February 02, 2011 07:41 PM UTC

Budget Playground Follies Continue

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Colorado Independent’s Joseph Boven updated yesterday, the slap-boxing over House Speaker Frank McNulty’s “more cuts now” resolution wasn’t slowed by the cold weather:

The argument is over budget forecasting, with the Republican-controlled House wanting to reduce revenue forecasts to be safe, and The Democratic Senate wanting to accept the forecast, only making additional cuts when and if they become needed…

The traditionally non-controversial resolution provides the Joint Budget Committee with direction as to state revenue for budget planning purposes for the next fiscal year. However, this year Republicans sparked debate by amending the resolution to further ratchet down predictions made to the non-partisan Legislative Council economic forecast.

Democrats say that the additional $195 million that would need to be cut from the budget if projections were further lowered would amount to thousands of teacher positions and may needlessly affect K-12 education before it was necessary to do so.

Republicans say that Colorado should expect the worst and hope for the best. They say make cuts in the budget now.

We talked about this one week ago. It’s an odd choice for a battle, over a nonbinding resolution that symbolically “certifies” the amount of general funds available for budgeting purposes. It in no way constrains the Joint Budget Committee one way or the other. Basically, Republicans are saying that for the last few years, the Governor has had to come back and make further cuts to the budget as revenue projections failed to meet with reality, so they’d prefer to just go ahead and make more cuts now to head that off. Democrats point to, well, every business news page in America–and Colorado–showing that the economy is indeed recovering, and that sales tax and other revenues are stabilizing. With that in mind, say Democrats, it would be foolish to inflict another $200 million of pain on our schools before we even know it’s necessary.

Do you see the fundamental issue lurking just beneath the surface? Republicans want to presumptuously make deeper cuts now, while Democrats want to protect what they can until they know there is no other alternative. We’ll leave it to our readers to assess which is the more responsible approach, but we know which one we’d rather be selling the voters next year.