Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and President Barack Obama’s message guru David Axelrod squared off Sunday on “Meet the Press” over exactly how the Commonwealth managed to balance its budget last year.
McDonnell said the state did so mostly through spending cuts – including money for education and health care – while not raising taxes.
“Yeah, there was some short-term pain, but, you know, we ran a surplus within five months, we’re going to have a big surplus this year, and so now we’re coming back and here’s why: governors have a balanced budget amendment,” McDonnell said. “We can’t make excuses, we can’t form committees, we can’t kick the can down the road, we can’t do (continuing resolutions), we can’t increase the debt limit willy-nilly; we’ve got to make tough decisions, and I think that’s what the Congress and the president need to do. I will say in fairness, most of this deficit’s been run up by Republican presidents over the last 30 years. It’s a bipartisan problem, and we need bipartisan cooperation to get it fixed.”
Axelrod – on message, per usual – noted that McDonnell’s predecessor Tim Kaine, a Democrat who’s now running for the U.S. Senate, made billions in cuts before he left office and that Virginia balanced its budget, in part, through $1.7 billion in federal stimulus money, borrowing $3 billion in future receipts on transportation, and borrowing money from the state’s pension plan.
“You did it because you were managing through difficult times, and you didn’t want to burden the taxpayers of your state through these difficult times, but those bills are going to have to be paid,” he said.
McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin, though, noted that the transportation bill signed this year had nothing to do with the state’s balancing its budget last year.
Virginia is also paying back the $620 million it deferred to its retirement system last year, and McDonnell has lobbied heavily for reforms to the state’s pension system, which faces almost $18 billion in unfunded liabilities.
