OXFORD — A dog and his people moved into our neighborhood not long ago. The dog is yellow. I don’t know if he’s a Democrat. I do know he likes to chase cars.
Or did.
On his first several mornings, he darted out from the garage. A flanking attack. Ferocious.
I was unaccustomed to this. He would startle me. So I would accelerate.
Then one morning I thought about it. “What’s he going to do with my truck if he catches it?”
So the second I saw him burst toward the street, I stopped.
It only took a few mornings before he gave up and stayed in the garage. He knew that if he ran toward my truck, I’d let him win.
I took all the fun out of it.
Now I just get a wry, hang-dog stare.
My prediction for the new year is that by the end of upcoming session, many of the new members of the Mississippi Legislature will be wearing this same expression.
The reason is simple.
Many in the wave of fiscal conservatives who are bringing Republican dominance to the Mississippi House and Senate sought office because they wanted to apply their solutions to the state’s financial knot. They saw years of increased spending and new, often unfunded programs by crops of lawmakers who put their faith in the state’s income rising year after year into perpetuity.
Through the ’90s and for much of the past decade, a majority of state lawmakers were like fishermen who decide to buy a fancier boat and pay for it by increasing their catch. A good plan as long as the nets keep filling. Not so good if storms keep the better boat in the bay.
And, of course, there have been storms of the economic variety — severe ones since 2008 — that have resulted in Mississippi lawmakers patching and pleading, exhausting reserves and dependent on billions of bailout dollars from D.C.
As 2012 dawns, the federal dollars draw scarce. Reserves and nonrecurring cash from a few sources remain available, but the supply is dwindling.
The first budget year the new crop of legislators will control starts July 1.
They won’t have to work hard to downsize government. Mississippi has already had a couple of years with less state revenue. The economy, having ground nearly to a halt, is just now starting to show a pulse.
As with the dog whose joy was chasing my truck, there’s not much “runaway spending” to control.
Further, it isn’t going to be fun to face constituents who are notoriously fickle. They want lower taxes but better roads. They want government cutbacks but Aunt Erma to get superior care in her Medicaid-provided nursing home. They agree that Mississippi teachers are underpaid but think levies on sales and property are already too high.
For the budget year that is now half-over, Gov. Haley Barbour proposed an average 8 percent cut in light of a $634 million “structural deficit.”
To illustrate the challenge, remember that his specifics were reducing Medicaid reimbursement rates, less money for public TV, libraries and community college sports. He also called for consolidated management of the state’s three historically black universities and consolidation of school districts to reduce the total by a third.
Little, if any of that happened. The reaction, in fact, was that the governor had lost his mind.
The big budget challenges in the new year will be funding for the state Public Employees’ Retirement System and our old friend Medicaid.
PERS, a study committee tells us, was clicking along fine until 1999 when lawmakers made optimistic adjustments that haven’t panned out. Now it’s double up to catch up or leave the problem for another day when a solution will be even more costly.
Medicaid can’t be controlled because it is an open-ended entitlement. If people qualify, they qualify.
Education is out there in the wings. Community colleges and universities have offset the state cuts by enrolling more students at higher tuition. K-12 schools have depended more on reserves and local taxpayers. Across the board, it’s been a while since any state employees, including teachers, were provided raises.
If the economy recovers and expands at a fast clip, then the new crop of lawmakers might have their penchant for austerity tested. But as things stand, they’re foiled. State government will spend less — because there’s less to spend.
• Charlie Mitchell is assistant dean at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism. Contact him at cmitchell43@yahoo.com.
