Politicians, especially the rhetorically cost-cutting sort now in vogue, like to say when seeking election that they will run the city-county-state-nation (pick one) the way self-respecting business and corporate types run their enterprises or, alternatively, the way We the People are expected to run our households.
There, as they say, is the rub. For, as anybody who follows the burgeoning business press knows, leveraging (i.e, getting into debt and staying in debt, both for a purpose) is a governing philosophy these days. And none of us John Qs need to be reminded of how up to the hilt we are in credit-card debt.
So let us be realistic as we look at the pickle Tennessee state government has got itself into: $400-odd million in obligations, with only some $200-odd million to pay the bills. So what do our elected emissaries -- the governor and the members of the state legislature -- do about it?
Beg, borrow, or steal? State government customarily tries some or all of that. Let's work our way backwards:
Steal? On the larcenous front, what the Sundquist administration has proposed in order to partially meet this year's fiscal emergency is to raid $88 million in reserves from the established and thriving Tennessee Housing Development Agency (THDA), which has had striking success in assisting low-income families in owning their first homes. As almost everyone agrees, that's a hit that would slow THDA to a crawl. Too bad, since the agency's activity is a perfect corollary to one of the administration's successes, the Families First welfare program. Families First, like THDA, is trying to inculcate in its recipients the habit of long-term solvency with some short-term pump-priming. And, unlike Families First, THDA has raised most of its own cash reserves from the success of its mortgage problems. A progressive and self-financing agency is, in effect, about to be penalized for being successful.
Borrow? The state could tap its $101 million Rainy Day Fund. After all, if the fiscal storm clouds aren't active now, when will they ever be considered to be? But state finance commissioner John Ferguson is probably right that the last-resort source of funding should be reserved for those occasions when there is a drastic, unexpected shortfall in the state's projected revenues.
That brings us down to: Beg? Which, for our purposes, means asking the voters to pony up some more cash. By (shhhhh!) raising taxes. It is almost axiomatic these days, of course, that you can't do that. In government circles, it's the tabooest of taboo notions. But we'd like to reopen the argument and say Why Not? Rather than see a favorite child go without college, wouldn't the average self-respecting Tennessee household be willing to take on, say, a second or even a third job somewhere?
As is made clear elsewhere in this issue, higher education in Tennessee is taking a humongous hit in the current state budget under discussion -- $40 million in the state as a whole, and almost $8 million over a two-year period right here at the University of Memphis. University officials are having to cut essential services, including basic teaching and research.
Once again into the vanguard go we, rethinking our current aversion to taxation. In order to shore up some of the services we are now about to send down the tube -- higher education prominent among them -- earmarking a specific new tax or two might be the true equivalent of the self-sacrificing exertions so often attributed to the typical American family.
Simply put, if we want it, we ought to be prepared to dig down and pay for it.