Planning the family budget is a relatively easy task as long as you know where the money is coming from and you are pretty sure the flow of dough won’t be abruptly cut off.
Any uncertainty over the source of your income can quickly cause sleepless nights and a whole host of “what if” questions such as what if that source goes south? What would we do?
Welcome to the opening annual budget writing assignment under the capitol dome where unfortunately for the governor and the GOP house and democratic senate, the uncertainty cloud is hanging over the progress like an early spring tornado poised to touch down. And no one is sure if it will or won’t.
Thank you President Donald Trump, the Democrats are savvy while the Republicans are much more sanguine about losing federal aid.
It may shock you but a whopping 42% of the state budget is predicated on manna from D.C. and during normal years, federal aide was not always a gimme but pretty darn close.
Now with waste-hunter Elon Musk in the game trying to squeeze billions of dollars out of federal spending, anything is possible.
So when the governor’s office took the wraps-off the governor’s $82.5 billion dollars plan to spend your tax dollars, many budget committee Democrats were falling all over themselves with ominous comments on President Trump’s cost cutting march.
“We are all painfully aware of what federal disruptions look like over the past week with the federal freeze,” lamented Oakland County Democratic state Senator Mallory McMorrow.
Next was state Senator Darrin Camilleri who wants to protect the governor’s recommendation to spend $10,000 on every public school kid in the state.
He looked the state budget director in the eyes the other day during the presentation and asked his “what if” question of Jen Flood.
“What do we do to make up that $2 billion in cuts to the school meal program for all, the Title 1 funding for at risk students or the Title 9 federal aid protecting women in sports?”
Ms. Flood, who of course has no influence over what the Trump administration does, stated the obvious, “the news of cuts would cause a lot of chaos in state government...we don’t have a crystal ball.”
No duh. The question was, if that happens, what do we do?
The deputy budget director hoping to toss his boss a life-line chimed in with, “some different decisions would be made as programs would be impacted.”
What Kyle Guerrant said, without saying it, is that any loss of federal cache would force state lawmakers to slice and dice away at state services until the lost revenue was madeup. Suffice it to say lawmakers would rather spend than slice.
So while the doom and gloom Democratic critics of the wouldbe federal cuts bemoaned the possible presidential rollbacks, the GOP chair of the house budget committee was taking all this in.
And when quizzed on her reaction she did not hold back and certainly did not couch her thoughts in perfumed bureaucratic lingo ala Mr. Guerrant.
“I think it was unnecessary hot air,” Rep. Ann Bollin (R-Brighton) began her staunch defense of her new president. “It’s putting noise in the room that’s unnecessary,” if you didn’t get her message in her first “hot air” remark.
She notes there has not been any notification from the White House that Michigan will lose money and she wanted her colleagues to know, “we still have a state to run.”
To underscore her reaction there was this: “I don’t think that the president or the federal government wants to cut people off at their knees. They want to make sure they are getting good value for the tax dollars.”
And when the Democrats heard that one of them might have been thinking, it’s not the knees we are worried about. It’s the heart and soul of citizens who need state services who won’t get them that we really worry about.
And so the R’s and D’s will commence to write a state budget with the latter looking over their shoulders wondering what Mr. Trump will not do for the state but to the state.
