Brother, Can You Spare $288 Million?
I had to emcee an event Wednesday night with the Educational Choice Charitable Trust, Governor Mitch Daniels was the honored guest. It was also as you know my wife’s birthday, so I had to get special permission to do the event. While on stage I jokingly asked the Governor if I could borrow some of the $288 million the state “found” via clerical error to take my wife out and make amends. He politely smiled and gave me that “Abdul, you’re on your own with that one” look. I was kidding of course and didn’t expect the Governor to take me seriously, just like I can’t take people too seriously who are calling on the state to spend the $288 million on programs.
Schools are already clamoring for it, saying they need it because of cuts in education and property tax caps. House and Senate Democrats are calling for an “investigation” and the more liberal members of the Indian blogosphere are attacking the administration’s financial street cred and wondering why the State Auditor’s office didn’t find the error. Okay everybody, let’s put the car in park for a moment and take a deep breath.
First, schools, you are not getting any more money. Deal with it. In fact, there is a good chunk of the populace that thinks that despite tax caps and state cutbacks you still get too much money and haven’t done enough to consolidate and collaborate your efforts to provide the taxpayers with better service for their dollars. For those of you want an “investigation” this is pretty simple. An auditor in the Indiana Department of Revenue was processing a corporate electronic tax check and when he was entering it into the system noticed that it was going into a segregated account instead of the General fund. He did some checking and found out that this had been going on since 2007. The first year about $4 million went into the special fund, by 2011 more than $168 million had gone in as more corporations paid their income taxes by electronic check. He reported the error and the state fixed it. This was the result of a computer glitch. The money was still in the state coffers. And if someone really wanted to play spin doctor the error actually worked out in the taxpayers favor because instead of going into the general fund and being spent immediately it was earning interest over the past few years.
So what to do with the “extra cash”? Well, the last time I checked this national economy was still sputtering along and while revenues are slowly getting better we are all just one Euro crisis away from being back where we started, so spending “extra” money might not be the best idea right now. I like the idea of paying off some bills (put half toward to teachers’ pension fund), put some in the bank (rainy day fund) and give the rest back to the taxpayers (rebate/refund credit). What a novel concept.
I am always amazed at people whether they be regular folks or government officials where as soon as they find a dollar their first inclination is to run out and spend it. What makes matters worse is when it isn’t their money they’re spending. Now I have to go shake the pillows on the couch so I can take my wife to dinner this Saturday night.
