Zero-based budgeting

Looking at RIPEC's state budget projections, Ted Nesi explains how a "budget on autopilot" is untenable no matter what the entity--towns, cities, states, the country. You can also read "autopilot" to mean "assumptions." Yet, the assumptions built into these budgets--3% raises, increase in program costs, etc.--aren't even enough to cover the rate of growth, which far outpace the ability to tax (or "generate revenue").

Nesi provides a nice pie chart showing that 52% of the growth in the budget since FY2002 is from social services and 17.7% of the growth comes from increasing personnel costs (while the growth in personnel costs--particularly in a good economy--are probably about what we'd expect to see, keep in mind that the state workforce has shrunk). Meanwhile, as we well know, aid to cities in towns--ie, money that towns send to cities, some of which filters back to them--has been reduced by nearly 3%, which isn't a lot in the big picture, but hurts each community acutely.

Given our current straits, perhaps it's time to implement zero-based budgeting instead of the current practice of "last year + (at least) 3%". Start fresh. Look at what we spend our tax dollars on and (re)prioritize: infrastructure, economic development, providing important services at reasonable cost, etc. Now, it takes a lot of work, so perhaps we could do a zero-based budget in the first year of each new governor term and then baseline from there. It's an interesting concept, but the chance of it getting implemented is, well, zero.