Well, there’s at least one young, charismatic leader in Washington who is actually willing to make “tough choices” and go through the budget instead of just talking about it. Congress might want to take a gander at D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty’s budget when it reaches the Hill for approval in June, for some lessons in restraint. Fenty’s proposed budget does quite a bit of what Obama promised to do with the federal budget, but hasn’t. (Although the city council and Congress will still have the opportunity to stuff it full of unfunded unicorns before final approval, so don’t count on it staying this way.) He’s targeting more than 1,600 jobs, many of which were ill-scrutinized additions to the work force during boom times.
So, Fenty has made the very tough choice to lay off roughly 2 percent of the D.C. public workforce to meet budget requirements, while Obama makes the tough choice to give lawmakers 90 days to cut his budget by a whopping .003 percent. As Greg Mankiw reports, that’s rather small potatoes (or, should I say “tall lattes”?):
Fenty’s cuts have put him at odds with labor unions, who demanded they be involved in the budget to
dictate
He’s rewarding performance (in public charter schools, which added 17 percent enrollment, and will see 8 percent more funding) over failure (in public schools, which lost enrollment and will lose funding accordingly). He’s also raising fees on parking meters and business registration, which has him taking heat:
Now, I’d prefer to see fiscal discipline come through cuts rather than tax hikes, but the fact that Fenty is making good-faith efforts to sacrifice some government largesse makes his tax hikes more palatable than the sacrifices Obama will ask of Americans without having sacrificed any of his own priorities. He’s even managed to cut the overall size of the budget, compared to last year, by five percent- the first such decrease in a decade. Remember that “net spending cut” Obama promised? But one of Fenty’s tough choices has put him in the cross hairs of one of the diverse city’s minority constituencies. It’s hard to cut government spending or services, period. But when government spending and services have been sliced and diced to validate the voters of countless minority/interest groups- a practice to which liberals are particularly prone- it becomes even harder to make rational decisions about which services are truly necessary. In this case, Fenty wants to combine the D.C. Office on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs with the Office of Community Affairs, saving $300,000. Right now, the Asian and Pacific Islander office staffs seven and has an annual budget of $1 million for assisting the city’s Asians-about 3.2 of the city’s population-navigate bureaucracy. Utterly oblivious to the irony of piling on a new bureaucratic entity to solve the problems caused by past piled-on bureaucracy, Asians and Pacific Islanders and their advocates are predictably asking why Fenty hates Asians:
An office for veterans, a constituency that is actually owed special attention from the government for their service, would also be folded into the Office of Community Affairs, while the Office of Latino Affairs would remain autonomous. It was inevitable that Fenty would face protest letters and gatherings of Pacific Islanders after making this decision, and it’s honorable that he made it nonetheless. Every interest group will argue its case to the Mayor in the face of cuts, and the liberals on his city council will castigate him for heartlessness, but none of them are dealing in reality. Fenty is acting refreshingly grown up about what the city faces in the absence of magical gumdrop forests that yield happiness for all interest groups at no cost to taxpayers. Fenty said of his proposed budget, in his State of the District speech:
They sound just like Obama’s promises, only so much less empty. Update: Below the fold, my graphic interpretation of the Obama budget:
