Gov. Bill Haslam seems poised to slide straight back into his chair in Tennessee's Capitol building this November and that's really too bad for Tennesseans.
It's too bad because Volunteer State taxpayers need more from their governor than the dithering Haslam has done with TennCare, with Common Core, with the Department of Children's Services and any number of other problems and departments.
It's true that Haslam must walk a fine line between common-sense governing and the disconnected far right that unfortunately controls the Tennessee General Assembly. But that's just the point. He doesn't seem up to the job of corralling -- or even just cajoling -- the lawmakers who have managed to delay education reforms and recently passed a law that probably will torpedo his effort to finally bring Affordable Care Act money to Tennessee.
On top of all that, he's now talking more slashes to departments in a state where teenagers are turning juvenile detention facilities into escape houses and would-be TennCare enrollees have to sue to get their applications screened because of computer programming problems.
On Friday, Haslam administration officials confirmed that the governor has ordered state agencies to slash discretionary spending by up to 7 percent as his administration builds the new budget to be presented to lawmakers in early 2015. The state's general fund, which pays for most functions of government including education, shows a $302.4 million revenue shortfall for fiscal 2014 that ended June 30.
All this comes after years of similar reductions.
In 2012, one of Haslam's money-saving cuts was to shut down Taft Youth Development Center near Pikeville, which he and other administration officials said would save facility and staff costs. In the past month, there have been at least 45 escapes from state youth facilities, as well as riots inside them. The Tennessee State Employees Association is blaming the cuts Haslam made in the Department of Children's Services.
And this is the governor who didn't just leave federal money on the table for health care after the Affordable Care Act became law. He gave our hard-earned federal tax dollars to other states when he joined mostly Republican governors in 23 states to just say no to Obamacare. It would cost Tennessee an estimated $1.7 billion to expand Medicaid over 10 years under the ACA, but the cost of not expanding will be $22.5 billion in lost federal funding plus $7.7 billion in lost hospital reimbursements, according to a recent report by McClatchy Newspapers and the Urban Institute.
Meanwhile, with a re-election bid in his future, Haslam announced in 2013 his "Drive to 55" initiative to increase the number of Volunteer State residents with post-high school certificates and degrees from 32 percent to 55 percent by 2025. This year he announced the funding cornerstone for that ambition: "Tennessee Promise," the first-in-the-country community college initiative for free tuition and fees. It will use about $34 million a year from lottery reserves to cover the tuition.
While funding higher education is also a plus, how are we going to pay for primary and secondary education to get students to college at all if we're so busy ignoring money and slashing budgets because we're a no-income-tax state and revenue from the state's two main business taxes are flagging?
Senate Finance Chairman Randy McNally, R-Oak Ridge, has said our money crunch is not from a problem with spending, it's with revenue -- or the lack of it.
The state's tax bread and butter (besides the sales tax) are the franchise tax on business property and the excise tax on corporate income. Some officials have said that corporations are leaving the state because those taxes are lower in other states. The lagging revenues forced Haslam and lawmakers to cut $276 million from the fiscal 2015 budget. Haslam was forced to break a promise he made in his State of the State speech: Giving teachers, state workers and higher education employees a 2.5 percent raise.
But maybe the state deserves this. After all, despite broken promises and purely partisan-motivated money decisions, Haslam drew no serious opposition in the GOP primary. In November, he faces a political newcomer and unknown in the general election -- a 72-year-old named Charlie Brown who misspelled his own name on his campaign's Facebook page.
Look out Mississippi: We're vying for your last-in-everything title.