Tennessee and other states are slowly reaching an unhappy conclusion: Washington is broke and just cannot do the things that the states are supposed to do for themselves.
Nor should it try!
With the drying up of the so-called “stimulus” funds, which were supposed to tide over state budgets until “happy days are here again,” it is obvious that the stimulus only delayed painful financial decisions that the states needed to make.
The stimulus money is mostly gone now, but the economy has not revived. Unemployment remains at a high 9.2 percent – and millions more Americans can find only part-time work or have given up seeking work altogether. So the country is deeper in debt thanks to the stimulus, but many people are still unable to get the jobs they need.
Gov. Bill Haslam previously noted the ineffectiveness of the stimulus to boost employment. He is clearly correct, since one of Washington’s broken promises about the stimulus was that it would hold down unemployment. Today, joblessness is far higher than it was ever supposed to be if Congress passed the stimulus.
“The good new jobs are not going to come from top-down Washington ideas but from bottom-up Tennessee ideas, small businesses, and utilizing the state’s regional assets in economic revitalization,” Haslam rightly declared.
Gov. Terry Branstad, R-Iowa, put it equally bluntly: “I think we’ve got to recognize that the federal government is never going to be able to deliver what they promised,” he told The New York Times.
The newspaper noted that governors of both parties realize “states are going to have to adjust to … the strong likelihood that they will be asked to make do with less federal aid.”
“It’s like falling off a cliff,” Democrat Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington said of the loss of federal money.
Now that we’re at the bottom of that “cliff,” shouldn’t we as taxpayers finally recognize that big federal spending is the problem, not the solution?