Posted on 08/07/2008 3:43:15 PM PDT by BOBWADE
Below is Gov. Matt Blunt’s discussion of his budget policy over four years in the context of a major editorial with a cartoon that appeared on Wednesday, July 30, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Gov. Blunt’s op-ed was not accepted for publication by the newspaper.
Insolvency to Surpluses: The Facts about Missouri’s Budget
By Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently stressed the importance of understanding the state budget. They should follow their own advice.
Missourians deserve to know the facts about the state budget.
The budget we inherited after years of liberal control in Jefferson City was an insolvent wreck, with a deficit of $1.1 billion. The budget my successor will receive is balanced, with a surplus. This is an established fact. Even liberal politicians acknowledge the surplus when they announce unsustainable plans to spend it on bigger government. It is regrettable that the newspaper is in denial about the dramatic improvement in Missouri’s budget.
In many states, the budget is in shambles. In Missouri the opposite is true. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) reported that 30 states face significant budget problems. Here, we are fiscally fit, with revenue growth, ongoing savings from management and program changes, no new taxes, and large increases in funding for education. NCSL reported that Missouri is among only 13 states with a stable or optimistic revenue outlook for 2009.
Our 2008 budget just posted the third consecutive surplus of my administration, with an ending cash balance of $833 million. As The Associated Press noted, this is Missouri’s strongest surplus in at least 20 years. Further, the rainy day fund for emergencies has grown from $463.3 million to $557.3 million since 2005.
Other newspapers have praised the responsible stewardship that rescued Missouri’s budget from insolvency. It is against the Post-Dispatch’s editorial beliefs that it is possible to balance the budget, increase education spending, provide medical care for those in genuine need, and meet the state’s other responsibilities, all without raising taxes. It is possible to do this. It is what our Administration just did.
In January 2005, I inherited a budget that included a $1.1 billion deficit. The budget had spending of nearly $7.13 billion, against revenues of only $6.98 billion, leaving us $148 million short in our operating budget. Additionally, the deficit included $790 million in mandatory spending that would have been necessary to sustain the old way of doing business and more than $68 million for other required payments. The deficit was not a list of suggestions as the Post-Dispatch asserted. For example, it included $460 million to pay for the growth of the old Medicaid system - a system attempting to provide public assistance to more than one out of every six Missourians and failing to even verify the eligibility for nearly a third of those who signed up.
On March 6, 2005, the newspaper presented its editorial remedy for the budget wreck. They suggested I propose a tax increase. We did not raise taxes. Instead, we cut taxes, three times. We made difficult decisions to control spending. We overhauled state government to produce savings and greater efficiency in the use of taxpayer dollars.
We reduced the number of state employees to below 60,000 for the first time in years. We proved wrong those who “knew” it was impossible to achieve financial stability without job-killing new taxes.
The editorial further misled readers about education by selecting 2001 as a funding baseline. Records will show I became Governor in 2005. The assertion that my administration increased elementary and secondary education by only 4.85 percent “more than in 2001” is extremely misleading. Working with the General Assembly we have increased K-12 funding by 17.2 percent or $440 million.
As with K-12, the editorial used 2001 data to mislead readers about higher education. Higher education funding in 2001 was $960.4 million. The next administration then cut this by $98 million, or 10.2 percent. My administration increased funding for colleges, universities and students by $166.5 million, or 19.3 percent, to more than $1 billion, the largest ever higher education budget and the first to exceed $1 billion.
This does not include the additional $335.3 million we provided to higher education through the Lewis and Clark Discovery Initiative. Thus, the total infusion of new funding for higher education during my term has been more than a half billion dollars.
The tax relief we provided to taxpayers was directed primarily to seniors, military veterans, health care and manufacturing jobs. But the editorial implied that these “lost” revenues would be reductions in future budgets. In fact, they are incorporated into our budget projections. The newspaper’s error has the effect of double-counting the impact of tax relief. I do not view a tax reduction as taking money “away from” the government, or as a “loss” to the government. Tax relief is returning taxpayer money to taxpayers. We need to do more of this, not less of it.
I hope that my successor shares my principles of good government. If Missouri follows the lead of liberals with radical proposals to dramatically increase welfare spending, the surplus might be sustainable for a few years, but this will eventually drive the state to either bankruptcy or a tax increase. If we continue on the path of fiscal responsibility, Missouri’s budget will remain strong and we will avoid the budget collapses that other states are experiencing because they failed to rein in spending.
Gov. Blunt’s Office Responds to Nixon’s Misleading Statements on Higher Education
JEFFERSON CITY – Rich Chrismer, Gov. Matt Blunt’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, today issued the following statement responding to Attorney General Jay Nixon’s misleading statements about the governor’s higher education initiative:
“Jay Nixon attempted to mislead Missourians and reporters in a conference call yesterday. Jay Nixon asserted that the governor’s higher education initiative, which has been heralded by colleges and universities across the state, would be ‘harmful to student loan holders.’ How can the initiative be harmful to our state’s student loan holders when the plan sold out-of-state loans in order to benefit students who are attending colleges and universities in Missouri? We have said repeatedly, and Jay Nixon has to know, that the Lewis and Clark Discovery Initiative was funded by the sale of loans to out-of-state students who very rarely attended a Missouri school. How does it harm a Missouri loan holder to sell a loan held by a Californian and used to attend the University of Arizona? Answer: it does not and in fact Missourians benefit when the dollars are brought home to Missouri. We are calling on Jay Nixon to stop his misleading statements and tell the truth about higher education. Jay Nixon needs to use facts in his campaign.
“Here is a fact: students at thirteen Missouri universities – including the four-campus University of Missouri system, ten Missouri community colleges and Linn State Technical College - will all benefit from Gov. Blunt’s Lewis and Clark Discovery Initiative, which is providing $335 million to these institutions of higher learning. The presidents of each of these colleges and universities support the initiative. Jay Nixon wants to end the funding and withhold it from these colleges and universities. Missouri’s students, colleges and universities cannot afford to return to the old way of education withholdings and cuts.”
THAT is awesome!!
No wonder the fading Democrat newspaper didn’t publish this.
This is why we refer to our home newspaper as “The St. Louis Post-Disgrace.”
I call it the ‘past disgrace’
actually, that’s Past Disgust’
sorry to post and run, I had to run after the kids and just got caught up. This was great to see him fire back and the liberal rag and point out their lies.
The St Louis Post-Dispatch is worthless.
Not to mention the disabled taxpayers that had to quit their jobs and move to care facilities because the Governor in his infinite wisdom took their stipends away. Or we could talk about the kids that have fallen through the healthcare cracks because their parents make a $1 too much for Medicaid and not enough to have private insurance. Yep, all hail the balanced budget. Balanced on the backs of old people, the disabled and the children. They always get the cuts first.
Gov. Blunt Issues Open Letter to Missouri Newspaper Editors in Response to “Rural Chic” Editorial
JEFFERSON CITY – Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following open letter to Missouri newspaper editors and publishers in response to an editorial entitled “Rural Chic” that appeared on Sunday, August 3, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Dear Missouri Editors:
In a recent editorial, “Rural Chic,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ridiculed political candidates who identify themselves with the traditions and values of rural Missouri.
All candidates and statewide officials should know that agriculture is the bedrock of Missouri’s economy. It also is the dominant wellspring of our culture. Producing food and fiber for America and the world is a life-giving and life-sustaining occupation. It deserves honor, not condescension. Farming is difficult work, tougher and more challenging even than writing elitist editorials.
Missouri has the fourth most diverse economy in the nation. We take collective pride in offering ourselves as a microcosm of America with large cities, small towns, suburbs and farms. We build airplanes and cars, grow corn, raise hogs and cattle. In the heart of St. Louis wonderful non-profits like the Danforth Plant Science Center and great companies like Monsanto are helping to feed the world. We are an ethnic, cultural, and religious mosaic.
Agriculture is a unifying element in our economy. For example, St. Louis is a major center of agribusiness, representing 12 percent of the area’s economic output according to the St. Louis Agribusiness Club. Does the elitism and divisiveness of the Post-Dispatch represent the mind of St. Louis? Certainly not. Does the newspaper’s disdain for Heartland Missouri tell us something about the increasing isolation of parts of the established media? Yes, I suppose so.
In “Rural Chic,” the newspaper finds quaintly hopeless nostalgia in popular attitudes about farming. The “Agrarian Myth” is the editorial’s chosen label for what it believes is an idealized portrayal of farming. But it is insulting and demeaning to be told that one suffers from nostalgia if one farms, wears cowboy boots, hunts, fishes, loves gospel music or drives a tractor.
But we all know the interlinear text of such an editorial, do we not? Where one finds cowboy boots and churches, there one also finds respect for our basic values. There one finds the big majorities against same-sex marriage, which was opposed by a solid majority of Missourians including St. Louis County where the effort to allow same-sex marriage was defeated by 54,000 votes. It is in the Missouri Heartland that one finds no interest in job-killing new taxes - and in many other places, too, but that’s another story. And there, in those rural areas and small towns and Heartland cities, one finds many conservative voters who do not subscribe to the liberal viewpoint of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
I understand the newspaper’s continuing anxiety that way too many people in Missouri keep turning up with good common sense and electing leaders who believe in the values of faith, family and community rather than big government. The paper should not give such a hard time to Democratic candidates for pretending to like guns and gospel music, and so on. Usually, people in the Heartland can spot a fraud the first time out. If they do get burned once by a Post-Dispatch liberal disguised in cowboy boots, it will not happen a second time, when the person next appears on a ballot.
Sincerely,
Matt Blunt
Missoura was going broke. They had to reduce expenses. The givaway programs took the hit first.
“Missoura was going broke. They had to reduce expenses. The givaway programs took the hit first.”
It’s MissourI. Yeah, they always have to “reduce expenses” on the backs of the least able to afford it.
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