Tag Archives: Daniels Administration

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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WTF?

Excuse the title of this post, but I just read the lead story in the Indianapolis Star about Litebox–the company that was showered with praise and promises of tax breaks just yesterday by both Mayor Ballard and Governor Daniels.

In my post yesterday, I questioned whether the obviously strange owner had been adequately vetted. Today’s news makes it abundantly clear that the answer is no. In fact, today’s story makes it clear that the company and its proprietor had not been vetted at all.

What sort of process awards tax incentives to a man who not only has no history of entrepreneurial or business success, but who also has multiple unpaid tax liens and judgements against him in his home state? As a policy matter, I have qualms about the practice of “helping” businesses financially in order to lure them to one’s city. But if we are going to play that game–and it is a game–the least we can do is insure that the businesses favored by state and local government are real, and that they pay their bills. If the rationale for these programs is job creation, the least we can do is ensure that the companies that benefit are capable of producing jobs.

This fiasco is a good example of why I keep harping on the issue of competence.

Didn’t anyone bother to check on this charlatan? Or were they so anxious to announce “jobs” that they didn’t bother?

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