Dispatch from the Legislature

Quietly members of the House are growing more and more concerned about the status of the budgets. Today will be our 16th legislative day out of 30 possible meeting days for this session. Usually by this time the House has passed either one or both of the budgets.

When the Governor presented his universally agreed, overly optimistic budgets in January there was a sign that we had some real teeth mashing ahead of us.

The budgets were based upon the idea that revenue growth would be larger than any independent experts have said and Alabama would receive additional stimulus dollars from Congress to shore up Medicaid.

Neither of these has happened yet and the clock is ticking.

Without these additional dollars both budgets will be very difficult for the budget committees to draft. I suspect the higher growth Education Budget can likely weather the storm by slashing away many of the programs that, while popular, can be suspended until the budget makes a recovery.

In short the Education Budget can probably survive. The General Fund is where the real mess comes in.

Medicaid is by far the largest expense in the budget and because it receives federal matching dollars any cuts to Medicaid mean you are really cutting about 4 dollars for every 1 dollar you cut in state funds.

There will need to be some drastic cuts in the General Fund without a doubt but the question for members of the budget committee will be where do you cut?

Not an easy answer for sure but time is running out and I certainly do not believe we should put this off until some special session which will cost an even greater amount to the taxpayers.