When it's all said and done: the main problem with this state's budget.

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In checking out the various news-sources on the net, I stumbled across this headline on the Seattle Times:

Frustrated Gregoire: 'status quo does not work'

Gov. Chris Gregoire has rolled out unprecedented proposals to restructure government as a way to close a budget shortfall approaching $5 billion.

Of course, the only place they're "unprecedented" is by Gregoire, herself... conservatives in the legislature have been trying to implement these reforms, or some variation, for years.

But the article itself isn't the subject of this post; it's the realization that whatever this budget looks like when it's completed, it will be much closer to what the budget should have looked like even if we had the funding available to do more.

Massive, unsustainable expansions of government must be avoided at any level. And the lack of sustainability has been the GOP position for years.

Nothing is happening today in the budget that hasn't been warned about for years. Google Zarelli and sustainable and you come back with 3600 hits.

Even the concept of budget "cuts" is questionable. Are these, in fact, cuts? Or are they more just reductions in pre-programmed increases?

Is, for example, the proposed budget smaller than the current budget? Will spending be reduced to, say, 2008 levels?

Or are we talking about the left's favorite exercise of referring to budgets in wholly arbitrary terms, where there's some sort of unsupportable magic number, dramatically increasing current spending, only to have that level of increase reduced somewhat, and referring to those reductions as "cuts?"

For me, unless the budget comes back lower than it currently is... then there are no "cuts." A reduction in increased spending does not a cut make.

Gregoire, in the headline, tells us: "status quo does not work."

Is this where the governor is to be reminded that the "status quo" is what got us into this shape in the first place?

Failing to address the obviously glaring, gaping issues such as unfunded pension issues... that's the status quo that got us here. And the warnings have been out there for years.

Gregoire and others talk about $5 billion deficits. The State Auditor warns of as much as $24 billion in unfunded liabilities... and the Governor is engaging in misfeasance if this legislative session ends without taking the time to address every penny of those issues.

Will she do it? Or are we going to get more of the... "status quo?"

Our budget should never be increased to rise up to an arbitrary number reflected in projected revenues. Our budget should be designed to spend the least amount of money possible to run this state; it should be designed to keep as much money as possible in the pockets of those paying the taxes, and the ability of our legislature and our Governor to spend money should not be influenced by good or bad economic times, as much as it should be influenced by funding core services and core services alone. (Did we really need to waste 0.5% of our construction budgets on mandated art work, for example?)

And by that I mean that our budgets should be as small as possible, bust... or boom. And no budget should be signed into law with any unfunded liability in state government unaddressed.

But I also recognize that such a perspective is entirely unrealistic. The democrat status quo will see to that.
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