BY RUSSELL TURNER
OUR WORST ENEMY
When we go to school, one of the main subjects that we have is history. Whether we like it or not history is one of the most important subjects that we will ever have. I have noticed that many of our citizens are far more interested in the statistics of a certain football team or some other sport; the diehard fan usually knows what the team did last year and the year before. I only wish that our citizens would take as much interest in the history of nations past.
When you look at history it is abundantly clear that for a nation to be a power in the world they must have a strong military, but it is equally important to have a sound financial system. Throughout history ALL great powers declined because of one major factor, they abused and neglected their financial systems. Sadly we Americans are going down the same path. While I can see many problems in our federal system, I want to address some problems here in our state of Oklahoma.
Recently a person asked me about the budgeting process in our state, his main question was the definition of BASE LINE BUDGETING. Base Line Budgeting is a system where our legislature simply looks at what was appropriated to various departments in the previous year and they simply put a little more money into to the current budget cycle. Most elected people like the concept of Base Line Budgeting because it is easy and they don’t have to determine if the money is being well spent or not. In my opinion there are some serious problems with this system. As long as the economy is growing you can get away with it, but in a downturn things can get serious very fast. Base Line Budgeting is an inefficient system where the size of government grows beyond the ability of the taxpayers to fund it. Government agencies are funded on a yearly basis; on many occasions I have seen various departments go on a spending spree near the end of their fiscal year. They have a simple reasoning behind this spending spree, they know if they don’t spend all of the money their allocation for the next year’s budget will be less. This scenario has become the norm for many agencies and departments; the taxpayers of this state cannot keep funding an ever increasing size of state government. Another problem, the governor, the house of representatives and the senate all have a budget; it would be far more efficient if they would get together and create one budget and stop all of the deal making between those branches. Fortunately there is another form of budgeting that is far more efficient and can be implemented immediately.
ZERO BASED BUDGETING is a system where every agency and department budget starts off at zero dollars. Every department would be required to itemize the expenses they will have for the year. This system would require more work of our elected officials, they would have to actually have to look at the requests and determine if they are justified. When you drill down to it the legislators we elect are supposed to be spending our money the most efficient way possible. Over the past years we have been electing a bunch of jokers who want to go to Oklahoma City and party with the lobbyists while dipping into the public till to purchase votes with taxpayer money. There have been those of us who have been warning about irresponsible budgeting for years, but we Oklahomans as a whole have sat back and allowed our government to grow beyond our ability to pay for it. I recently read an article where by some estimates the income of the private sector in Oklahoma dropped by 20 billion dollars over the past couple of years. While all of this is happening OU recently increased its tuition and gave huge raises to many of the professors at the school.
Many parents give their children an allowance, before they would consider raising it a good parent would want an explanation to why the child needs more. Our legislators should be doing the same with our tax dollars; instead all they can talk about is passing illegal tax measures in the waning days of the session in an attempt to cannibalize the taxpayer.
History proves that when it comes to the destruction of a country and its economy we are our own worst enemy. Budgeting our funds is more important than most people understand.
Comments
Post a Comment