May 14, 2007

Taxpayers' Ignorance is Legislators' Bli$$

Excellent column by Tom Humphrey in the Knoxville News-Sentinel Sunday regarding Gov. Bredesen urging lawmakers to "seize the tide!" and spend the state's rapidly growing revenue surplus. One deficiency of the piece - Humphrey fails to tell his readers that, in order to spend much of the surplus, the legislature will have to break the "Copeland Cap" amendment in the state constitution which was installed by Tennessee voters in 1978 as a way of limiting the year-over-year growth of the state budget.

Copeland was designed to prevent precisely the kind of runaway spending embodied by the rush to spend this year's revenue surplus. But because of a loophole a succession of governors and legislatures have broken the cap 12 times in the past 22 years, by a cumulative $3.275 billion. Copeland is no longer doing what the people of Tennessee intended it to do when they voted it into the state constitution.

As I wrote to Humphrey via email minutes ago

I wonder, why don't the media more regularly mention the Copeland Cap in budget stories?

After all, the FY 2006-07 budget was $100,000 under the Copeland Cap, so to spend any of the surplus they have to first pass legislation to break the Copeland Cap. Now, you and I know they do this as a routine formality and it doesn't take a super-majority to do it, but the people of Tennessee voted for the Copeland Cap nearly 30 years ago precisely to keep from being soaked when revenue is at high tide.

It doesn't work anymore in part because it doesn't take a super-majority to break the cap but also because today's public doesn't seem to understand that there IS a cap and that it is routinely broken. They don't understand it because most newspaper stories don't mention the cap, and the broadcast news never does.

The result: Today's taxpayers aren't getting the full story about the state budget and the surplus and why the constitutional amendment that was supposed to limit excessive spending isn't going to prevent the spending of one dime of today's surplus.

Much of the public doesn't know to be outraged about the routine flouting of the Copeland Cap because much of the public doesn't know the Copeland Cap exists. For that, 100 percent of the blame falls on the Tennessee news media, which rarely mentions it, failing to provide readers and viewers with the complete context they need to evaluate what their government does.