For those of you who came into the Cheddarsphere after February 2007, you missed the best anonymous blogger ever, Dennis York. The man behind the legend, Christian Schneider, really went to town yesterday over at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, apologizing to the future for the Necro-Budget.
I can’t even come close to duplicating the Schneider/York humor, but I can give the humor-challenged the hard, cold numbers gist:
– Included with $2.2 billion in tax hikes, supposedly only on the top 1% of wage-earners, is a $257 million cigarette tax hike. The cigarette tax is the most regressive tax that exists (i.e., it hits the poor harder)
– “Major cuts” equals an 8% spending hike (this number is rather fungible; but the lowest estimate, which is mine, is 5.4% and 6.3% once the budget “repair” bill is added in), funded in large part by the “one-time-only” $2.1 billion Generational Theft Law.
– The biggest, but not only, example was a swap of $498 million in state funds for the school equilization aid for $498 million in federal funds for the school equilization aid. Where do you suppose that $498 million is going to come from in 2 years?
– Despite the $2.2 billion tax hike in the budget, the aforementioned $2.1 billion from the Generational Theft Law, and the unmentioned $1.4 billion tax hike in the recently-signed budget “repair” bill (that itself increased the current-year deficit to something north of $400 million), the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles deficit in the general fund would only drop $138.1 million from FY2009 to FY2011 to $2,278.9 million (or $2.3 billion), and actually would increase $38.6 million from FY2009 to FY2010 to $2,455.6 million (or $2.5 billion).
Revisions/extensions (3:40 pm 2/24/2009) – If you want a truly-frightening experience, take a gander at Table 9 of the Budget in Brief, specifically the balances section for FY2012 and FY2013, found on page 36 (page 39 in the PDF file). For those of you without Adobe Acrobat, I’ll summarize:
- FY2012 – Gross balance of -$127.6 million, net balance of -$257.6 million (there’s supposed to be a $130 million required statutory balance), and a structural balance of -$396.3 million
- FY2013 – Gross balance of -$559.5 million (based off the gross balance of FY2012, not the net), net balance of -$689.5 million, and a structural balance of -$431.9 million
That’s right, all of those numbers are negative. For the first time in a Doyle budget, they are admitting that the following 2-year budget will be massively in the red.
