There’s a story at the Journal Sentinel entitled, Wisconsin candidates’ cost-cutting plans don’t add up. Jason Stein summarizes the candidates’ proposals:
Candidates for governor are sharing more of their plans to slice spending to help balance the state’s struggling budget, but they’re making promises they could find difficult or even impossible to keep.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democrat who has shared the most detail on his proposed spending cuts, faces huge obstacles to achieving a key part of his budget proposal, an in-depth look at candidate plans’ shows.
A Republican rival, former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann, could see a surplus from his savings plan if the economy keeps growing, but only after nixing hundreds of millions of dollars or more in commitments already written into state law. Neither Neumann nor his GOP primary opponent, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, has released many details about how they’ll make these massive cuts. And in the plans that Walker has released, a large chunk of them amount to little more than a bookkeeping exercise.
In Barrett’s case, state figures show it would be incredibly difficult to save a proposed $200 million in a state health program for the poor by insisting that patients be more conscious of costs.
“I don’t know how they calculated that amount or where it comes from,” said Jason Helgerson, Medicaid director for Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, a Barrett ally. “It has some definite challenges.”
(For more on some of Walker’s supposed savings, by claiming that not filling vacant positions counts as a budget cut, see Meet the New Solution, Same as the Old Solution.)
Stein’s story goes on to illustrate other ways in which each of the major party candidates has offered only incredible, unrealistic budget ideas.
With a $2.5 billion dollar project shortfall in the next two-year budget, and budget-cutting proposals that aren’t cuts at all, Wisconsin’s next governor is sure to disappoint voters who’ll be shocked at inevitable, genuine cuts of which they were never told, and never expected to feel.
Cynicism about politics doesn’t come about accidentally, or because people are naturally skeptical. It comes about in ways like the major candidates’ proposals, offerings that dare residents to believe in, or at least look away from, empty claims and promises.