The first rule of responsible budgeting: Nothing is ‘too small to cut’

THE REFRAIN began almost immediately after Gov. Mark Sanford unveiled his landmark budget proposal in January, and it became so loud and so intense that, at least through the first stage of the state budget debate, it has virtually drowned out many of his painful but common-sense proposals: There’s no reason to cut this, because it’s too small to make a significant dent in the budget deficit.

As in: Cutting $1.5 million from the State Museum won’t do anything to close a $350 million deficit, so there’s no reason to do it. Doing away with the caisson team won’t save but $150,000, and what difference could that possibly make?

Taken individually, every one of these arguments is completely correct. No one cut will close the deficit. And rejecting any one cut will not have a major impact on the $5 billion state budget or the $350 million deficit.

The problem is that there’s not just one group that is fighting, so far quite successfully, to avoid a cut. There are constituencies for every one of the 291 individual cuts Mr. Sanford proposed in his budget. And nearly all of them have been working around the clock, taking their support to the public and to the legislators — many of whom are the loudest constituents of individual programs, and the most fervent adherents of the “it’s too small to make a difference” doctrine.

If all of these advocates — or even a significant minority of them — get their way and have their teeny, tiny little cut restored, it will have a major impact: The budget will be horribly out of balance, and legislators will once again be faced with the choice of making largely untargeted, and therefore damaging, cuts, or else raising taxes or fees.

House budget writers will tell you that there’s a third way, and that they’ve found it. But their way — relying far too heavily on one-time money, questionable budget projections and trust-fund raids —only delays the pain; it does not avoid it.

There’s an even bigger problem with this argument, and it has to do with the way we have always approached budgeting in this state: This argument relieves those making it from having to fight for their program on the merits.

Downplay the significance of the cut, ridicule the idea of getting anywhere with such a small cut, and you don’t have to convince anyone why it’s more important to pay for your own special program than for some other program. You don’t have to answer uncomfortable questions, such as: How many teachers could we hire (or avoid laying off) with the money you want to keep spending on this program? How many Highway Patrol troopers? How many prescriptions could we fill (or not stop filling) for people who can’t afford to buy the medicine that keeps them out of the emergency room, where the rest of us have to pay indirectly for their much more expensive care?

Since tax increases are off the table as far as this Legislature is concerned, buying into the “too small to worry about it” mindset means that nothing gets cut — which means that everything gets cut. Refusing to make responsible, targeted cuts means that at least $350 million in programs and services we’re already providing will eventually have to be eliminated.

The question is whether we study how we’re spending money now and make some tough decisions about which programs are least important, and eliminate those things, or whether we just make across-the-board cuts, taking money from essential programs as well as from programs that are important and useful but, ultimately, optional.

Balancing a budget on a series of small cuts is not a radical idea. That’s what people with no choice (read: those who cannot, like legislators, just pass the work off to others) do.

It’s how schools have done it, stuffing a couple of more kids in each classroom, reducing support staff, charging for some extracurricular programs. None of those changes alone balances a school budget, but taken together they do.

It’s how individuals and families make do when a breadwinner loses a job and has to settle for one with less pay (or can’t find another one at all): cutting out the cable, increasing the deductibles on the insurance, reducing the number of restaurant meals each week, turning down the thermostat a couple of degrees. All minor changes, but they add up.

Did Mr. Sanford make all the best choices about what to cut? Of course not. No one could. Unlike a lot of politicians, he’s the first to acknowledge that point, and invite legislators to come up with better choices. In his State of the State address, he asked not that legislators adopt all his cuts, but simply that they adhere to three important principles of his budget — “not cutting across the board, cutting annualizations, and restoring money to trust funds where possible.”

That is an inherently reasonable request. More than that, it is what we all should expect and demand of our legislators. Nothing is too small to cut. Little numbers add up.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.