Lang says repair bill not to blame for deficit
LFB director Bob Lang sent a letter to Sen. Mike Ellis today saying that the estimated $1.68 billion structural deficit is not due to the budget repair bill. Rather, Lang says, it is due to a decline in tax collections and departmental revenues at a time when expenditures are expected to increase.
Ellis, R-Neenah, sent out a press release earlier in the day saying that Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature are to blame for the ballooning structural deficit because they refused to "honestly" address the revenue shortfall.
"Instead, they relied on delayed debt payments, transfers and other accounting gimmicks to shove the problem out of this election year and into the next biennium. That is what created the structural deficit," Ellis said.
Lang says his memo says no such thing.
"It would have been inaccurate to portray the significant increase in the structural deficit as the result of the budget adjustment bill. It was not," he wrote. "The structural deficit was neither improved nor worsened by the budget adjustment bill; nor did the memorandum suggest that it was."
Lang continued that the memo LFB prepared on the structural deficit "was not intended to assign credit or blame to either branch of government, but rather to factually state why the number increased as significantly as it did."
See the structural deficit memo here.
Labels: Budget_Repair_Bill, structural_deficit
