TO UNDERSTAND the feud between Gov. Mark Sanford and the nearly
unanimous Legislature over this year’s budget, consider a
hypothetical family recovering from the economic downturn.
Dad’s work hours were slashed severely when the recession hit, so
the family trimmed a few obvious frills and decided they could live
with lower checking and savings account balances. They let the
credit card debt mount, and even got sucked into the payday lending
racket. They couldn’t afford the tuition anymore, so the eldest
child had to drop out of college; they stopped taking the kids to
the doctor because they had to drop their medical insurance.
Finally, Dad’s hours were restored, so they picked their
insurance back up and sent Suzie back to college. Then Mom got a
bonus, so they broke out of the payday lending cycle, paid off half
of their credit card debt, replaced the leaking roof and put a down
payment on a new car.
Gov. Sanford has a problem with that. He thinks paying off the
entire credit card debt and even building back up a healthy balance
in the checking and savings accounts should take precedence over all
that “new spending.” If it doesn’t, he thinks, Dad should give part
of his salary back to the company.
Mr. Sanford has a point when he says lawmakers should pay back
trust funds that they raided during the downturn before they start
fixing up historic properties and creating new grants programs for
local projects, as they propose to do, to the tune of several
million dollars. Money in the trust funds, set up to pay for
everything from the clean-up of dangerous waste sites to lawsuits
filed against state government, was collected under the promise that
it would be used only for a specific purpose. Restoring those trust
funds is part of the Legislature’s basic obligation to keep its
promises.
And the Legislature certainly shouldn’t use Mom’s one-time bonus
— that is, money that cannot be expected to be available in
following years — to expand programs that have to be paid for every
year. It was particularly disturbing to see the Senate so quickly
agree to use $8 million in one-time money to expand Medicaid to
cover children whose families make up to 185 percent of poverty.
That expansion is a great idea, and it will pay dividends in years
to come. But the Legislature has finally just about dug itself out
of the hole created by expanding and even maintaining Medicaid with
non-recurring money. The thought of now resuming that
crisis-to-crisis practice is simply intolerable.
But Mr. Sanford is simply wrong to suggest that the Legislature
should make full repayment of all trust funds — as well as a reserve
fund that the Legislature made a deliberate decision to shrink — at
the expense of buying school buses and making sure Medicaid can
maintain its current level of spending and providing crisis services
for the mentally ill and restoring basic operating expenses for law
enforcement agencies.
Moreover, the governor does the state a grave disservice when he
talks about the “$600 million to $800 million of new money” as
though legislators are on a drunken spending spree. They’re not. The
bulk of that money is being spent to bring our state back toward the
same, minimal level of services provided back in 2000.
