Friday, June 5th, 2009...12:03 pm
Having Trouble Hipping Myself to the Strategy
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I realize that I don’t posess the intellectual resources and strategic accumen of our state’s legislative leaders, but I am having trouble understanding the whole idea of not presenting the budget to the governor. This is supposedly part of some negotiation strategy.
I don’t get it. How does this tip the tactical scales in their favor? I can already envision the converasation:
Adams/Burns: We have a budget for you, but we aren’t going to give it to you until we get what we want.
Brewer: Oh, really? That’s good because I already said I wouldn’t sign it. This saves me the trouble of writing a veto statement.
Someone assure me that this whole thing wasn’t done as a “face saving” gesture.
3 Comments
June 5th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
This is all political theater. As for “face saving” whose face is being saved? Any taxpayer who values his own money will never trust Brewer.
This all goes down to the issue is a 16% increase in the state sales tax going to get approved “reluctantly” or is the governor and the legislature going to reluctantly agree to an 8% sales tax increase.
I don’t doubt that government employees in Arizona are the unmentioned elephant here. They don’t want any more layoff and no more furloughs. The liberal news media will frame any budget that doesn’t presume a tax increase as a apocalypse.
June 6th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Actually, it’s a strategy intended to force the Governor to accept their budget, and it has a better chance of working than did simply sending the budget to her immediately for a prompt veto. Remember, the Governor’s budget relies on a tax increase, presumably approved by the voters. That’s something California voters just rejected. The strategy works like this: send the budget to the Governor late in the game, arguably without time for further negotiation. Tell the Governor that this budget balances the books without presupposing that the voters would approve a tax increase. Reassure her that, if the voters do approve a tax increase this fall, then of course the budget can be revised later to eliminate some of the most painful cuts. In the meantime, though, shouldn’t we plan for the worst? Later, of course, those same people can argue that a tax increase is not needed because the budget is already balanced.
This approach shifts the focus from the painful nature of the cuts in the Legislative budget to the issue whether it’s prudent to adopt the Governor’s budget before knowing if the voters will approve a tax increase.
This explains the odd result that, simultaneously, some members voted yes on the budget only because it would be held, and some voted yes on the budget because they assumed it would be immediately vetoed. Those who voted for the budget in order to “move along the process along” were snookered. Under leadership’s strategy, I don’t think there is a plan to “fix things later” as individual members assumed/were told.
In short, this was actually a clever strategy by leadership to get more people to vote yes on a budget they didn’t like. Some of those yes votes wouldn’t have been there if members thought this was a “real” budget. It’s actually a very smart strategy to try to sell a very dismal budget.
June 6th, 2009 at 10:34 am
From day one of the legislature I have been trying to figure out what the strategy is as there has been a great number of seemingly odd choices by both the lege leadership and governor. I’ve heard all sorts of theories, but I am know leaning more to the explanation that they actually do not have any master plan and this is largely the result of being caught between making cuts that they know will be unacceptable to the majority of the population or raising taxes which they have pledged to Grover Norquist not to do. When faced with a set of difficult choices, the response is often to simply delay the decision hoping circumstances change to offer a better choice.