Tribune: Nixon's Budget "An Excellent Plan for Managing Scarce Funds"
Posted this afternoon by the Tribune's Hank Waters:
Gov. Jay Nixon’s State of the State speech is an excellent plan for managing scarce funds in the coming year.
I kept looking through Nixon’s proposals for obvious weak spots and must say his outline leaves little room for serious criticism...
A few members of both parties said Nixon takes a chance by balancing his budget with a few proposed initiatives not yet passed by the legislature. Of course, they are technically right. Nixon can’t guarantee a balanced budget without knowing whether lawmakers will enact his proposals, but if we were in the governor’s office, we’d do the same thing. The budget is the governor’s primary tool for initiating legislative fiscal policy and urging compliance by the legislature.
This tactic can be taken too far, leaving the chief executive open to charges the budget is being used more to gain political ends than to manage reasonable levels of anticipated revenues.
In his FY2012 budget, Nixon did not get too far across this line. He served the ball into the General Assembly’s court, where lawmakers will find little room or reason to change its general tenor. It’s a good plan projecting achievable, careful fiscal management by both branches of Missouri government that should be the envy of many other states today.
