July 1.
In short, the deficit is half as big as the core of the state budget.
To experts, that is an astoundingly scary ratio that ranks Illinois as one of the nation's worst fiscal basket cases if not the worst. The budget deficit in Illinois is almost as big as the one facing California, a financially beleaguered state that has triple Illinois' population, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington-based think tank.
"This is historic, it is epic," said Laurence Msall, president of the watchdog Civic Federation. "It is impossible to overstate the level of peril."
Signs of distress are bleeding out to schools, transit agencies and social service providers, all of which complain that it is getting hard to make ends meet because the state is chronically late with promised cash. Meanwhile, the state's credit ratings are tanking, making it ever more expensive to borrow to make ends meet.
...
...Consider this: The head count of state workers is 20 percent smaller than it was a decade ago. If the state payroll was magically purged of every single employee, the annual salary savings would amount to $4 billion, less than one-third of what is needed right now to dig out of the deficit hole.
...
