The Alabama State House voted Wednesday to cut the General Fund budget by nearly $345 million — about 20 percent — for the next fiscal year. While these cuts will not affect education spending, they’ll just do that again next year — it is a painful reminder that Alabama remains under the dominion of out of touch individuals like Governor Bentley and the spineless legislature.
Exhibit A: You can bet your bottom dollar that not one penny of legislative pay will get slashed in these draconian cuts. Why? Well, Republican Senator Scott Beason recently said that, frankly, it’s just too hard on legislators to have jobs outside of the legislative session because of the schedule. Subsequently, the legislature needed a 62 percent pay raise a few years ago. Fair enough; cutting legislative pay wouldn’t make much of a dent in the budget anyway.
Meanwhile, I’m glad that everyone else has it so easy. To balance the budget, the legislature has decided to put the burden on those who should “pay their fair share.” People like the poor (“Get a job already!”), children (“Why don’t YOU have health insurance, HMM?”), and prison guards (“Do we really need more than one at a time at the prison? C’mon!”).
Sadly, visceral responses to balancing the budget on the backs of the dependent by some people in this state will be just those in parentheses, cold-hearted and selfish (you know, just like Jesus). And to be fair, there is abuse in government assistance programs, and some cuts may need to be made. However, we seem to quickly forget all of the things we all rely on the government for. Like roads, for example. Why don’t we just cut out the DOT completely? Well, that might affect people who actually have power in this state, not just the ones who are always burdened with balancing its meager budget on their backs.
We could have elected a programmed computer to go to Montgomery and cut money out of the budget. The reason we have elected actual people is to actually discuss comprehensive ways to solve very large and complicated issues by debate and consensus building. This is not governing, it is taking the easy way out and trying to do simple math with as little effort as possible (only subtraction, please). It’s time for the legislature to at least act like they are trying to solve the budget problem, rather than trying to put the burden of balancing it on those who can least afford it. Don’t worry, though. I won’t hold my breath for that.
Lane Morrison is a graduate student in civil engineering.
