| Mike Pirtle: Legislators need to focus on reality |
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Posted: Sunday, October 25, 2009 7:13 am
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With a budget deficit looming in the range of some $1 billion, take a $100 million here or there, you would think our state legislators would be intensely focused on figuring out what we can pay for, what we should pay for and how we will pay for it come next summer.
Make no mistake, this state is facing a most difficult financial issue next year.
While lots of folk, GOP, Demo and other, are running like crazy to be the next governor, those who don’t make it may well be the lucky ones.
The state made some spending cuts for this year’s budget, but was spared draconian slicing and dicing by handsome sums from the federal recovery largess programs.
Those federal dollars were a huge relief for the state.
But, next year those funds may not be there, and state officials should be scrambling, like most businesses and families this year, figuring out what it has to spend, what it usually spends and what it can not spend.
With a few exceptions, Rep. Donna Rowland’s office noted last week she identified $10 million in spending that could be cut from the budget, our legislators appear to be in the same mode as last session when instead of worrying themselves rightly with our spending priorities, they spent seemingly most of their time on countless guns bills and other at best marginal issues.
So, what issues are legislators studying and committing on this off season?
Well, last week some legislators were whining about communities with red light cameras, just like we have here in Murfreesboro because the public demanded something to cut down on the ridiculous amount of motorists who ignore the traffic signals at the scary risk to the rest of us.
Politically pandering, the legislators, who don’t live here and don’t know what happens on our roads, decided the red light cameras are a tax, not a safety measure.
Bull.
What really makes that annoying is that state legislators were also wasting time last week complaining about what was happening in Washington, treading on territory about state’s rights and other matters they don’t seem to understand have been decided many times by the Supreme Court and a fairly notable event called the Civil War.
So state officials want to tell Washington about how to handle its business and cities likes ours how to handle our traffic problems.
But, the state legislators are doing nothing to figure out what they are going to do about our budget problems next year and that’s really scary. |
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