A political scientist, Stephen M. King of Taylor University
, offers Hoosiers a template to measure the quality of their political leadership between elections. Just in time, it turns out. The Indianapolis Star on March 10 delivered a lecture to its readers on the difficulty of leadership in such hard times, the need to lower expectations.To summarize, The Star trusts Senate Appropriations Chairman Luke Kenley and House
Speaker Brian Bosma when they say that state government can’t get any smaller right now. So please don’t distract them; they’re doing the best that can be done. By the way, the uppity insistence of a new governor on cutting state income taxes by 10 percent is not helpful.“It was exceedingly difficult to keep the state on a fiscally sustainable path while tax revenues tumbled and the demand for services grew as a result of rising unemployment and falling incomes,” The Star editors wrote in outlining the leadership’s
policy of protecting the major government revenue streams.The problem, it seems, is that taxpayers haven’t done their part. They haven’t found taxable employment in numbers that the leadership judges adequate for the needs of government. But is the solution to maintain tax pressure on those employers and investors who might otherwise find ways to become more productive and create new jobs?
If so, that’s not policy, that’s accounting
; we could program our smartphones to do it.King’s template skips over journalistic whim to empirically weigh leadership decisions on three factors: personality, politics and policy. However such a template is applied to the current budget debate, our guess is that business will not be done as usual the remainder of this session. For the legislative rank and file is by now fully aware that the electorate is concerned about its own little budgets at its own little statehouses (in most cases, kitchen
tables).What voters see in plain sight all around them is an Indiana, despite the proclaimed heroics of its legislative leaders, becoming a third-tier state. Indeed, King cites data showing us falling behind the nation and region in five of six key economic indicators.
Asking voters to pay for new infrastructure and shore up basic education because the supermajority won’t swear off public-sector collective bargaining and a prevailing wage on public construction is irresponsible. It is asking your spouse to take a second job because you spent the grocery envelope on beer and pickled eggs.
Under such calculation, the laws of economics don’t apply to government itself. For Bosma and Kenley, past accounting and spending errors don’t carry over to the next page, do not prompt systemic adjustment. The leadership thereby proclaims itself supremely exempt from the rules by which the rest of us live.
And that, King’s template might predict, is a leadership that will not stand.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013303140082
