(Mark Noonan) – From the news: “Nevada’s budget woes aren’t only coming from the revenue side, where tax collections for the first quarter of this fiscal year are already off by $53 million.
A legislative panel was told this week that state general fund spending on Medicaid is projected to be $55 million more than budgeted by June 30, 2011 due to higher than expected caseload growth.”
They got it wrong. On both revenues and expenditures, the geniuses who write our budget got it completely and absolutely wrong. And now there will be a special session of the legislature and guess who will pay the price for their errors? That’s right, fellow taxpayers: you and I will foot the bill.
This is not at all unique to Nevada – it is common in all State and local governments and, of course, our federal government is the worst offender of all.
Almost invariably – and, it seems, always during bad economic times – the government projects revenues to be higher than they are and expenditures to be lower. Why do they continually do this? Because they are afraid to make the really hard decisions necessary to balance the budget and, of course, because they simply do not have – and cannot have – the knowledge required to make such predictions.
At the beginning of a budget year, no one knows how much revenue will be generated or how much expenditure will be required. Will there be a sudden boom in business raising revenues? Will there be a major natural disaster requiring heavy additional spending?
No one knows – all estimates are, at best, guesses. It wouldn’t be so bad but the clowns in government always guess in a manner which makes life easiest for them. And then pick our pockets when they get it wrong.
And if they can’t even do basic budgeting correctly, what makes anyone think they can properly do things such as run our health care system? Or, indeed, run anything which directly affects our day to day lives?
And, remember, our legislators are dealing with much smaller things than Uncle Sam and they still got it wrong. Everyone should now properly tremble with fear any time someone comes along to say that the government should be in charge.
We no longer can afford pie-in-the-sky, liberal dreams. The time is long past where any reasonable person can expect government to get it right. Outside a few things – such as law enforcement, national defense, etc – the government not only can’t get it right, but is certain to get it wrong.
And even in the areas where government has a proper role, there are some times miscarriages of justice and waste in defense contracting, and so forth.
Our duty, as conservatives, is to set things right. To stand firmly for balanced budgets, low taxes and a sense of personal responsibility in the broadest sense, which naturally includes a genuine concern for and willingness to help our neighbors.
Democrats from Washington to Carson City are taking their last opportunity to impose their liberal nightmare on Nevada and America – and the results are in: it is a complete failure. But if we don’t fight for core, conservative beliefs, then we may as well not fight at all.
2010 is the year in which we can take back our country and reshape it as the Founders’ intended. All we have to do is hold true and fight hard.
(Mr. Noonan co-publishes Blogs for Victory)
