The Spending Affordability Committee is a neat little bit of political theater, more like a magic show. There is a review of revenues and spending, looking at the growth of personal income and retail sales. Then a figure for next year’s growth is produced like a rabbit out of a hat, the lawmakers nod sagely, Republicans grumble, and, voila, it’s a done deal

There has to be some meeting before the meeting, or maybe a conference call before the meeting, where the actual number is worked out.

“There’s no real methodology,” said Cecilia Januszkiewiz, the budget secretary for the last 18 months of Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr.’s administration. “It’s not some sort of objective calculation.”

Opening the process

Last summer, CJ, as she is widely known given the tongue-twisting nature of her last name, did a paper for the Free State Foundation, a free-market think tank for Maryland, making 11 recommendations for improving the budgeting process, particularly focused on making spending decisions more open and transparent. CJ also wants a cumulative running scorecard that is Web accessible for all the new programs proposed by the governor or legislature.

To its credit, the General Assembly staff does “a fiscal note” for every bill introduced, estimating what it will cost. But there is no running total and no way to assess the cumulative cost.

In researching her paper, CJ read the past reports of the Spending Affordability Committee going back 20 years, and noted that even in some years when the committee found the state was looking to spend more than it took in, “they still went on to recommend an increase of spending.”

She sees the Spending Affordability Committee’s recommendations – sometimes revised upward – as “sort of a cover” for increased spending.

Spending on higher education

This year’s Spending Affordability Committee chairman is Del. John Bohanan, a Southern Maryland Democrat who also chaired the Commission to Develop the Maryland Model for Funding Higher Education, which released its draft report this week.

CJ laughed when the commission’s name was mentioned. “There’s no funding; there’s only how much to spend,” she said.

In fact, as one of the few people to have read the report, she’s right. The 83-page draft lays out a case of why Maryland should nearly double its spending on colleges and universities, adding up to more than $1 billion over the next decade. The figure $760 million was mentioned, but that doesn’t include automatic increases to community colleges once the higher spending is set.

The commission made no attempt to identify where that money might come from. Bohanan denied that the recommendations were like the Thornton school aid formula mandated in 2002 without a funding source for its major inflow of money to K-12 public school systems. “These are goals,” Bohanan told reporters at a briefing. “This is not a mandate.”

“The presumption is that we’re going to recover before the 10 years are up,” Bohanan said.

CJ rightly points out that deficits are expected to continue for the next five years, even with the addition of slots money. “Even if things get better, they’ll simply be less worse than we expect them to be,” CJ said.

“It’s just irresponsible,” she said. “If you want to increase education dollars, you have to explain where it’s coming from. You’re already spending all the money you have.”

She speculates that supporters of higher ed would dearly love to make it a mandate, maybe adding colleges and universities to the requirement in the constitution to pay for “a thorough and efficient system of free public schools.”

Jobs and exports

To its credit, the higher ed funding commission did not engage in some misty-eyed embrace of a college education as way to produce better people. “Learning is its own reward,” the report acknowledged in a fleeting nod to “the truism.” Instead, they were focused on jobs, and supplying enough Maryland graduates to fill them, while retaining the two-thirds of Maryland students who leave the state for higher education, never to return.

Nationally, 81 percent of those in college enroll in their home state, but only 63 percent in Maryland do.

“Three out of four Maryland residents possessing a bachelor’s degree or higher were born in some other state,” the report noted. This is a widely known fact seldom acknowledged when the high concentration of scientists and engineers here is touted.

Without the import of graduates from Rust Belt states and overseas, Maryland would have even bigger shortages in its professional labor force. A higher percentage of foreign-born residents (43 percent) have bachelor’s degrees than the native-born (34 percent).

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