Either Gov. Paul LePage didn’t read his own budget, doesn’t know what a gimmick is or doesn’t care if what he says matches what he’s proposing.
In his budget address before a joint session of the Legislature on Feb. 10, Gov. LePage said that his budget contains no gimmicks. It does.
Two proposals in his budget account for $79 million worth of bookkeeping tricks to make the budget appear balanced.
The first gimmick is particularly entertaining, considering the self-appointed crusade the governor is waging against state debt. If his budget is adopted on June 30, 2012, the governor plans to borrow $54 million to balance the General Fund budget.
The next day, he plans to pay the money back.
One-day borrowing allows the governor to redirect money from Other Special Revenue accounts — stuff like the fees paid to the fire marshal for inspections or by insurance companies to the Superintendent of Insurance — to pad the General Fund, which otherwise would have come up short.
Along with pushing payments from one fiscal year to the next (which, as far as I can tell, Gov. LePage is not doing), one-day borrowing is one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Gov. LePage’s second gimmick also is familiar. He is proposing the creation of a task force. The task force would be responsible for finding $25 million in new government spending cuts and presenting them to the Legislature next January.
If the Legislature goes along with the scheme, the budget will balance without the actual spending cuts. Lawmakers, the governor included, get to put off the hard work of those cuts for almost a year.
Personally, I have no problems with using all the tools available to make a state budget balance.
During my time working on budgets, I supported the creation of a similar task force. Nobody was crazy about the idea then, but given the fact that the world economy was in free-fall, it gave all of us — Republicans and Democrats — time to catch our breath and get through plummeting state revenues.
But it’s a little different this time. With state revenues actually projected to grow by $365 million for the next two years, Gov. LePage didn’t need to use tricks or gimmicks. He had the cash to avoid them.
He made the choice to include them anyway.
There’s no question that the $79 million worth of gimmicks allowed him to make other policy decisions, to keep a few promises to the business community that backed his election or avoid tough tradeoffs in areas like Health and Human Services or Public Safety.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Legislature, as it reworks the governor’s budget, doesn’t increase the amount.
There are a lot of bad proposals in the budget, and lawmakers will be looking to take the edge off some of them. Adding a few million dollars to someone else’s homework assignment might look like a reasonable way to close a budget.
Ultimately, however, it’s likely that the bulk of the $25 million will come from Health and Human Services, education or improving revenues. The task force just delays bad news for somebody.
Finally, tucked down deep in the language of the budget is a proposal that intends to change the way we talk about the program that provides health care for low-income, disabled and elderly folks.
Currently, the program is called MaineCare and it’s the state’s version of Medicaid. The governor would like to do away with the MaineCare name and refer to it as simply Medicaid.
This Jedi mind trick is unlikely to change the way people feel about the program or the critical role it plays in protecting the well-being of thousands of children, poor adults, disabled individuals and elderly living in nursing homes.
Gov. LePage may hate MaineCare, but the program saves lives and is one of the reasons that Maine has the eighth healthiest population and the sixth-lowest level of uninsured in the country. Love it or hate it, the program works by any name.
These gimmicks aren’t the biggest sins in the governor’s budget. His proposals to cut support for the poor and elderly and to pay for big tax breaks on the backs of retirees, teachers and state workers are much worse.
But the no-gimmicks pledge continues a pattern of saying one thing and doing another, and of being too loose with the details. Eventually, even his supporters will start to question what he says.
David Farmer is former deputy chief of staff and communications director for Gov. John Baldacci. A longtime journalist, he has been an editor and reporter in Maine, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
David Farmer is former deputy chief of staff and communications director for Gov. John Baldacci. A longtime journalist, he has been an editor and reporter in Maine, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Readers may reach him at dfarmer14@hotmail.com.
