Wednesday, December 4, 2013
"When you consider the fact this (Legislative Budget Recommendation) holds the line on spending while investing in our priorities and maintaining adequate reserves, this is the most fiscally responsible budget plan released in many, many years."
—Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves on the Joint Legislative Budge Committee's proposed budget for the 2015 fiscal year.
Why it stinks: Since capturing control of the Mississippi Legislature, and therefore the budgeting process, Republican lawmakers have boasted about putting aside about $100 million per year into reserves, or what is colloquially called the Rainy Day Fund. Republicans such as Reeves like to point out that state law requires following the 98 percent rule, or budgeting all but 2 percent of revenues, to allow for adequate funds incase of emergency.
But "adequate" is in the eye of the beholder.
What's most hypocritical about bragging about meeting the statutory requirement for reserves is that under leadership of Reeves and other Republicans, the Legislature has repeatedly failed to fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program funding formula, which lawmakers created in the 1990s to determine public-schools funding. In total, MAEP has been shortchanged more than $1 billion or between $250 million and $350 million per year. Considering the troubled state of Mississippi's public education, Reeves and his colleagues should realize that it's raining now.
Comments
Turtleread 10 years, 4 months ago
I once joked with one of my Mississippi legislative friends that it should be called The Mississippi Inadequate School Funding Program because it never seems to get to the level it would consider adequate in any year without some funds being urgently needed elsewhere in the budget. To be perfectly reasonable, I don't think Americans in any state really regard education as a prime function, do you? Take a look at the highest paid state employee in a state, who is it? It's not the Governor, not a university president, it's a football coach (or basketball coach). Is it reasonable to be paying Superintendents of Education and Presidents of our colleges over $100,000 a year (or football and basketball coaches sometimes $1 million a year or more) while we have difficulty recruiting teachers and professors for our classrooms? I think the days of the definition of a college being a football stadium with a small college attached are done and the High Schools should refrain from becoming the "farm teams" that feed this entity. The way is through "non-contact" sports played on an amateur basis.
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