Public Policy and Governance – Page 316

The Legacy of “Our Man Mitch”

The NorthWest Times of Indiana has an article detailing the devastation that tax caps are visiting on Indiana’s municipalities. We can thank Mitch Daniels for leading the charge to place these caps in the state’s constitution, where they will continue to strangle local governments until we manage the difficult job of passing a constitutional amendment.

WTHR relayed the result of an environmental group’s investigation that found Indiana’s rivers and streams the most polluted in the nation–no surprise to local environmentalists, who have witnessed the Administration’s distaste for environmental regulation.

Indiana’s much-touted “balanced budget” was achieved without touching tax breaks for business (and in some cases, by increasing them)–by cutting programs that aid those poor and disadvantaged citizens least able to access the political process or otherwise protect themselves.

And–as we’ve seen over the past couple of months–there’s mounting evidence that this Administration can’t even keep its own books.

Add to these “factoids” the war this administration has waged against public workers, it’s divisive, politically-motivated attack on private-sector unions, its willingness to sell off state assets and privatize everything in sight, and we are left with a legacy that will last long after Mitch mounts his motorcycle and rides off into the sunset.

You’ve got to give the Governor credit: he has created a persona that is entirely at odds with reality. Mitch “the knife” was a disaster as Budget Director; he took Clinton’s healthy budget and proceeded to facilitate creation of Bush’s enormous deficits. His reputation as a businessman, rather than a politician, rests on jobs in “government affairs”–that is, as a lobbyist. His standing in the national party rests on a fiction of fiscal expertise and a contrast with undeniably pathetic competition.

Whoever wins the gubernatorial election in November will inherit a broken state that has steadily been stripped of the tools needed to fix it. Of course, if that person is Mike Pence, he won’t notice. He’ll just add a dash of theocracy and an emphasis on social issues, and finish the task of turning Indiana into Mississippi.

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It’s Only Money

As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed, “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”

P.J., you were prescient!

The headline in the Star tells the story: “For the second time in only four months, the state is admitting it made a massive revenue error.”

“This one cost counties $206 million in revenue that they have been owed from January 2011 to now and which will be repaid with interest as of April 5. The first, announced last December, resulted in a $320 million windfall to the state’s general fund.”

After the news of this latest “programming error” broke, a couple of heads rolled–appropriately, in my view. But the folks taking the fall are hardly the only incompetents in this situation.

As a disgusted (Republican) businessman friend of mine emailed me earlier today,

“So much for fiscal discipline and competent management. If you recall, late last year the State “found” $320 million just sitting in a bank account, having not been “swept” into the general fund as all other tax revenues have/had; now they “find” – oops – that they failed to pay local units of government hundreds of millions of dollars they were owed.

Riddle me this: How can policy makers and legislators pass good/sound budgets when the governor/administration provides such wildly incorrect information on the state of the budget? As just one example, Mitch pushed for the “automatic taxpayer refund” because our fiscal house is in such great shape – the State even calculated that taxpayers will get a whopping $70/person (whoopeee)… Will the state still pay that out and further starve govt and localities of needed revenue for essential services like crime control? And how do we know that calculation was even close to correct?”

The scorn heaped on the “lets run government like a business” Daniels Administration is well deserved; no real business would survive fiscal mismanagement on this scale. But local governments aren’t exactly being run by the sharpest knives in the drawer, either. Didn’t the Ballard Administration notice the city had been shorted $41 million dollars? It’s not like Indianapolis was so awash in money that a missing $41 million simply escaped the notice of those charged with managing the City budget.

When the Daniels Administration “found” 320 million dollars it had overlooked a couple of months ago, the Governor brushed away calls for an independent audit. This latest “whoops!” suggests such an audit is considerably overdue.

State Senator Vi Simpson summed up this whole sorry mess in an email sent out today:

Today, we found out that Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels has mishandled more than half a billion dollars of our money.

While he was out of the country, the Governor’s Office said the state has deprived counties of $206 million in revenue between January 2011 and now. That money will be repaid with interest, and several top officials are resigning in the wake of the scandal.

Last year, Daniels jokingly told reporters that “finding” more than $300 million in missing revenue was like getting an early Christmas gift.

It was no joking matter then, and now that the problem has grown $200 million more serious, it’s starting to feel like Hoosier taxpayers have been the victims of a cruel April Fool’s prank.

I was one of several Democrats who publicly called for an outside audit after the first round of missing money was discovered. At the time, Daniels dismissed it as a partisan plea.

He was wrong then, and now we know his frequent cries for “fiscal responsibility” have never applied to his own administration.

The worst part of this story isn’t the horrendous mismanagement of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars – it’s the fact that local governments have had to lay off police officers and firefighters and reduce services to make ends meet because Daniels was hording their money.

It’s hard to argue with that assessment.

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In Other News, the Sun Rose this Morning….

According to reports in the IBJ and elsewhere, the trial pitting IBM against the State of the Indiana is winding down. At issue are cross-claims about the reasons for and propriety of the termination of IBM’s contract to provide welfare intake services.

According to the IBJ, IBM’s lawyer argued that the real reason for the termination was state budgetary woes. The State’s lawyers defended the termination by complaining that “IBM was more concerned about profit than getting assistance to needy people.”

And the sun rises in the east….

Those of us who study outsourcing have repeatedly made the point that–while contracting can be a useful tool in many circumstances–it is not appropriate in areas where government is providing essential services to vulnerable populations. Despite lots of irresponsible rhetoric to the contrary, government is not a business. It’s purposes and aims are different. Private, for-profit organizations have a duty to shareholders; government agencies have obligations to citizens.

Evidently, this essential distinction escaped the notice of the Daniels Administration, which is now shocked–shocked to discover that a business would prioritize the pursuit of profit.

In other breaking news, it appears that rain is wet.

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…With A Little Help from My Friends

On my way to work this morning, WFYI informed me that today is the day Mark Massa will be sworn in as the newest Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court.

When Governor Daniels announced that he had chosen Massa, there was a good deal of criticism. Some observers expressed surprise that–once again–the Governor had ignored an opportunity to diversify the Court, that–once again–he had declined to appoint an eminently qualified woman. Adding insult to injury, Daniels claimed that his choice was based upon the candidates’ relative qualifications for the job, a manifestly bogus excuse.

I was not surprised by the choice, which I’d predicted well before the commission charged with winnowing the field even sent three names to the Governor. Nor do I believe it had any more to do with sexism than it did with merit.

This is Indiana–the crony state.

There’s a pretty robust academic literature dealing with political culture. Some states (Massachusetts, say) have a liberal culture that promotes public service; others (Arizona, Texas) take a considerably more conservative, parochial approach to the role of government. When I was researching state differences in political culture for a book on the Faith-Based Initiative, I asked George Geib–past Dean of History at Butler University and a long-time Indianapolis Republican operative–how he would describe Indiana’s political approach. His answer was that the framework within which we conduct our affairs is quid pro quo.

Look around at the so-called “privatization” initiatives. Lucrative deals for parking and welfare intake have gone to well-connected ACS. The developer of the parking garage being built in Broad Ripple used to work for the Ballard Administration. A PR firm that gets city business just “happens” to employ Ballard’s son. These are just a few examples that come readily to mind; there are literally hundreds of others.

This isn’t new in Indiana, and it isn’t the exclusive provenance of Republicans. Both parties have practiced politics as spoils system, both have favored their cronies with appointments and contracts.

The problem women have in a crony system is that we are late to the party, and less likely to play the game–less likely to be one of the favored cronies. Nothing against our gender–if we were playing by the good old boys’ rules, we’d probably be equally likely to be rewarded with the plum jobs and/or contracts.

Mark Massa was counsel to the Governor; by all accounts, the two are friends. And in a state where doing business with your friends is the way business is done, his appointment was a foregone conclusion.

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Fifty-One Percent

In a recent New York Times column, Gail Collins observed “the thing that makes our current politics particularly awful isn’t procedural. It’s that the Republican Party has become over-the-top extreme.”

She left out “mean-spirited and patriarchal.”

I was an active Republican for 35 years, but the party I belonged to no longer exists. There is no more striking evidence of that fact than the poisonous brew of policies that have been collectively dubbed the “war on women.”

The party I belonged to made at least some room for good-faith disagreements about abortion. Today’s GOP not only uses opposition to reproductive rights as an absolute litmus test, it proposes to deny thousands of poor women access to basic health services provided by Planned Parenthood, because that organization spends 3% of its own money on abortions.

Sorry you’re dying of breast cancer, sister, but hey—we’re “pro-life.”

Recently, the extremists have ventured well beyond attacks on reproductive choice. The recent fight over access to contraception was a wake-up call. The fact that Rick Santorum has been taken seriously as a Presidential candidate by a major political party, despite criticizing both birth control and women who work outside the home, is simply chilling.

It’s not just the unremitting attack on women’s right to control our own bodies. A larger message is that women and children (at least those no longer in utero) are simply unimportant.

In Washington, the GOP defends subsidies for big oil while it proposes deep cuts to social programs that primarily serve women and children.

Speaking of sending a message: in several states, Republicans have championed deeply offensive bills requiring women to submit to demeaning trans-vaginal ultrasounds before terminating a pregnancy, and they have proposed “personhood” amendments that would redefine most widely used birth control methods as abortion, and outlaw their use.

These and literally hundreds of other efforts—silly and serious—convey a breathtaking condescension to those who comprise 51% of the voting population. That condescension was perfectly captured by Rush Limbaugh—he of the “if you want birth control you’re a slut” rant—when he dismissed the idea of a war on women by protesting that Republican men simply want to “protect” us.

When I first went to law school in 1971, I encountered this sort of patronizing, belittling attitude everywhere. But I have news for today’s smug lawmakers: women are no longer willing to smile sweetly and seethe internally.

Pundits talk a lot about the gender gap. It is going to grow.

Here in Indiana, a group of Democratic women did some electoral research, and discovered that over 400,000 Hoosier women who had voted in the 2008 Democratic primary failed to vote in 2010. Had they done so, a number of results would have changed.

There is always a fall-off in voting in non-Presidential years, and a significant number of those women will probably return to the polls in 2012, but this group isn’t taking that for granted. They have formed a “51% Club,” with the express purpose of making sure women vote in May and November. The 51% Club held its first event last week.

I go to lots of fundraisers, but I have rarely been to one as well attended as this one. There are a lot of angry women—and men—right now.

Gail Collins was right. “You can try to fix that [GOP extremism] by working from within to groom a more sensible pack of future candidates, or from without by voting against the Republicans’ nominees until they agree to shape up.”

Those are the choices. A lot of us have made ours.

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