Is Missouri Legislature about to play shell game with stimulus?
JEFFERSON CITY — Take your pick of old Chicago subway cons: the shell game or three-card Monte. One or the other will be offering direction to the Missouri Legislature and Gov. Jay Nixon as they decide how to spend the federal stimulus money.
A big pot of the money is intended to fill gaps in two state areas of spending: Medicaid and education. Many states are having serious problems meeting the generally high budget demands of those areas. Missouri isn’t as bad off as some, so the question that Missouri Republicans had in a stimulus hearing this morning is this: Can the state legally take some of the federal money to replace general revenue, and then use that general revenue to fund one-time construction projects?
The answer from the National Conference of State Legislatures was, well, no, unless the Legislature is tricky about it. What the lawmakers can do, said an NCSL staffer, is use general revenue that might have gone to education to fill a gap in another part of the budget, and then fill the education “hole” by using the federal money.
“This is a matter of playing a shell game really,” the staffer said. “It’s a matter of appearance.”
“We just need an additional shell,” said Sen. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia.
Sen. Scott Rupp, R-Wentzville, the chairman of the committee, preferred another analogy. “It’s four-card Monte.”
Rupp then asked Nixon policy director Jeff Harris if the governor was willing to use the stimulus money in this fashion, so the legislature could then free up general revenue for one-time funds. Rupp, recall, got into a tiff with Nixon over the appointment of Linda Martinez as the director of development.
Perhaps that’s why Harris was a bit argumenative (Rupp was, too), and wouldn’t quite give in to Rupp’s line of questioning.
By the end of the meeting, Sen. Victor Callahan, the Democratic minority leader, tried to play peacemaker and suggest that everybody’s on the same page. There’s lots of money, Callahan said, and in the end, everybody will get their piece of the pie. At least Missouri isn’t like South Carolina, Callahan said, where the governor is considering not taking the stimulus money.
“I’m happy we’re not in South Carolina,” Callahan said. “And I hope, by the way, we get some of that moron’s money.”
Meanwhile, Nixon is continuing to tout his new web site tracking stimulus proposals from citizens. The site has produced 440 proposals in the first 24 hours, Nixon said. What are they? The site doesn’t say.
It’s no shell game if Jefferson City tells up front what they’re doing, and they are. Give it back to the people who earned it, who then will use it to restart the economy more quickly that bureaucrats and politicians ever could.
As to the federal money, we don’t have the first dollar of McCaskill’s and Obama’s “free money.” We’re borrowing it from our grandchildren. When Obama and Congress passed this joke, they also stuffed it with hidden turkeys that will be coming out of hiding for months.
You can try to spend yourself rich, but it won’t work. You can try to borrow yourself out of debt, but it won’t work. A pathetic touch was Hillary Clinton in Asia, pleading with China to keep buying our debt.
What makes it pathetic is Hillary pleading with China to keep buying George Bush’s debt after her husband gave the dyslexic spend-thrift cheerleader a budget surplus.
http://www.academycomputerservice.com/economics/charts.htm
Red Collar,
Do you support the call to have Rich Chrismer, Ed Martin and the other Blunt administration convicts to return all the tax money we gave their lawyers for their roles in the e-mail/Scott Eckersly scandal?
That’s a lot of money that could do a lot of good for Missouri families. I’d hate to think you just came on here to take shots at McCaskill.