Alabama’s state budgets are making their way through the house and senate this week as legislators scramble to appropriate the state’s limited resources.
Much of the public debate has centered around the roughly $6 billion education budget, by far the largest pot of money in state government. The Alabama Education Association (AEA) called for an implausible 6 percent pay raise for teachers. Republican legislators found that a 1 percent bonus was likely the only economically feasible option this year.
The AEA will undoubtedly blame Republicans, per the usual. But they’d be more accurate if they pointed the finger at their Democratic allies in Washington, D.C.
PEEHIP, which provides health insurance benefits for Alabama’s active and retired education employees, is facing a $220 million shortfall in the coming year. That’s largely due to the enormous financial burden of ObamaCare, which was passed with exactly zero Republican votes.
Related: ObamaCare could keep Alabama teachers from getting a raise
“The budget before us has been a tremendous challenge, the biggest challenge I’ve faced as ETF chairman,” said Sen. Trip Pittman, the Senate Education Budget Committee chairman. “The reason for that is the economy has remained stagnant and has not rebounded.”
But while the education budget has sucked up most of the headlines, the state’s $1.8 billion General Fund budget is in far worse shape. It lacks the revenue streams of the education budget, which is the unfortunate result of decades of control by the state’s teachers’ union bosses and a complicit Democrat-controlled legislature.
Alabama’s cash-strapped General Fund is under tremendous pressure to increase funding to the Department of Corrections. Highly publicized revelations that prisoners have been abused for years at Tutwiler Women’s Prison were gut-wrenching and exacerbated the PR nightmare. But the the most pressing longterm issue is that the federal government could intervene if Alabama doesn’t do something about its prisons, which are currently filled to double their capacity.
The legislature increased the Dept. of Corrections’ appropriation last year by $14 million, but were unable to find the money to do more this year.
RELATED: Legislators must reform Alabama’s prisons or risk a federal judge doing it for us
As dire as the prisons situation sounds, it pales in comparison to the budgeting nightmare that Medicaid has become.
In 2003, Medicaid consumed 18 percent Alabama’s General Fund budget. In 2014, that number skyrocketed to an incredible 35 percent. The legislature appropriated an additional $70 million to the program this year to help fund it, but that hasn’t stopped the Obama Administration and their allies in the state from ramping up the calls for “more, more, more!”
Bogus stats touting the benefits of expanding Medicaid under ObamaCare have been propagated by special interest groups who stand to gain financially from the expansion and by the state’s liberal media.
Obama’s HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has publicly blamed Republican governors, specifically in the south, for the ObamaCare disaster because they refuse to expand the broken system. Never mind the fact that several Democrat governors have refused expansion to this point as well.
Alabama Senate Democrats have made Medicaid expansion their top priority this session. Senate Minority Leader Vivian Figures penned an open letter to Gov. Bentley touting the benefits of making the ever-growing program even larger.
“I plead with you to reconsider your stance on Medicaid expansion,” she wrote.
But the Democrats’ cries have fallen of deaf ears to this point, in the executive branch as well as the legislature.
“The Democrats’ only approach to Medicaid is to throw millions upon millions of dollars at the broken, flawed, inefficient and overly expensive liberal social program,” said House Speaker Mike Hubbard. “Republicans are focused on saving taxpayer dollars by reforming Medicaid and helping individuals move off of the government dole through growing the economy and creating more jobs.”
Yellowhammer will have more on Alabama’s budgets as they are finalized in the coming days.
In the mean time, here’s a chart that shows how Alabama currently spends all its money from both the Education Budget and the General Fund.
Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims
