Use new money to stabilize budget, fund actual needs

THERE WERE TWO common threads in the competing state budget plans passed by the House and Senate: They had generally the right priorities, restoring basic services that were slashed during the last economic downturn, but they relied too heavily on surplus money to pay for new programs that need more stable funding.

So now that lawmakers have an extra $100 million in stable funding to spend, the choice should be obvious: Use it to pay for some of those important program restorations and expansions that would otherwise be funded with one-time money. And start with the Senate’s statewide 4-year-old kindergarten expansion.

That’s not very appealing, of course. Who wants simply to make accounting changes to programs you’ve already committed to when you could buy votes with more new stuff, or gimmicky, temporary tax cuts?

Grown-ups, that’s who. Responsible lawmakers who understand that they’re setting the state up for another series of painful budget cuts if they keep using one-time money to pay for new or expanded programs that have to be funded every year, not just next year.

Both the House and Senate budgets are based on the assumption that tax collections will grow by hundreds of millions of dollars the year after next — an assumption that is, at best, shaky. If the economy slows at all, there won’t be enough money to keep running the 4K program or paying the new Highway Patrol troopers or buying the gas for school buses or continuing any of the other programs that are being restored to pre-recession levels.

That kind of budgeting was what got us into a fix to begin with, triggering budget cuts that left us with too few troopers on the highways and too few guards in the prisons and too many dangerous mental patients clogging hospital emergency rooms because the state wasn’t able to provide care.

Of course, using the new recurring money to pay for programs that are already in the budget would free up $100 million — on top of another $80 million just recognized last week — in one-time money to spend some other way. That’s money the governor and House want to use to temporarily eliminate the gasoline tax and the Senate wants to use to pay for state and local projects it already put on a wish list.

Neither of those approaches is worthwhile: The gas tax cut would actually encourage more fuel consumption when we should be trying to discourage it. Besides, it’s irresponsible to cut taxes, even temporarily, when you have literally billions of dollars worth of critical infrastructure needs that are going unmet. It’s also irresponsible to spend money on many of the Senate’s wish-list items, from a police substation and streetscaping in Columbia to local museums stretching from Greer to Myrtle Beach. Many of those items — like others scattered throughout the House budget — are no doubt worthy projects, but they are local projects that should be paid for by their local communities. State funds should go to one-time statewide needs, whether that’s new school buses or road and bridge repairs.

Our state simply has too little money and too many actual needs to waste a penny pandering for votes, whether through pork or tax rebates.