Monday, August 03, 2009

PA State Budget Crisis

Having a government with no budget is nuts. The state and state agencies have made promises and contracts with people and organizations and now they're not holding their end of the bargain. If an employee of a company fails this miserably at their job, they get canned and the company has to face lawsuits. I propose the following solutions:
  1. If there is no passed budget for even a single day, the state government should be dissolved. Parliamentary democracies deal with this occasionally when they can't agree on important issues, and it forces them to compromise. Special elections should then be held ASAP to replace the government.
  2. If it's illegal for the state to spend money, it should be illegal for them to collect taxes. Days with no budget should be sales-tax and income-tax free.
  3. The state and the decision makers should not be immune from lawsuits for failure to properly run the government. I'm not talking about cash-grabbing: no huge punitive damages. I'm thinking of replacing lost wages of people who still need to eat and pay their rent but can't get paid because Pennsylvania isn't allowed to pay them.
  4. They could avoid all of this by saying the budget stays the same, with inflation increases, unless otherwise ammended. This could be in the state Constitution. Then they can argue all year long about adding or removing individual items from the budget, just like they do for our body of laws. If they want a balanced budget, then base this year's spending on last year's revenue.

1 comment:

Jason said...

You sound like a Republican! Ha! Ha!