Why You Should Never Trust Republans With Money
Via Robert at Interstate 4 Jamming, a Lakeland Ledger editorial, Don’t Sell The Cash Cow, about a suggestion that the state sell the Florida Lottery to a private company.
The Florida Lottery has been a generally stable source of revenue for the schools, and for college scholarships. It has been making money for years and all of the infrastructure, rules, and regulations are in place. It has been shown over the years that whenever the Republans get a large, one-time infusion of money, they slash taxes, which are a steady, long-term revenue source. The Lottery was sold as providing money for school enhancement, but it quickly became an excuse to cut funding to schools.
The Republans keeping telling people that government should be run like a business, but when they are in charge they act like they want to make it target for a hostile take-over by selling off the profitable segments of the “business.” They keep out-sourcing functions which end up costing the state more than they had before and delivering less.
The simple fact of the matter is, Republans don’t understand how to operate a profitable long-term business because they are only interested in short-term get-rich-quick schemes.
Next we’ll hear that the move to get rid of property taxes will work because of the money infusion coming from a Nigerian business deal.
5 comments
Unfortunately, that gimmick doesn’t have a Republican trademark on it. The Democratic governor of Illinois is floating the same trial balloon–yet another in a seemingly endless series of quick-fix nostrums that may (and I cannot stress the word “may” enough) get him out of his current budget problems, but which will not only not solve the state’s long-term solvency issues, they will actually make those long-term problems worse.
Selling off the lottery? In California we run our schools on the ‘tax for those who can’t do math’! (I’m one, I confess.) So…. how long before the mafia gets involved?
As I remember, Michael, your “Democratic” governor has done a few other untoward things that annoy people. The only honest way to deal with government budget crises is to raise taxes or cut programs. That’s the iron rule of non-profits, you can only spend the money you have. Removing long-term income to cover short-term deficits has never been a reasonable solution, and shouldn’t be on the table.
Ellroon, I never treat my “retirement plan” with disdain and the possibility of criminal involvement was one of the reasons for the current structure and regulation of the Florida Lottery. The Cuban revolution moved a major gambling operation from there to South Florida, so it wouldn’t take long for the heirs of Meyer Lansky to take over a “private” lottery.
I don’t think there’s a constituency yet that Rod the Bod hasn’t pissed off at least once during his tenure. He was undoubtedly one of the governors hitting up the Shrubbery for money for child insurance programs, since one of his big campaign gimmicks this last cycle was to announce that Illinois was going to offer free health insurance to all children whose parents couldn’t afford it on their own. I’m not opposed to the idea in and of itself, but given the fact that his budget plan was eerily similar to that of the Underpants Gnomes (1. Announce program that will cost billions we don’t have. 2. ???. 3. Keep the budget balanced.), plus the fact that the way the rules are currently written the kids being enrolled don’t need to have proof that they’re actually residents of Illinois, this one has ticked off a lot of people, yours truly included. I’m still pissed at him for robbing $2 billion from state employees’ pension funds (already the worst-funded in the nation, after a couple of Republican legislatures tried the same trick in the ’80s) to fill a budget hole when even the Republican members of the General Assembly were agreeing, on the record, that it was past time to raise Illinois’ lowest-in-the-Midwest 3% income tax. This twit has already sold off the state’s student loan portfolio to great fanfare and tremendous voter approval, given that he plowed the proceeds back into an extension of a popular state grant program for college students–which now has no funding source allocated to sustain it. And now he’s talking about selling off the state’s tollways (all of which should have been converted into freeways long since, under the terms of the original bonds that were issued to finance their construction) and the state lottery in an attempt to find enough cash to continue his profligate ways without having to bite the fiscal discipline bullet and raise taxes. Nobody will like the idea, of course, but everybody with more than three brain cells to rub together and fire up a synapse recognizes that there just isn’t any alternative.
The child insurance program is operated on a state by state basis. If he can’t prove the kids are in his state, the Feds won’t kick in. We ran into this covering the children of migrants who stay in the state, but not in the same location.
You have to cut spending or raise taxes, because that’s all most state constitutions allow.
Oh, you mean you built four-lanes just like New York did with the Thruway. Once the tolls had paid off the bonds it would be free, except the tolls were needed for maintenance, and expansions, and jobs for in-laws, and all of the other excuses I heard when living in New York.