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TALLAHASSEE - With even Republican senators bashing the new budget, Gov. Jeb Bush expressed some irritation to inquiring reporters last week. Among other things, he was tired of what he called the "gobbledygook talk of "recurring' and "nonrecurring.' "
The governor knows better. He did not earn a Phi Beta Kappa key or build a successful real estate business without learning to respect the difference between those terms.
But budgetspeak can be eye-glazing to most of us. So I solicited some expert help from the budgeteers on how to translate it.
In the process, we'll see how Bush and the Legislature might be able to keep squeaking by without new taxes until after his brother's re-election campaign next year, and how the president had a convenient hand in it.
First, the translation.
In family terms, an example of nonrecurring revenue would be the $500 your mother takes out of her savings account at Christmas for a downpayment on your son's new car. It's nonrecurring because he can't count on Grandma doing it again. The downpayment itself is also a nonrecurring expense, because it only has to be paid once.
But of course there will be monthly payments to make, as well as gasoline, maintenance, tag fees and insurance. These are recurring expenses, and Grandson better have recurring revenue, such as a regular paycheck, to deal with them. If not, he's in big trouble. He might skimp on the preventive maintenance (which corresponds to how the state has been trying to cut some corners) but if he doesn't keep up the monthly payments the bank will take the car back.
The same goes for the loan you used for the downpayment on your house - nonrecurring income and expense - and the recurring paychecks you need for monthly payments and taxes.
It's no different for government. To avoid getting in a jam, Florida law requires budget planners to identify the two different kinds of revenue, and the two kinds of spending, and try to match them up.
Nonrecurring revenue consists of such sources as proceeds from the sale of state land, the unspent leftovers from the previous year's budget, surplus construction funds, taxes imposed on a one-time basis, and windfalls such as the $947.5-million Florida share of the $20-billion bailout for states in the tax cut bill that President Bush signed Wednesday.
Nonrecurring spending properly includes such expenses as major computer purchases, construction of buildings, and pilot programs to see if new ideas actually work. It should not include the salaries of the people who run the computers and occupy the buildings. It's easy to stop building things when money comes up short; it's harder to let the people go.
For a long while, the Legislature tried to be careful about all of this. But as school enrollments, Medicaid caseloads and inflation began to grow faster than revenue from existing taxes - and especially after Jeb Bush got the Legislature to start cutting taxes - Tallahassee began to dig itself into the same sort of hole as the kid who buys a car without knowing how he's going to afford the payments.
In the budget year that ends June 30, for example, legislators funded more than $1-billion worth of ongoing programs - in budgetese, recurring expenses - with nonrecurring money. The largest part of that was more than $300-million from taxes that already were set to go off the books in the fiscal year that starts this July 1. To make things fit, they assigned some very popular recurring programs to the nonrecurring side of the ledger.
That wasn't smart. The Medically Needy assistance program went into the nonrecurring pot. So did Medicaid assistance for adults with vision, hearing and dental problems. After the press began interviewing people who would die without the Medically Needy program, legislators scrambled to save it. It's back in the recurring pot, at the expense of other programs. Nothing will remain of the adult Medicaid assistance, however, except for emergency dental care.
The new budget contains even more money ($1.3-billion) in ongoing programs funded by trust-fund surpluses and other nonrecurring sources. Nearly everyone in the Senate presumed that spelled tax increases by next year at the latest, and for a time the governor seemed to agree. But just a day after the Florida budget was passed, President Bush signed the "Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act" that contains the state bailout. The bailout wasn't his idea, but he bought it.
Congress meant the money to help states get through their present hard times. But Gov. Bush says Florida's share should be "reserved," not spent. Meanwhile, he's unresponsive to questions about new taxes. He apparently intends to use the windfall to postpone until 2005 - the day of reckoning with new taxes that might inconvenience his brother's quest for Florida's electoral votes in 2004.
The state windfalls, by the way, come at the expense of low-income working families whose additional child-care credits were cut out of the tax bill to help it fit within the Congress' phony cost estimates. Is there no shame in politics?