Our Views: Cold turkey on the slush
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If a household faces a budget crunch, the solution is not to turn off the lights. Rather, it’s to cut back on the stuff the family wants to have but for a while can do without.
The Commission on Streamlining Government can’t even get that far. By an 8-2 vote, the panel rejected the idea of eliminating the slush fund appropriations politicians like so much.
What a gutless decision. Down the hall at the State Capitol, another commission is talking about cutting about $150 million from higher education. That’s something on which the state needs to spend more, not less. Yet the basic desire for economy in government gets no traction because of the politics of the slush funds.
Legislators insert the special appropriations in the budget for myriad causes, mostly good ones. Typically, the money goes to local governments or nonprofit organizations, and legislators get the political credit for delivering the goods.
That money is not necessarily a total waste. There are worthwhile things on the list. But they are, clearly, things the state could do without in a major financial shortfall. In any year, they are things local government should fund through its own resources, or nonprofit organizations could raise contributions to pay for.
But that system doesn’t give legislators the political bang for the buck.
While Louisiana might spend billions in the budget, and maybe $30 million can be saved with a quick excision of the slush, the savings are real enough. What is better than that, though, is ending the corrupting influence of political pandering with the taxpayers’ money.
“It’s time to end our addiction to this process,” state Treasurer John N. Kennedy said. His colleagues on the commission did not agree, and that’s a shame.
These special appropriations are a political addiction and going off them cold turkey is the only politically realistic way to approach the problem.
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