Walker missed budget surplus boast by $1 billion

Walker has been boasting that Wisconsin was heading into the new budget cycle with a cushion of about a half-billion dollars.

Turns out that the budget he will soon sign begins with about a half-billion gap.

Jon Peacock, citing official state data, at the authoritative Wisconsin Budget Project Blog explains:

The state’s fiscal health isn’t nearly as strong as the Governor and a number of other lawmakers asserted in the spring.  While the Governor was courting GOP support in South Carolina for his upcoming presidential campaign, he said:  “At the end of the budget we’re debating right now for our next two years in my state, we will end with a structural surplus of $499 million.”   

Unfortunately, the latest figures from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) show that we need to change that plus sign to a minus sign, because the Governor’s optimistic assertion was off by about $1 billion.   

A July 7th memo from the LFB projects that Wisconsin will start the 2017-19 biennium with a structural deficit of $490 million. In other words, the 2015-17 budget developed by the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) puts the state in a position where lawmakers would need to use the first $490 million of revenue growth during the 2017-19 biennium simply to maintain the spending commitments assumed in the second year of the 2015-17 budget. 

And a closer review of the LFB memo reveals that the fiscal pain that will be felt in 2017-19 is likely to be far greater than the structural deficit calculation indicates – thanks to unrealistic assumptions about the amount of funding agencies will lapse to the state treasury over the next four years. 

Any reporter trying to get a straight answer from Walker about the disparity will get either game-playing spin, his 709th finger-pointed at Jim Doyle, or another stonewall.