blogs.sltrib.com - Salt Lake Crawler by Glen Warchol

Archives

Bio

All you ever wanted to know about Glen

More Blogs

Tribune Blogs Index

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

It's going to get ugly

Fiscal analysts and their tables and splatter charts always make the state budget look complicated and darkly magical. But under it all, it's a lot like your budget — if a few dozen monkeys helped you figure it out. (Make that 104 monkeys, if you count the Senate.)

The legislature has overspent $272 million and, just like you, they have hard decisions to make in Thursday's special session:

Spend about 10 percent less. Ow, ow, owie!
Crack open the old nest egg, which the Lege calls the Rainy Day Fund — and hope it's not a long storm.
Borrow money.
A messy combination of the above.
Debtors' prison. (Ha. Ha. Don't you right-wing nutjobs wish.)

Of course, you've got to have priorities. Most citizens want to protect public education from cuts, which means even bigger cuts from the rest of the budget.

Then again, since when has the Lege care about what citizens say when it comes to education? Sen. Lyle Hillyard, jefe de jefes of of the Legislature's budget committee and all-around Scrooge McDuck, says he's open to whacks at least at education "administration."

I don't think any of us want to do a 5 percent or 10 percent cut. We want to find other ways to do that.

Uh-oh, say school districts across the state.

Robert Gehrke tries to make some sense of it here.

Speaking of priorities, Roger Ball of the Utah Ratepayers Association wades in here to protect utility regulators.

1 Comments:

At September 23, 2008 4:13 PM , CaitlinsMotherPrefersTedsBedToGlens said...: Tribune's Bob Barr Blackout Watch: The Libertarian Party nominated Bob Barr as its presidential candidate 121 days ago, but the Salt Lake Tribune has yet to inform its print edition readers of his candidacy.

The Tribune's administrators are disabling the accounts of individuals who note this fact in the TribTalk forums or comments sections of SLTRIB.COM.

Barr is now on 46 state ballots across the United States, and is on track to be on 47 to 48 ballots.

Nationwide polls show Barr receiving support from between 1 to 2 percent of voters (or about 1 in 50 American voters), and between 8 to 11 percent support in some battleground states.

Only a handful of other presidential candidates can claim the same thing.

The CEO of MediaNews (which owns the Tribune), William Dean Singleton, was a significant financial supporter of Republican U.S. President George W. Bush.