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The Oklahoman on the Budget

Author:   Matt Deatherage  
Posted: 6/22/06; 11:15:43 AM
Topic: The Oklahoman on the Budget
Msg #: 1662 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 1660/1663
Reads: 3438

For some reason, the Oklahoman's RSS feeds simply vanished for about a week. Last night, I even went to look at the paper's RSS page, and there was nothing there. In fact, there still isn't anything there, but for some reason, the feeds started working again this morning, including this story from last Saturday on the overdue Oklahoma legislature's budget agreement.

As we've discussed, any Oklahoman story about state government has to be read through the Oklahoman's politics filter: Republicans are right and want to give people their money back; Democrats are wrong and want to spend your hard-earned dollars on wasteful stuff, but every now and then they'll spend it on things you like such as roads and schools, even though you shouldn't like public schools because they teach facts instead of faith.

So, we had this budget impasse. The House, controlled by the GOP for the first time in 80 years, refused to move without giving back every dime they could to the richest folks in the state, including completely eliminating the inheritance ("Paris Hilton") tax and dropping the highest state income tax rate. The Senate, still controlled by Democrats forever, pointed to all the things the Republicans said we couldn't afford to fund last year (teacher pay, road repair [which the GOP said we could afford so we didn't have to increase the gas tax, remember?], more money for higher education to avoid double-digit tuition increases, and so on).

So now, we pick up the Oklahoman story by Michael McNutt:

A clash of personalities between politicians looking ahead to elections contributed to a months-long stalemate over the state's $7 billion budget for the 2007 fiscal year that begins July 1.

Gov. Brad Henry, who offered a compromise budget in May when no budget talks were occurring between legislative leaders, prodded the Democratic Senate leader in a meeting Wednesday to end the budget impasse.

Senate President Pro Tempore Mike Morgan, D-Stillwater, satisfied he was able to get as many concessions as he could, had a telephone conversation with House Speaker Todd Hiett, R-Kellyville. The next day, the two met in the morning, and within hours the agreement was announced.

Note the subtle framing: the Democratic-controlled Senate had to get "concessions" from the GOP-controlled House. The House holds the power, and the Democrats had to "ask" for whatever they could get. In reality, each chamber has equal power and both were obstructing the other's agenda.

Henry, who prides himself at being able to work out compromises, wanted the matter settled before legislators adjourned the regular session May 26. He had been insisting state government would not be shut down, and the lack of a budget was starting to be brought up by those campaigning against his re-election.

Sen. James Williamson, R-Tulsa, blamed Henry a week earlier for the lack of a budget, saying Henry didn't have the leadership to get Senate Democrats to approve his compromise.

While Morgan had been cool to the Democratic governor's compromise, Hiett endorsed it openly. In news conferences, he talked about the budget deal he and the governor crafted.

Although Henry and state Treasurer Scott Meacham put together the compromise, some began calling it the Henry-Hiett compromise. Hiett, running for lieutenant governor, didn't seem to mind, aware of Henry's high popularity ratings.

Henry's reward for keeping the budget talks going may be some campaign fodder. While his three main GOP gubernatorial opponents have talked about reducing the state's personal income tax, Henry is poised for the second straight year to sign a record tax cut.

Translation: Gov. Henry's not as good as you think he is. Williamson was playing politics. Hiett is taking credit for things he didn't do. The Oklahoman is unlikely to endorse any of these three in their November elections, but Henry might not get the paper's full wrath if he keeps signing tax cuts for the rich.

Hiett got the tax cuts he wanted, calling the tax-relief package the capstone to the first two years of the House Republican majority. The package includes eliminating the inheritance tax in three years and reducing the state income tax from 6.25 percent to 5.25 percent within four years.

The tax will be lowered each of the next three years until it reaches 5.5 percent. For it to get to 5.25 percent, state revenue growth must equal 4 percent plus the cost of the tax cut.

Morgan, who is hoping Democrats will keep control of the Senate after this fall's elections, received the most criticism for the budget delay.

His holdout reaped him some of his demands, such as an increase in the state's standard deduction to the federal level in four years, $3,000 in teacher pay raises, a 5 percent pay increase for state employees and an increase in higher education's share from $90 million to $130 million.

More subtle framing. Hiett "got what he wanted," but Morgan "held out" for "some" of his demands. There's no indication that Hiett had to give up anything, and every indication that Morgan was the one obstructing the budget in a vain hope of keeping control of the Senate. The GOP's actions are described in terms of benefitting the state; the Democrats' actions in terms of benefitting the Democrats.

Legislators will return Wednesday in a special session. Estimates put the cost of a special session at $32,800 a day. It takes a minimum of five days to pass a bill into law. As a result, lawmakers could get their work done by Friday at an estimated cost of $98,400.

In order to avert a special session, the governor offered his compromise with two weeks remaining in the regular session to get both sides talking. It worked, but Morgan, at the suggestion of some Senate Democrats, rejected the compromise.

The cost of a special session was a huge Republican talking point, especially in an attempt to pressure the Democrats into just caving in on economic support for working Oklahomans or be painted as wasteful spenders for "forcing" a special session. But, again, if two parties refuse to budge, they're both responsible for the impasse. The Oklahoman only portrays Democrats as the problem, although it's unwilling to let Hiett take the credit for embracing Gov. Henry's compromise. As usual, this echoes a GOP talking point: blaming Democrats for the GOP's absolute refusal to budge.

Hiett and Morgan have had an uneasy working relationship since the end of the 2005 session. Morgan was vaulted unexpectedly into the Senate leader's role when Sen. Cal Hobson, D-Lexington, resigned as president pro tempore. Morgan is friendly, but prefers to stay out of the limelight. He believes government should help people.

An indirect reference to Ronald Reagan's famous joke that the scariest words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." People opposed to "big guvmint" would see that instantly, but people who actually do believe in a role for government might not detect it - the Oklahoman's favorite kind of bias.

Hiett, the first Republican speaker in more than 80 years, likes publicity and is an advocate of less government. A main reason he ran for the House 12 years ago was because he felt a state agency had overregulated one of his dairy herds.

The difference in personalities was evident again Thursday. Hiett suggested a joint news conference to announce the deal, but Morgan preferred separate events.

OETA's Oklahoma News Report ran segments of both press conferences, including Morgan's answer to why he didn't want a joint press conference. Morgan said that all Hiett wants to talk about is tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, and Morgan didn't want to have to stand there and not have a chance to speak while Hiett campaigned for Lieutenant Governor. Sure enough, all Hiett talked about was "tax relief."

Some Senate Democrats were irritated that Henry approached Hiett first with his compromise. Some of them, whom Henry served with before being elected governor, were disappointed the proposal included a cut in the state personal income tax rate favored by Republicans. Most Democrats opposed any income tax cut.

"Some" Democrats - no names, no locations, no agendas, and only those who disagree with the "party line." Notice there's no inner GOP squabbling quoting "some" Republicans. Was there any? The Oklahoman won't say.

Nor does McNutt explain that with huge underfunded mandates in corrections, road repair, schools, and more, that Democrats realized that even without tax cuts, the state doesn't have enough money to fund everything it's already supposed to be doing. The paper does not explain how much of the tax cut goes to the wealthiest Oklahomans, but in fairness, neither do the Democrats. It's just a talking point without numbers to back it up.

The impasse over the budget could be traced back to the regular session when Senate Democrats made a misstep in an apparent attempt to gig a couple of GOP lieutenant governor candidates.

The Democratic-controlled Senate passed a measure by Sen. Scott Pruitt, R-Broken Arrow, to reduce the state's personal income tax rate from 6.25 percent to 4.9 percent. Senate Democrats were hoping to box in Hiett, who had drafted a House measure calling for reducing the income tax rate to 5.5 percent. Hiett was opposing Pruitt in the GOP lieutenant governor's race.

Hiett ditched his bill and embraced Pruitt's measure. The House passed the measure and sent it back to the Senate, where Democrats either had to vote against what they had passed days earlier or vote for an income tax cut that they didn't support. The proposal was sent to a committee, where no action was taken.

Did putting one tax cut in committee stall the entire budget? That doesn't sound right, but it's all the Oklahoman offers: bumbling Democrats being played by shrewd tax-cutting Republicans.

It also doesn't sound right on its face: the Senate would have known that Hiett would easily jump at the chance to cut taxes even more than he thought he could. Morgan in particular called Hiett "obsessed" with cutting the top state tax rate: "By refusing to throw the people of Oklahoma under the bus, Democrats in the Legislature have taken advantage of Republicans' insatiable desire [to] cut the taxes of the privileged few to win a tremendous victory for middle class families in our state."

(Republicans say that Gov. Frank Keating proposed increasing the standard deduction, the cornerstone of the Democrats' tax cut "victory," but that Democrats opposed it when the GOP Governor was in favor of it. I have no memory of that, but I'd bet a quarter it was either when the state was hugely in the red or was inextricably tied to cutting all taxes on people who make more than $100K per year or something like that. Keating was a lot like that.)

If the Oklahoman piece portrays the GOP as more of the winners than the Democrats who merely "got concessions" and "gave in," Keith Gaddie at SoonerPolitics.com (sadly, no RSS feed) has a more realpolitik view:

Mike Morgan sure had a good day now, didn't he? Should Democrats hold the Senate, perhaps he and Lance Cargill will be able to work a little better together. The Speaker of the House got a deal that is pretty much what he was offered a month ago, so no win for the Man in the Hat.

…except for this one not-so-realistic part:

Oklahomans, when polled, wanted the spending approved by the legislature. They also know that their neighbors are those public employees and teachers who received those [rare] public pay raises, and they make use of the services provided by those agencies. They just didn't want to pay more taxes to get them.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, was proposing that Oklahomans "pay more taxes." The only fight was about whether to cut taxes, and if so, how much. Oklahomans could have had even more of the spending that they want - on those things that the state is supposed to do, like build roads and run schools - if their elected representatives hadn't been so "obsessed" with cutting taxes for the top tier.

Shame you don't read that much in the Oklahoman, isn't it?


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