Governor's Budget: Deep Cuts, Shared Pain

Well, our previous governor, Ernie Fletcher (R-KY) royally screwed the commonwealth with his budget-busting corruption. New Gov. Steve Beshear has tried to spread out the pain of an "austere budget" throughout the Commonwealth of KY, but there is no doubt this is going to hurt.

The full coverage in the Louisville Courier-Journal is here. The highlights (or lowlights):

• Kentucky public universities will have funding cut by 12% this year to $1.19 billion. Next year there will be a nearly 1% increase to $1.2 billion. This will deeply hurt the advances in public higher education that were made by Gov. Paul Patton (D-KY) before the Fletcher admin. and it is sure to mean more tuition increases--putting higher education further out of reach for many.
• Public schools (primary and secondary) will have a 0.8 % cut this year to $3.79 billion with 0.6% of that increased next year to $3.82 billion.
• Social services (food stamps, homeless shelters, assisted living, mental health, etc., etc.) will be cut by a whopping 8% this year to $652 million with only a 1% increase in the second year to $659 million--and KY already falls way behind in our assistance to the most vulnerable among us.
• Medicaid will, fortunately, see a 3% INCREASE this year to $1.23 billion (much less than expected, but at least no cuts) and a 7.7% increase the following year to $1.32 billion.
• State employees, whose salaries have been frozen for years, will get 2% raises in each year of the administration. (Now if only Metro Louisville will do the same and renew the city employees' contract. My wife hasn't seen a pay increase in 3 years, despite rising costs. Our wonderful mayor has had city employees working without contract for nearly 2 years.)
• Infrastructure projects apparently will be funded through bonds.

The cuts in the budget wouldn't have to be so deep if Gov. Beshear would simply rethink his "no new taxes" view (what is he, a Republican?) and increase taxes on tobacco (3rd lowest in the nation) and alcohol in order to raise needed revenue for essential services. He is literally gambling everything on his plan to push through an amendment to the state constitution to allow casino gambling throughout the Commonwealth. I doubt that will pass and, even if it does, our experiences with the state lottery show that the promise of using gambling to fund education is illusory. Besides such promotion of addictive behavior amounts to a regressive tax on those who can least afford it (the poor who buy lottery tickets weekly from money that should go to groceries, rent, etc. in desperate attempts to escape to wealth) and the resulting social problems associated with pushing gambling addictions are well known.

I know that Beshear campaigned on casinos, but, like many others, I voted for him in spite of this, not because of it. I voted for him because he was not the corrupt Ernie Fletcher. We need a grassroots campaign to push Beshear to raise tobacco and alcohol taxes for a less "austere" budget--especially for education and social services. Balancing budgets on the backs of the poor and our children is immoral and will further undue the progress made by the Patton admin. Gov. Beshear needs to be reminded that he was elected to undue the harm of the Fletcher admin.--not increase it. True, Fletcher, not Beshear, caused this mess. But this is not the right response.