The current KATU viewer poll.
 

Steve Dunn and Natalie Marmion of KATU came up on the screen following the Monday night victory of the Super Bowl champs, the New England Patriots, over the Pittsburgh Steelers.  Steve and Natalie looked almost as hapless as the Steelers.

Mark Simmons (Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives), Natalie said, will try to deal with the $482 million budget shortfall.  The governor may call a sixth special session, Steve said, to break the budget deadlock. 

Mark Simmons, once a leader but now, like Bill Witt, drifting way off course, appeared and dissolved on my television screen.  A young woman, a Democrat, splattered into view, harping about the shocking situation.  She said it threatened needed programs.  (What program isn’t “needed” to a Democrat?)

The budget, oh the budget.  Something’s got to be done about the massive shortfall so the government doesn’t collapse, the rivers catch fire, children starve, old people have to eat dog food and artists fail to get grants to throw animal feces on images sacred to Christians.  Woe!  Woe! Alas!!

Speaking of piles of crap.

The general fund portion of the current budget (which doesn't include lottery income, federal funds and various other items) .is. $11,371,237,933  (Eleven billion dollars)   Include all those extras and it’s $34,053,148,500.  (Thirty-four billion dollars) That’s a 14% increase over the previous biennium (two year budget period). In per capita (per person) spending, 42 states spend less than we do. As measured in the year 2000, Oregon had the fastest growing government in the nation.  The state currently ranks Number One in unemployment statistics – the worst state in the nation.

So, what is the amount of this beastly Republican budget?  What kind of a draconian guillotine did they use?  The Republican approach will end up providing Oregon with a budget of:  $37,000,000,000.  (Thirty-seven billion dollars, give or take a few ten million dollar bills.) 

That doesn't look smaller, does it?  Maybe it's New Math.  And, where did I get that number? The $34 billion figure came from a lovely graph located here:  (Quote source)   The man's name is Matt Evans.  Here's some more that he had to say.  This explains the $37 billion amount. .  (Boldface emphasis and one parenthetical statment, in red, is ours, not Matt's.)
 

Just in case some of you didn't get that, the "shorfall" they're all talking about is the difference between what government estimators guessed would come into the state coffers, and what probably will actually come into the state coffers as a result of a poorer economy than originally expected.

Nevertheless, the money coming in, though less than some "experts" guessed, is more than came in last time. The "shortfall" has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with any cuts in current levels of government spending.  It has to do with a reduction to the increases in spending they had planned. Their "shortfall" is merely a term the bureaucrats (and the media) are using to give you the impression Oregon has less money to spend.  That is a lie.  Oregon has more money to spend.  Matt Evans, a reliable source according to the Eugene Register Guard (not exactly a conservative rag) just told us so. Matt said there is three billion dollars more!

Here's Matt's budget growth graph (from Watchdog.com). The numbers relate to the basic budget, minus all the extra stuff like federal dollars.

The next bar that will appear -- the one Natalie and Steve think involves a Republican "cut" -- will be the highest bar of all.  Now take a look at Matt's "all funds" graph.

“So,” you fairly ask, “then what the hell is all this talk about a budget shortfall?  Why would programs have to be cut if the revenue  increase is equal to Oregon's entire general fund in 1985?”

That's an easy one.  It's because of all the pay and benefit raises for government employees (including teachers), all the non-residents now included in the Oregon Health Plan and all the increases in spending all the government agencies and programs must have to keep Oregon in the forefront of "progressive" political thought.  This may be translated as follows.  The mainstream media types often say that the rich like to buy themselves a Republican with a fat campaign donation.  The Democrats have another way of doing things.  They buy themselves voters.from a host of special interest groups.  It's a better system than the one the fat cats use because the Dems operate on somebody else's money -- to be specific, yours. 

"But," you say, "they say they haven't enough money.  They're calling this present situation a shortfall.  In my dictionary, that means "less."  How can three billion dollars more add up to less?"

Simple.  Democrats were expecting they'd have four billion dollars more to spend, but Kitzhaber and Vera Katz have brought Oregon into a business recession.  A billion of the four billion revenue increase the liberals were planning on spending has disappeared into that recession .  To a Democrat, an increase in spending of three billion dollars -- when they wanted an increase in spending of four billion dollars -- is a cut!  That’s right.  To a Democrat, an increase is a cut if it isn’t a big enough increase.

For our purposes here, the question is: Did Steve and Natalie fail to explain this because they don’t want you to know it?  Or did they fail to explain this because they, themselves don’t know it?  Is it possible that a major, award-winning television news department whose product reaches hundreds of thousands of viewers each month could be so careless or so ignorant as to completely misinform their audience like this?

It's impossible to conceive of them doing this intentionally.  That would make them liars.

LL: Look over the numbers, yourself  Click here.

Postscript: September 13, 2002 -- On behalf of my fellow citizens of Oregon, I watched the Friday OPB news division program, Seven Days.  The topic, of course, was the Oregon budget.  The panelists analyzing the situation spanned the political spectrum from very liberal to very liberal.  There were a couple of fellows, one obviously from Germany, from the public radio side, the Queen liberal, Stephanie Fowler, the deeply collectivist Bill Lunch and the Oregonian leftist David Sarasohn.

The "$458 million shortfall" was introduced as though it were fact

The rest of the budget discussion was about process, which means the actual problem I've outlined above never came up. Thus did they successfully manage to once more bring shame on the profession of journalism.

© 2002 Oregon Magazine