Money matters

Here, here:

Money burning a hole in state's pocket again?

Officials can't seem to stand the idea of having some cushion.

Isn't this what got the state in trouble in the first place?

Indiana got a couple of billion ahead, and then the money started burning a hole in elected officials' pockets, and they had to find ways to spend it.

And spend it they did, often like there was no tomorrow.

But tomorrow came, and the state was in serious financial trouble.

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According to the experts who write about this, the state is in the black about a year earlier than anticipated.

So what's the problem? The problem is that on the very day Gov. Daniels said the state had eliminated the $600 million deficit it had when he took office, he said the state would be able to afford to spend about $140 million on full-day kindergarten - something the General Assembly could think about when it puts together the next two-year budget in 2007.

With the state having gone through a genuine fiscal crisis finally seeing some daylight, you'd have thought this would be a good time for a conservative governor to say: Let's look at everything state government does and why it does it. Maybe we have an opportunity to rethink everything and downsize it a little. If the first thing Daniels wants to do with a "surplus" is start an expensive new program, others will follow his example.

People in government aren't very good at talking to taxpayers about fiscal matters. Then they're surprised when people tune them out or get cynical about the whole thing.

I was at a small gathering on Saturday, and the subject of Allen County's smart gamble on gasoline, which is saving about $3,000 a month, came up. "What in the world does that have to do with my life?" one person said. "Show me how to save on gas, and I might pay attention." That person speaks for a lot of people, I think. Nobody cares how much a government saves by its smart operations unless they're told what it means to them. Obviously the government isn't going to hand the money out to taxpayers -- it'll just find somewhere else to spend it. Tell me how many filled potholes that will represent.