Reporting on state and municipal budgets is what we in the news business call a MEGO story, as in My-Eyes-Glaze-Over. We know too many voters feel the same way. Aw c’mon, listen to this commentary anyway; after all it’s your money.
So far, the governor’s proposal has been subjected to a wall of opposition from Democratic and Republican legislative leaders and in editorials and op-ed opinions. Democratic leaders including House Speaker Nick Mattiello, D- Cranston and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio, D-North Providence are using the ancient Statehouse cliche, asserting her budget is ‘dead on arrival.”
Much of this vitriol has focused on Raimondo’s proposal to legalize retail marijuana sales, a la neighboring Massachusetts.
Legal pot has been an issue from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. You can make a good argument that the governor should not have put it in the budget. It does, of course, have budget issues –the governor’s bean counters estimate pot taxes would harvest about $22 million in new tax dollars for state coffers.
Yet, marijuana policies have wider implications than mere taxes. There are many other questions surrounding legal weed. How have other states handled it? What provisions can be enacted that best keep it out of the hands of children? How do police handle stoned driving?
So Mattiello and Ruggerio –both opponents of legal pot–have a point about considering this topic outside the narrow budgetary confines of how much tax money retail sales would yield.
Rhode Island lawmakers can easily study the Massachusetts system to determine how to best handle this. Massachusetts has harvested millions in taxes since retail pot shops have opened. Cape Cod hasn’t floated off into the Atlantic. But giving local officials control over licensing these shops has opened the door to corruption, particularly in Fall River, where former mayor Jasiel Correia is under federal indictment for bribery in siting pot stores..
Let’s get beyond the hot-button issues of marijuana and some fee increases. The rest of Raimondo’s budget resembles state spending and taxing proposals across New England, and indeed, across the nation.
Ten billion sounds like a big number. Let’s look at where it’s spent. About $4 billion is general fund money from Rhode Island taxpayers; the rest comes from other sources, including the federal government.
Roughly sixty-five percent of the $10 billion is in just two places -aid to education for cities and towns and social services and medical care for the poor and elderly in nursing homes, mostly Medicaid. Another 23 percent is in personnel costs to state workers. The final 12 percent is in debt service on bonds and the janitorial functions of government–keeping the buildings heated, cleaned and repaired.
Conservatives in the business community love to skewer high salaries of what they claim are too many state employees. Well, guess what, the number of full-time state workers is down considerably from 2006, when the state had 16,500 to about 15,000 now. As far as benefits go, yes pensions are better for state workers than most private sector employees. But salaries, particularly in top state jobs, are much lower than private workers.
In this election year, beware any politician who claims it’s easy to take a knife to the budget. The only way to reduce costs would be for lawmakers to decide to radically change the responsibilities of the government towards we the citizens. That would mean cutting children or the elderly off Medicaid, or reducing aid to schools.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday morning at 6:45 and 8:45 and at 5:44 in the afternoon.
