Alabama Governor Bentley is waging an aggressive campaign on Twitter and through speeches across the State to convince everybody that, after years of austerity measures and saving Alabama taxpayers $1 billion, it is now necessary to raise taxes to restore money to underfunded agencies.
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According to him, they have saved us $1 BILLION a year since 2012… which must mean General Fund spending is decreasing rapidly. But is it?
Let’s take a quick look… my source for these figures are the budget documents stored online on the website for the Alabama Department of Finance, Executive Budget Office. The address for any budget follows this formula: http://www.budget.state.al.us/pdf/gf/GF2016.pdf. Just change the year, and the relevant budget document will appear for your perusal.
And I have perused them. For the fiscal year 2010, the GF budget was $13,120,285,428. For the fiscal year 2015, the GF budget was $14,331,771,261… an INCREASE of $1,211,485,823. So, far from REDUCING the GF budget by $1 billion since 2010, it has RISEN by $1.2 billion. The exact figures for each year are provided below:
All of the totals listed below were drawn directly from the linked documents, and represent ALL expenditures and transfers. These numbers do NOT include the conditional appropriations that appear at the bottom of every budget.
As you can see, the only year that the GF budget actually shrank was from GF-2014 to GF-2015… and that was only by $144,145… far from the “$1B annually” of which the Governor boasts.
I want to particularly draw your attention to the GF-2016 number, which represents the Governor’s requested budget. While the budget grew an average of $242,297,164 a year from 2010 to 2015, this year Bentley wants to increase spending by $814,907,307…. More than THREE TIMES the average budget increase from GF-2010 to GF-2015.
If we do have a “budget shortfall,” it is only because Bentley wants to increase spending so dramatically this year.
Once again we are confronted with a State Government who thinks that not spending as much as they asked for is a “cut”… that’s the only way I can see that Bentley cut $1B in spending. It was all imaginary, intended to give him a talking point while spending continues to rise and rise, as it almost always does.
So, to Governor Bentley, I ask that you stop misrepresenting the facts and explain how the budget can rise almost every year since 2010 while, at the same time, you claim to have “saved taxpayers $1B annually.” Are you intentionally lying to us, or are you just that far divorced from reality?
Alabama taxpayers do not want to pay more taxes so that the state General Fund budget can be drastically increased for no real reason, and particularly not while our Governor runs around the state pretending he and the Legislature have been slashing spending in recent years. They haven’t, and this year’s budget request is far from reasonable.
If the Governor were to reduce his budget increase to $242K, which was the average budget increase from FY-2010 to FY-2015, the entire “budget shortfall” could be closed. Of course, he doesn’t want to do that.
Governor, your budgetary crisis is imaginary and entirely of your own making… if you didn’t want to spend so much this year, there would be no “shortfall.” So stop whining and have the courage to actually live within your means, i.e. spend only what you have.
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According to him, they have saved us $1 BILLION a year since 2012… which must mean General Fund spending is decreasing rapidly. But is it?
Let’s take a quick look… my source for these figures are the budget documents stored online on the website for the Alabama Department of Finance, Executive Budget Office. The address for any budget follows this formula: http://www.budget.state.al.us/pdf/gf/GF2016.pdf. Just change the year, and the relevant budget document will appear for your perusal.
And I have perused them. For the fiscal year 2010, the GF budget was $13,120,285,428. For the fiscal year 2015, the GF budget was $14,331,771,261… an INCREASE of $1,211,485,823. So, far from REDUCING the GF budget by $1 billion since 2010, it has RISEN by $1.2 billion. The exact figures for each year are provided below:
GF–2010 = $13,120,285,438
GF–2011 = $13,907,262,338
GF–2012 = $13,948,028,983
GF–2013 = $14,090,733,223
GF–2014 = $14,331,915,406
GF–2015 = $14,331,771,261
GF–2016 = $15,146,678,568
All of the totals listed below were drawn directly from the linked documents, and represent ALL expenditures and transfers. These numbers do NOT include the conditional appropriations that appear at the bottom of every budget.
As you can see, the only year that the GF budget actually shrank was from GF-2014 to GF-2015… and that was only by $144,145… far from the “$1B annually” of which the Governor boasts.
I want to particularly draw your attention to the GF-2016 number, which represents the Governor’s requested budget. While the budget grew an average of $242,297,164 a year from 2010 to 2015, this year Bentley wants to increase spending by $814,907,307…. More than THREE TIMES the average budget increase from GF-2010 to GF-2015.
If we do have a “budget shortfall,” it is only because Bentley wants to increase spending so dramatically this year.
Once again we are confronted with a State Government who thinks that not spending as much as they asked for is a “cut”… that’s the only way I can see that Bentley cut $1B in spending. It was all imaginary, intended to give him a talking point while spending continues to rise and rise, as it almost always does.
So, to Governor Bentley, I ask that you stop misrepresenting the facts and explain how the budget can rise almost every year since 2010 while, at the same time, you claim to have “saved taxpayers $1B annually.” Are you intentionally lying to us, or are you just that far divorced from reality?
Alabama taxpayers do not want to pay more taxes so that the state General Fund budget can be drastically increased for no real reason, and particularly not while our Governor runs around the state pretending he and the Legislature have been slashing spending in recent years. They haven’t, and this year’s budget request is far from reasonable.
If the Governor were to reduce his budget increase to $242K, which was the average budget increase from FY-2010 to FY-2015, the entire “budget shortfall” could be closed. Of course, he doesn’t want to do that.
Governor, your budgetary crisis is imaginary and entirely of your own making… if you didn’t want to spend so much this year, there would be no “shortfall.” So stop whining and have the courage to actually live within your means, i.e. spend only what you have.