THE NEW BUDGET PLAN proposed Friday by the chairman of the Kansas House Appropriations Committee indicates that there is still a wide divergence in the Legislature about how to get the state through the rest of this year without sending lawmakers out to run bake sales and beg on the streets.
Like the other plans that have been proposed, including the one that got bipartisan support in the Kansas Senate, Rep. Kevin Yoder’s plan has something for everyone — to hate.
The Senate plan would cut spending on public schools by $7 million. Yoder’s plan would cut almost eight times that amount, taking $53 million out of the schools’ budgets.
But that is just a matter of shifting the pain. The Senate bill would reduce spending on social service agencies by $23 million — this in a year when there has already been a mini-scandal about the long waiting lists for badly needed social services. Yoder’s plan would reduce social services cuts to $6 million and would provide money to shorten the waiting time for home care for the disabled. The plan would also reduce the Senate’s cuts to higher education.
The changes to this year’s budget are a balancing act, and Yoder’s proposal is an attempt to find a point of balance. The feeling of teetering on tiptoe is familiar to many Kansans, for whom the bills keep rolling in, even though there is less and less money to pay them.
Give Yoder points for trying. He seems to realize that what the Legislature is really dealing with is not doling out dollars and cents, but spreading unavoidable pain in such a way as to do the least harm to the state and its people.
The question is not who should be spared pain altogether, but which Kansans are least able to bear more pain than they already have.