Who is the fiscally conservative governor?
Special Commentary by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
The small but cheery group of Republicans who are doing what they can to boost Jim Gilmore in his Senate race against Mark Warner are heartily pushing, following Gilmore’s lead, the notion that he is a fiscal conservative and that Warner is a tax-and-spend liberal and so you ought to vote for Gilmore because he’ll make sure your money is spent wisely.
Part and parcel to this idea is the dizzying array of numbers that the hacks have been throwing at the wall in hopes of distracting us enough that more of us will begin to believe the hype that they’re trying to get us to buy.
It doesn’t seem to be working, of course, which I say considering the poll data that has Gilmore trailing Warner somewhere in the 25-point range. Which is probably why no one in the media has picked up on the lie that is the message that Gilmore is the conservative and Warner the liberal in the ’08 Senate race.
I analyzed numbers from the Virginia Department of Planning and Budget web page that show that Gilmore and Warner are very much in line with each other as budget writers – and that, perhaps surprising to some, Tim Kaine is the most fiscally conservative of the bunch.
Here’s what I did – I looked at the bottom-line operating budgets for fiscal years dating back to 1997, the third year of the George Allen administration, through to 2010, the second year of the current budget biennium and the fourth and final budget year under Kaine. I used the final budget of each governor’s predecessor (beginning with Gilmore, who succeeded Allen in 1998) to set the budget base, if you will, and then judged the growth during their administration by comparing where they started (the base) to where they finished (the bottom-line operating budget for the final year of their term in office).
Pretty simple, I think. So here’s what we get. The final Allen budget, for fiscal-year 1998, was set at $17.6 billion. Using that as the base for the Gilmore years that followed, we skip ahead to the 2002 fiscal year, in which Gilmore and state legislators agreed on a $23.5 billion budget. Expenditures grew by $5.9 billion using my metric here, or 33.5 percent.
This gets us to the Warner years. That FY ’02 budget of $23.5 billion is the base that we will use to begin our look at the Warner impact on the budget. From there we look ahead to FY ’06, when Warner and the General Assembly adopted a $31.9 billion state budget. That represents growth in annual expenditures of $8.4 billion, or 35.7 percent.
That’s a difference in budget impact between the two of 2.2 percent. Hardly, then, could the case be made that one is a tightfist and the other a spendthrift.
Just for fun, I wanted to look at the Kaine years to see where he fit in as far as this comparison would be concerned. We use the $31.9 billion budget of FY ’06 as our base, and then look ahead to FY ’10 and the on-paper budget of $38.3 billion, which we can expect to retract a bit given the current budget shortfall that should lead to at least a few targeted budget cuts to get spending in line with revenues. But just using the current statutory guideline as our comparison point, we have growth on the order of $6.4 billion annually in the Kaine years, or 20 percent.
Turns out I was doing more than having fun there. I’m thinking of the silly comments made by House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith to the effect that Kaine is someone who has trouble with budgets considering the shortfall situation that we’re in right now. I guess we can chalk that up to cheap politics, considering that Kaine is, by this measure, anyway, the most fiscally conservative of our most recent three governors.
But then, that’s something based in fact, and we all know that in politically charged election seasons facts aren’t a primary focus.
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FY 2002 to FY 2005 Warner spends 5.9 billion.
FY 2006 to FY 2007 Kaine spends 5.8 billion.
When is reality going to set in, or do you want to continue embarrassing yourself?
Jim Gilmore has sent $6.1 Billion dollars in Car Tax reduction back to the tax payers during the last ten years…. Since FY 1999.
Quiz, Which governor of the above has helped the tax payer more over the last decade?
Jim Gilmore is running as the much more fiscally conservative of two candidates in the U.S. Senate race, and as my numbers show, and Chris Green for obvious reasons doesn’t dispute, that is clearly not the case. Case closed.
The Gilmore surrogates, of course, can’t possibly acknowledge this fact, because that would require deviating from their rather limited script. “Car tax. Car tax. Car tax. Car tax.” So they are reduced to obfuscating as Chris Green does above.
In spite of Chris Green’s continued personal insults, I still say that I think his heart is in the right place. He thinks he’s doing the right thing by sticking up for his favored candidate, and for whatever reason, people like Chris think that the best way to do so is to lash out with this kind of invective.
I’ll continue to root for Chris to mature as a blogger and figure out ways to actually address points made by others in columns and forums and not have to reduce himself to embarrassing his good name and that of his political party by hitting the send button on comments like the one above.
Chris:
You can just say I am mean spirited, but the fact of the matter is that the difference between Gilmore and Warner is that Gilmore lowered tuition 20%, and froze it for four years.
Warner, depending on the rate of growth at each university, it has only taken four years of his administration and two of Kaine to double tuition across the system!
Taxes… Gilmore has sent $6.1 billion back to the citizens, while Warner only raised taxes, and did so while masking the fact that his finance chief had informed him three months before he pled poverty to the General Assembly that we were in a surplus…. A $336 million dollar surplus!
Now with these facts…. which Governor was a fiscal Conservative for the people…. not the Democrat/ic Liberal definition of spending as much as possible, then raising taxes even more to meet the spending needs of govt.
I wouldn’t say you’re mean-spirited, just sometimes awkward in the way you present your points.
I would counter your above points this way -
- The tuition freeze was artificial, and put public colleges and universities in a position of having to consider massive service cuts. When Warner lifted the freeze, tuition had to go up to account for the artificial pressure downward from the Gilmore years. Schools like UVa. were considering going private as another alternative to the failed Gilmore policy. I think it was a good effort in theory, but it fundamentally failed to work in practice.
- Gilmore didn’t end up sending money back to us. As I’ve explained several times now in responses to your arguments, we’ve spent more than that amount of money sending that money back to ourselves.
- Warner raised taxes to account for a gap in spending on core services that he inherited from Gilmore and Allen. And he did so with the support of the Republican-majority House of Delegates and State Senate. That $336 million surplus that you reference was not nearly sufficient to account for the gap in funding for core services that the administration and the General Assembly identified.
In the final analysis, Gilmore and Warner had a similar impact on the growth of state spending. Both had to play catchup from the failings of their predecessors. Tim Kaine has presided over a much slower rate of growth in large part because the Warner years saw us finally step up and begin to address the issues that had been left on the table by Allen and Gilmore.