October 5th, 2009

This Monday’s budget update takes the form of a column written by Brian O’Neill, a political writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In a piece titled “Bloated Legislature bungles budget,” O’Neill writes:

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“Fat, drunk and stupid is no way go through life, son.”

That advice from Dean Wormer to the frat boy Flounder in “Animal House” comes to mind when I ponder our Pennsylvania Legislature inaction. (In Harrisburg, “in action” is always best compressed to one word.)

Slow, corrupt and expensive is no way to run a state government, brothers and sisters.

Most of us have spent too much time recently watching Pittsburgh leaders handle the G-20 by adopting the credo, “We won’t let anarchists shut down this city — we’ll do it!” But did any of us stop to ponder the irony of having the world economic conference in the only state in America that hasn’t passed a budget yet?

Here’s what you missed in Harrisburg if you were watching the world meet in Pittsburgh’s Golden Barricaded Triangle:

Nothing.

As I write late Friday afternoon, there still is no state budget. This is the seventh consecutive year that America’s Largest Full-Time State Legislature has been unable to perform its principal task on time. It’s more than three months overdue.

If nothing else, that is yet another argument to shrink the statehouse. Surely, it could not do its job with 201 members as easily as it can’t do it with 253, and we’d save a fortune. Cutting the size of the Legislature by 20 percent — or its cost by 20 percent — could save as much as $60 million to $70 million a year.

That’s based on current average cost of well over $1 million per legislator. Salary, perks, offices, staff, travel — it adds up quickly for our 21 dozen lawmakers. That’s nearly two gross. The cost is more than too gross.

Regular readers of this column have heard such arguments for years, and know that no progress has been made. Because downsizing the General Assembly would take a constitutional change and nearly all the constitutional levers are in the hands of the lawmakers.

Perhaps there was a time when we could shrug that off, but Harrisburg is doing especially obvious harm these days. The 253-headed monster is looking everywhere but to its own bloated self to find money to make up for the $3.2 billion drop in state revenue caused by the recession.”

Read the rest of the column.