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Voices of the Northwest
Sadler's Sense: Learning from the Katrina Moment
A new trend? Why voters are rejecting state spending limits on ballot measures.
By Russell Sadler
Posted on Nov 18, 2005 |
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Has the fever broken?
Tax cut fever started in California in 1978 with that state’s infamous Proposition 13. It raced through Oregon in the 1990s with Ballot Measure 5 and the flawed “cut and cap” Measure 47 and became a national epidemic. The fever appears to have abated in the recent election.
Voters in Washington State, Colorado and California rejected measures limiting spending increases or rolled back tax increases approved by elected legislators.
California voters rejected Proposition 76, limiting state spending and giving the governor sweeping powers that traditionally belonged to the legislative branch of government to cut spending when revenues decline.
Colorado voters rolled back a much-touted spending limit so the Legislature could keep an estimated $3.7 billion over the next five years to pay for the repair of roads, bridges, schools and other public infrastructure and avoid the interest cost of borrowing that money.
Washington State voters rejected a measure repealing a 9.5 cent a gallon gas tax increase approved by the state legislature.
Die hard budget-baiters insisted this is not a trend.
“I don’t see it,” said Grover “I-want-to-shrink-government-so-I-can-drown-it-in-a-bathtub” Norquist, president of the misnamed Americans For Tax Reform.
Norquist is the power behind “the pledge” to vote against all new taxes that he demands all newly-elected members of Congress sign when they get to Washington. If Members of Congress refuse to sign, Norquist recruits and finances candidates to run against them in the next primary. Norquist called Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, once an ardent anti-taxer himself, a traitor to the cause for supporting the rollback of Colorado’s poorly-designed spending limit.
Owens told Colorado voters it was silly to refund $3.7 billion because of an arbitrary limit, then go out and borrow the same amount of money and pay interest just to repair the state’s infrastructure. The voters agreed with Owens.
Oregon voters may have their own moment of truth next year. A cookie-cutter copy of Colorado’s arbitrary spending limit is circulating as an initiative petition. It will be on the ballot if supporters buy enough signatures.
One sponsor of Oregon’s spending limit initiative is Don McIntire, author of Ballot Measure 5, a property tax limitation. McIntire’s 1990 measure reduced property taxes by shifting local school spending from locally raised property taxes to state income tax revenues. The shift amounted to a couple of billion dollars a biennium in new state spending. McIntire is now complaining about “reckless state spending” that his Measure 5 is largely responsible for creating. Can you spell s-h-a-m-e-l-e-s-s?
How do you know when you’ve gone too far cutting government spending? That is a question the budget-baiters have never adequately answered. You don’t know know the answer to that question until it’s too late.
You don’t know you’ve cut spending too much until class size in schools becomes unmanageable or test scores decline. That’s how Californians learned the long term consequences of Prop 13.
You don’t know you’ve cut spending too much until the highways are so snarled that a city strangles on its traffic and major bridges are closed or their load limits are reduced, commuting becomes an ordeal and businesses move out of town because the arteries of commerce are sclerotic. That’s how Washington State learned it wasn’t spending enough money in the right ways to cope with its exponentially growing traffic.
But the most painful way to learn you have cut spending too far is to have a natural disaster --- and no one comes to help or the help that does come is too little, too late.
Call it a Katrina moment.
Dumbfounded Americans watched the slow death of a great American city -- live on CNN.
Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast doing devastating damage. But once the blow blew past, no one came. Then the levees that held the water out of New Orleans slowly crumbled from years of neglect. The pumps stopped. And a crippled city died.
Brownie the Crony Appointment was Brownie the Incompetent when the call came.
What help came was too little, too late.
Thousands have been displaced -- permanently. Many will never return to the Gulf Coast. Katrina has spawned the biggest diaspora in our country’s history. The human cost of government’s failure to spend enough for maintenance and preparedness is sobering.
Perhaps Oregonians will decide they have listened to the budget-baiters and government-haters long enough. Perhaps we will decide we have cut government far enough before we have our Katrina moment to prove we have gone too far.
So, is Grover over?
Probably not. This well-connected, well-financed political hustler has the multiple lives of an alley cat.
But Norquist’s influence is considerably diminished. It was strangled and drowned in a bathtub named New Orleans when a Katrina moment demonstrated that zealots like him can go too far.
Copyright © 2005 by Russell Sadler
Russell Sadler is a journalist and a lecturer at Southern Oregon University. You may write him c/o publisher at westbynorthwest.org. Visit Sadler's Sense column's at West By Northwest.org:
Sadler's Sense: A Right to Die?
Sadler's Sense: Who Are These Candidates Representing?
Sadler's Sense: The Birth Tax
Sadler's Sense: The Thin Veneer
Sadler's Sense: Gas Policy After Katrina-- Oregon Can Lead the Way Again
Sadler's Sense: Oregon's Supreme Court Take on "Takings" Flies on Eagle Wings
Sadler's Sense: Legislature's Sandbox Politics Irresponsible
Sadler's Sense: Beyond Dorchester - Can Our Traditional Parties Stand for Anything Substantive?
Sadler's Sense: The Oregon Gasoline Tax, Pork Barrel Projects and Big Brother
Sadler's Sense: A Classic Conservative Judge Who Conserves the Law
Sadler's Sense: On the Economic Ramparts--The Northwest, Defazio and CAFTA
Sadler's Sense: Can Dissatisfaction Become a Wave for Political Sanity?
Sadler's Sense: Oregon's Public Lands Patrimony in Danger Once Again
Sadler's Sense: Driving a Road to State Religion?
Sadler's Sense: Remembering Roy Lieuallen and his Legacy
Sadler's Sense: The Big Sky Game: Manufacturers, Airlines and Competing Visions
Sadler's Sense: On Death: Our Challenged Autonomy
Sadler's Sense: Who Is in Charge of the State's Purse?
Sadler's Sense: The Risks of Shifting Higher Ed.'s Costs and Who Pays
Sadler's Sense: The Good Ship School Finance Is Sinking
Sadler's Sense: Infrastructure Renewal Needed
Sadler's Sense: The Unlikely Poster Child for Measure 37
Sadler's Sense: Of Myths, Money and Machines, Why We Blame the Owl
Sadler's Sense: Not Window Dressing
Sadler's Sense: From Constantine to George, God's Will and Secular Power
Sadler's Sense: Credibility or State of Our State
Sadler's Sense: Look in the Mirror, Oregon
Sadler's Sense: Why We Must Pay the Piper Now
Sadler's Sense: A Short History of Measure 30
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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