ND House Candidate Berg Defends His Crazy Spending Spree Poorly
I was able to catch Former ND House Majority Leader Rick Berg on the Scott Hennen show this morning. Berg seems like a nice enough guy but I don’t think I could have stood listening to him if I wouldn’t have the chance to respond to his statements with a blog post. I don’t have a transcript or a recording to I’m going to be doing this from memory. If you think I got something wrong I’ll look into it and make further comments as soon as possible.
Hennen and a caller had questioned Berg on the massive budget increases that Berg help push through in the last two sessions. Berg, knowing the audience is very concerned about budget matters at the federal level tried to paint himself as a budget hawk. (Where have we heard that before.)
Berg claimed that the reason why North Dakota is one of the few states with a strong budget is because of the responsibility of the political leaders. (Such as himself I presume.) I couldn’t disagree more. The reason why we aren’t running red ink is only that the oil revenues are climbing faster than anyone could guess. If the oil business even slows down we’re going to have trouble keeping special interests the politicians dote on happy.
Berg was bragging up the fact that they’ve created a two hundred million dollar rainy day fund. I guess that’s ok, but they only did that by raiding the “Permanent Oil Tax Trust Fund” for the money to spend. That’s right they’ve saved money while taking $900,000,000 out of our trust fund.
Speaking of that Berg said that they only spend seventy million dollars of oil money in the general fund. Of course that ONLY counts the oil extraction money. It doesn’t include the massive increases in sales and income taxes generated by the oil industry efforts in North Dakota. The state legislature, of which Berg was one of the leaders, is foolish to be acting as if that money will always be there.
Berg said that after the first seventy million dollars the money goes into the trust fund and it’s only spent if the money is there. If the money’s not in the trust fund they won’t spend it. That’s funny because the first thing he bragged about was how he brought property tax relief. But the property tax relief is paid out of the trust fund. I find it very telling that these politicians lock in the permanent spending for government agencies and special interests but put our tax relief into a fund that might not be there. That pretty much tells you what their priorities are. Government employees first, taxpayers last.
Suppose the state runs out of money for the property tax relief program. Is that going to cut any spending? Of course not. The legislature will either increase taxes or the school districts are going to raise their taxes back up. Berg characterizes this as money that will only be spent if it’s there, but that’s not really the case is it? Now they could roll back spending on government agencies that have seen 50% increases in legislative support, but politicians like Berg and Hoeven won’t do that. Once they give that money to an agency they aren’t going to get cut.
Berg said that most of the spending increases were “targeted spending increases” and one time spending. Targeted spending increases? The Republican Governor and Republican dominated legislature showered EVERY state agency and special interest with more money. How can you claim that’s targeted spending? Of course the public didn’t get anything for this money. Tuition didn’t go down. Our state highways are unpatrolled many hours a week because 24/7 highway patrol coverage is one of the few things that aren’t important. We can spend fifty million dollars for a photo op state heritage center but public safety isn’t important.
The state government has had two disastrous legislative session in a row, the 2007 and the 2009. After the 2007 session Rick Berg was on Scott Hennen’s Hot Talk show. On that show he claimed that they had only increased spending 7% per year of the biennium. He said the rest was “one-time spending.” Of course when 2009 rolled around they didn’t do away with the one time spending. They used that as a baseline and doubled down on the irresponsibility.
And all that money didn’t do any good. They threw a 30% increase in spending to NDSU and they’re still facing a deficit. All that money spent and nothing to show for it. Are the government employees and special interests happy with what they have?
Why in the world do we want to send another irresponsible to Washington DC. They’re full up of those there already. Tags: North Dakota News
