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Monday, January 29, 2007
Fight the urge to fund what we don’t need
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the great struggles for fiscal conservatives governing Georgia will be to make a difference before they get co-opted.
The pattern in the past has been to create new spending programs, often with little funding and big promises, and then to watch them grow over the next decade and demand sums far beyond what was ever projected. The Georgia Public Defender Standards Council is an example. This headline from budget hearings held earlier this month tell the story: “Budget shackles indigent defense: Lawmakers to consider funding request” (Metro, Jan. 17.)
The state is at the point with indigent defense funding where we were in the 1970s and ’80s on double-digit health care inflation. That is: Every physician was an unchecked cost generator. To combat it, the federal government, through states, developed the so-called “certificate of need” to regulate medical equipment and construction. And employers began to get serious about managed care. Neither was ideal nor wholly effective, but they were useful interim cost-containment tools.
On indigent defense, judges are the potentially unchecked cost generators that physicians once were. The Brian Nichols murder case in Fulton County is an example. Even before jury selection started, legal fees had topped $500,000. Taxpayers provide four lawyers, one a state employee and three others who are paid fees that judges can set, in this case ranging from $125 to $175 per hour. The Capital Defenders’ Office has a $5 million budget for the Nichols case and about 60 others.
If my client is one of those 60, or if I’m the judge presiding over one, I’m not settling for anything less than the fees and defense services provided in the Nichols case. Otherwise, the finding of guilt and the sentence are immediate grounds for appeal.
The Legislature in 2004 created a system whose costs it can’t control. And in her State of the Judiciary speech delivered last week to the General Assembly, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears hinted at the need for a state program to provide lawyers to “middle- and lower-income citizens” in civil cases. “In any given year nearly 40 percent of our middle- and lower-income citizens has at least one civil legal need,” she said, “but only one in every 10 is able too secure legal representation.
“This means that 90 percent of our most vulnerable citizens have no one to represent them while they are trying to handle some of the most important issues of their lives, such as access to affordable housing and medical benefits.” Federal funds and volunteer lawyers serve the poor now, so the real question is how such a proposal might be framed, contained and managed if and when a proposal is made. A Supreme Court-appointed committee is studying the matter now and any decision to ask for funds is at least a year away.
The message to fiscal conservatives, though, is in response to a report that Gov. Sonny Perdue proposes to “kill” a 12-year-old program, intended as a pilot, to experiment with foreign language offerings in some elementary schools. Perdue would redirect to all of the state’s elementary schools the $1.6 million that now goes to a few. To establish the language program in all 1,284 elementary schools statewide would cost taxpayers about $85 million.
Beneficiaries are reacting badly — understandable since the state proposes to withdraw a program many of them value. As Perdue spokesman Dan McLagan noted, the purpose of a pilot is to see if something works. If it does, and the success can be replicated — not always possible — expansion should be considered.
Fiscal conservatives should always create pilots, examine their effectiveness and the validity of cost projections before advancing. The absolute wrong way to go is to lay out an open-ended promise and partially fund it with the expectation that more money will be available next year or the year after. That’s the way prior legislators have put government spending on autopilot. State a promise, underfund it and then wait for a state or federal judge to translate the promise into tax dollars.
Too, as we see on a small scale with the elementary school language programs, every offering creates a constituency. State Rep. Ben Harbin (R-Evans), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is already talking expansion.
Republicans now in control should experiment a great deal — mostly involving the private sector — and be prepared to cut bait when something’s not working, not working as promised, or is too costly. If, indeed, the experience is that a $1.6 million program in a $20 billion budget is not effective and fiscal conservatives lack the political will to redirect the money elsewhere, there’s not much hope that Georgia’s future will be any different than its past.
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Oh, Jane, hush
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There she was again, Hanoi Jane, another of the anti-war grandmas of the anti-war 60s, refusing to be silent any longer, lest the anti-war party now in control of Congress not be aware of the anti-war views they have carefully preserved lo these many decades. Frankly, the geriatric set should have sat this one out. Her presence in Washington at Saturday’s anti-war demonstration is a reminder that the American left hasn’t changed in 40 years. For them, a good anti-war march is the activist equivalent of a good oldies station reviving the hits of their youth — one last fling on memory lane. Move on.
The march, and the coverage of it, prompts two thoughts. One is that this march had a far higher profile than, say, the Right to Life march a week earlier, which also brought thousands to Washington to assert that “silence is no longer an option,” to borrow a cliche from Ms. Fonda. That march, however, reflected sentiment contrary to the views held by most of those who make news decisions. Admittedly, Saturday’s march was timed to Congressional action on legally meaningless troop surge resolution, while the earlier one was timed to the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
The other thought is that organized marches and demonstrations really have become a monumental bore, whether it’s the Right to Life, the anti-war left, candlelight vigils, fund-raisers, or any other massing of humanity for the purpose of making a statement. They’re meaningless, except to fill air time or newspaper pages. They tell us nothing we don’t know about public opinion and, in fact, tell us nothing accurate about public opinion at all. By now, they all look alike and sound alike. Some band of true-believers carrying placards ginned up by marketing firms for television appeal gathers with instructions to look angry or needy or Republican. None of them should get anything more than the coverage given to Right to Life — and that is a brief notice that a crowd gathered, and that by way of explaining to motorists which streets to avoid.
America really needs a new form of public expression. We’ve worn out marches. We’ve worn out the yellow-ribbon scene. It took hardly any time to wear out the celebrity-angst routine, but that’s become a bore too. Jane wore out her anti-war gig 40 years ago on an anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam. With that baggage, she does today’s anti-war left no favors coming forth with the I-can-no-longer-remain-silent routine. Nobody has doubted those politics for 40 years.
