Apr 28, 2008 12:09 pm US/Eastern
"The Budget Rope-A-Dope"
Jim Defede Writes Columns Exclusively For CBS4.com
See Jim's Commentary On CBS4 This Morning
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
Late Sunday, senior House and Senate Republicans in the Florida Legislature wrapped up negotiations on the state budget. I'm still going through the finer points of the plan but here are a few initial thoughts.
Several of the more egregious cuts I previously wrote about, have been restored, including funding for:
- The Pediatric AIDS Network
- Restoration of 71 child abuse investigators that were cut from the Department of Children and Families
- Drug treatment programs for 44,000 inmates
- Hospice care for 8,000 terminally ill Medicaid patients
- Hospitalization costs for 16,000 transplant patients
In order to fund many of those programs, legislators – at the urging of Gov. Charlie Crist – dipped into the Lawton Chiles Endowment fund for $355 million. (Created with money the state received from its lawsuits against the tobacco industry, the fund has about $2 billion in reserves.)
But before anyone begins celebrating that the worst has been averted, there are many more programs that were not spared and the pain those cuts will inflict will be immeasurable.
This is the game legislators play. They propose horrific cuts that they know no one could possibly agree too, so that when they restore them, they will look like heroes and no one will notice the inconceivably cruel cuts that remain.
State Rep Dan Gelber, the Democratic leader in the House, described the process as a budgetary rope-a-dope by his Republican colleagues.
"This happens every year, we scream and holler and we say, `How can you do this,' and as it gets more and more horrific, all of a sudden a little bit of money is backfilled," Gelber told me. "And in this case, [$355 million] may seem like a lot but when you think about a $7 billion cut to Florida's budget, it's nothing to run around and get happy about."
There are still massive cuts to education, which for the first time will leave our schools with less money per student.
There are still cuts to community colleges and state universities, the latter being required under this budget to raise tuition by 6 percent.
Funds for nursing homes have been reduced as has the state requirement to guarantee a humane ratio of patients to nurses has been scrapped.
Local hospitals and health clinics will lose almost $500 million under this budget, which will have an impact on the care they are able to provide.
There continue to be cuts in services to foster kids and a loss of funding to help parents who adopt children with special needs.
"It's horrible," Gelber says.
Republicans managed to set the agenda in Tallahassee in a way that diverted attention away from the state's underlying problems. The state's economy is in shambles, and its budget is in freefall. But rather than pitting one vital program against another in this budget process, legislators should have debating ways to raise revenue by closing some of the special interest and corporate tax loopholes that deprive the state every year of billions of dollars.
One of the more ridiculous loopholes allows large multi-state corporations, such as Wal-Mart, to avoid paying corporate income tax by transferring the profits they make in Florida to states where they don't have to pay taxes.
That one loophole costs the state $400 million a year.
But Republicans refused to consider closing that loophole or others.
"A lot of the Republicans who sit on these health care committees will talk about the choices they are making," Gelber laments, "the choice between a pediatric liver transplant program or a sickle cell screening program, or an autism program versus a healthy kids program.
"It is really amazing to me that this could happen," he continues. "We're not having the discussion about priorities. We're not deciding whether some tax loophole we gave some special interest is more important than sickle cell screening or pediatric liver transplants. That debate is not happening. All you hear is sound bites about how we have to tighten our belts. And that's kind of silly because none of the guys up here are going to have to tighten anything. They are not feeling any of this pain; it is rolling down hill on the backs of our seniors, on the backs of our children, on our schools. That's where it is going and that's the real tragedy."
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