Blunt budget boast blasted
Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt celebrated his leadership this week with a news release that claims that he has created “strong budgets, surpluses, while other states see red.”
The release adds: “Gov. Blunt’s strong, conservative fiscal management of Missouri’s budget turned an inherited $1.1 billion deficit into three surpluses in a row. In April, the National Conference of State Legislatures reported that Missouri is one of only 13 states projecting stable or optimistic revenue outlooks for 2009.”
Not so much — or so fast — counters the Missouri Budget Project, a liberal think tank whose chief economist Tom Kruckemeyer was a senior Missouri budget official serving both Republican and Democratic administrations.
In a report released the same day as the governor’s boast, MBP countered that “if it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.”
The project report argues that, contrary to the Blunt Administration’s implication, Missouri has been spending more than it takes in, and the surplus is an accounting mirage.
Specifically, the report claims, the Blunt administration has been using a one-time pot of unspent funds essentially as an accounting method to make it appear that the state is operating at a surplus, when the reality is that Missouri has a structural deficit that will hit the fan next year and the year after.
Any Blunt boosters or other budget watchers care to critique the Missouri Budget Project’s findings?
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Eddie Roth writes about education and social justice. He recently joined the Post-Dispatch editorial page after six years as an editorial writer with the Dayton Daily News. But he is not new to St. Louis. Eddie grew up in Webster Groves and south St. Louis County. He's a lawyer who for many years practiced with a downtown firm. He and his wife, Jeanne, and their three daughters, Emily, Julia and Alice, lived in the Shaw Neighborhood, where he was active in neighborhood affairs, and now have made it their home again. He also served a term on the St. Louis Police Board. When it comes to community organizing, he endorses Quentin Crisp's advice: Rather than keeping up with the Joneses, it's better to pull them down to your level. 
This doesn’t surprise me at all. There was obviously something wrong when one understands what is actually happening to the US economy and realize that Missouri isn’t some miraculously blessed state above all others. When are people going to realize that Blunt is part of that Republican element that has a love for distortions? It is nothing but evil clear and through.
I must admit that Sara Steelman is not of this element of Republicans. It is so shocking how so many of rural Missourians fall for these calibers of people and continue to place them into office.
There are some of these types in the Democratic Part also, I must admit.