Mike Walker and Mike Ramirez combine to warn us... are we listening? Mike Walker is a retired USMC Colonel and Superintendent of Business Services for a California school district.
What happened to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform report?
Why are we playing partisan games over the Obama and Ryan plans when a very good plan was already submitted? It was not a creature of political bloodletting. Is that why it was ignored in hyper-partisan Washington?
Gee, it was comprehensive, balanced, and bipartisan. It was the product of a very talented group of Americans even for those jaded by Washington shenanigans. More importantly, why are we waiting? We need to act and we need to act now. Here are two stories from the “trenches” of the governmental budget crisis in California.
A Local Lesson
Our school district, like almost every district in California, has been hit with the largest budget cuts since the Great Depression and will likely surpass those cuts in the coming months. Some of us learned that acting early to cut expenditures is everything in an on-going fiscal crisis like the one in California and one America is facing in Washington DC. Yet amid this unprecedented crisis we are not laying off employees this year. Many are asking why. It is because we were amongst the school districts that acted early to reduce expenditures.
When we eliminated around 25 positions for the 2009-10 school year it reduced expenditures by about $1.5M per year. For the upcoming 2011-12 school year that yields a total expenditure reduction of $4.5 million.
Comparable school districts that did not act in 2009 but put off the reductions until 2011 are still facing the same $4.5 million problem. Ours is already fixed. Their problem is not. They now have to eliminate about 75 comparable positions to get the $4.5 million reduction for 2011-12.
That is now gutting their educational program. We will have the equivalent of fifty more professional educators serving the same number of students next year and we met the same $4.5 million goal. The delay taken by our peers was a terrible miscalculation. The lesson is that putting off painful cuts does not lessen the problem it exacerbates it.
A State Lesson.
A few weeks ago the California State Legislature passed a little over $10 billion in cuts to expenditures in order to help address a $26 billion deficit for the 2011-12 fiscal year. If they had made the exact same cuts starting with the 2009-10 budget, something many in and out of Sacramento had proposed, then the immediate crisis would be over and California would be looking at a $4 billion surplus on 30 June 2012. Instead, Sacramento, like a lot of California school districts, resisted making timely cuts. Instead of taking painful yet prudent cuts when first confronted with the crisis they dithered and delayed thereby creating a nightmare scenario in the here and now.
Learn from our mistakes. If we want America to wait until the budget cutting is truly savage in its consequences then do what most did in California, keep playing politics and kicking the can down the road with accounting gimmicks.
If we are serious about fiscal responsibility then we should start by pulling together simply as Americans and implement the Commission’s plan now. There will be plenty of time to have a debate, politically driven or not, over the Obama and Ryan plans later.
Regards,
Mike
