I’m sure John Hickenlooper would prefer I didn’t bring this up. But the legislature just got played by the new governor.
Hickenlooper loves to pretend he’s not really a politician. But he just made a very professional political move.
Faced with the latest in the state’s series of devastating budget shortfalls, Hickenlooper did exactly what governors desperately try not to do:
He actually cut the budget where it hurts.
While Republicans praised him for being tough-minded and Democrats didn’t criticize him because he’s a Democrat, Hickenlooper simply laid out the ugly new details of the budget cuts and said that, sadly, this is what budget cuts really look like.
They look like you’re taking $500 away from every public-school kid.
They look like you’re taking $900 per student out of higher education.
They look like you’re closing — or, in our favorite new word, “repurposing” — four state parks.
The only way Hickenlooper could have made the choices before us any starker would have been if he’d brought a smudge- faced urchin along with him to the Joint Budget Committee, cup in hand, pleading, “Please, sir, I want some more.”
Hickenlooper made the anti-Bill Ritter move. Ritter tried to make it easy on the taxpayer by blocking the worst of the cuts, even if he did eventually end up having to kick some mental-health patients out of their beds.
But Hickenlooper doesn’t have the luxury of those one-time federal stimulus funds (yes, those stimulus funds) to help cover the state’s most pressing needs. He isn’t going to raise fees and find himself accused of being a closet tax-hiker. And he decided to increase the reserve fund in case of emergency — say, if he needs to bring Bill Owens out of retirement this summer to inform us that all of Colorado is burning.
Hickenlooper says, repeatedly, that as he toured the state in his gubernatorial campaign, he learned, if nothing else, that there was no appetite among voters for new taxes.
So here it is — Hickenlooper’s no-new-taxes, nowhere-near- enough-money budget proposal.
Which, if you look at it, is a disaster for the state. And given that Hickenlooper’s kid goes to public school, it’s not so good for him, either.
Hickenlooper gets this. He’s the pro-business Democrat who speaks at every opportunity about making Colorado a more business- friendly state. Businesses like low- tax states. They like low-regulation states. But the decision where to move your business doesn’t begin or end there.
As Hickenlooper was telling me the other day, businesses are not inclined to move to states that are grabbing $500 out of the hands of passing schoolchildren. (Let’s just say that’s not a visual the Chamber of Commerce prefers.) Businesses are also not inclined to move to states cutting higher education or, for that matter, states busily repurposing parks.
Colorado is not alone in any of this. Most states have shortfalls these days. And in the aftermath of a deep recession, there is no good way to proceed. You don’t want to make big cuts or watch as teachers get laid off or as government employees get money taken out of their paychecks.
You also don’t want to raise taxes and take money out of everyone’s paycheck.
But you have to balance the budget, meaning you have to make cuts. And even as you’re making cuts, Medicaid costs are soaring. And in the aftermath of a recession, when you can least afford to pay for more Medicaid, that’s when the need, of course, is greatest.
But it’s not just the recession that is causing problems in Colorado budgeting. A report put out by the governor’s office shows that since the 2001-02 fiscal year, state revenues have grown at an annual rate of 0.64 percent, which is to say, hardly at all.
That doesn’t work. Not when your population keeps growing. Not when medical costs keep rising. Not when you have more students to teach. Not when higher ed is struggling and you’re in competition for high-tech businesses.
So where does that leave us?
I doubt the legislature will follow Hickenlooper blindly here. It’s unlikely that school cuts will be as large as Hickenlooper recommends. But the cuts will be significant — and people will wonder what happened to Amendment 23 and how the politicians found their way around it to make these cuts. If K-12 cuts turn out to be smaller, higher-ed cuts will probably have to be larger. And the reserve fund won’t grow.
And if there is no appetite for tax hikes among Coloradans, I’m guessing — and I’m guessing that Hickenlooper is guessing — that there’s no appetite for more of these kinds of budget cuts either. Something has to give. As Paul Krugman put it the other day about proposed federal budget cuts, that’s like eating our future.
Hickenlooper is showing us one choice. You don’t need help from an urchin to see there’s another.
Mike Littwin: mlittwin@denverpost.com
