Ideas for addressing Missouri's budget

Anyone who has ever worked with a budget knows there are basically two ways to resolve a budget deficit: Increase the revenue, or decrease the expenses. Politically, most politicians find it painful to reduce the expenses and look too often at tax increases as the revenue option.

Examples of expense reductions Missouri could consider:

1. Reduce the funding to elementary and secondary education which has received an $800 million funding increase over the last five years while net state revenue over the last four years has gone down $114 million.

It's demagoguery to say that such a suggestion means you're against quality education ... but that's what happens when an elected official makes such a suggestion. Note: In this fiscal year's budget, kindergarten through high school received a $135 million dollar increase while overall state revenue declined. Even the currently debated cuts to balance this year's budget will leave (to my knowledge) every school district with more revenue than last year.

Why? Because the School Foundation Formula is out of whack according to most every politician, lobbyist and government or independent budget analyst when speaking off the record.

Formula example: After more money was awarded to schools which had summer programs, summer attendance went from 96,000 in 1994 to 260,000 in 2001.

2. Zero-based budgeting (or some version of reviewing all of last year's expenditures) has been advocated for more than 30 years and was a catchphrase when I served in the Missouri Legislature in the 1970s.

But just advocate reducing any area of government funding lower than the previous year and advocacy groups (and government workers involved) are aroused to protect and contact every Missouri elected official to restore their funding.

And so when I attended a Fox Theater performance last week in St. Louis, an insert in the program and a pre-performance announcement from the stage asked everyone to contact their state senators and representatives because "Governor Holden had recommended zero dollars for arts funding for the coming fiscal year beginning July 1." (Who said it's easy to be governor?)

My suggestion is that Professor ED ROBB, former economic analyst from Missouri University (who spoke recently at Southeast Missouri State University); JIM MOODY, whose studied and projected Missouri budgets for almost 20 years and whose videotaped analysis was distributed with the help of Gov. Holden: RAY McCARTY, who is reviewing Missouri budget numbers for the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry; LINDA LUBBERING, Holden's budget director; Missouri Senate Budget Committee chairman JOHN RUSSELL; and Missouri House Budget Committee chairman CARL BEARDEN meet to see if they can come to agreement on revenue projections for next year's budget, anticipated expenses and targeted areas to consider for REAL CUTS in expenditures, not merely cuts in budget requests.

We need to get beyond political gamesmanship and campaign posturing for 2004. Missouri has lost too many jobs. Tax increases alone are NOT the answer. Improved productivity, elimination of waste and, yes, not attempting to provide the monetary solution to every problem that is raised are actions that need to be taken.

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I also recently saw the Pulitzer Prize-winning play "COPENHAGEN" at the 775-seat Webster University Repertory Theatre. It is based on real events.

To quote from the artistic director's (STEVE WOOLF) discussion:

"Copenhagen is a play that is full of ideas and passionate discussions and is in some ways more relevant than it was when first written four years ago. The heated discussions about whether or not Germany had the means to make an atomic bomb during the Second World War have an eerie resonance to contemporary events when the same questions are being asked about Iraq and North Korea. In researching this play and reviewing film footage of the devastation in Japan after the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we all became aware that there is more than one generation that has no real knowledge of the profound power and danger of these weapons. As you listen to the dialogue, you will get a sense of the stakes that were at play when the use of an atomic weapon was first considered."

The event: In the fall of 1941, Werner Heisenberg traveled to occupied Copenhagen to meet with Niels Bohr. Both men were superstars in the world of physics. Heisenberg was in charge of the German nuclear program and had studied with Bohr in the 1920s. The meeting is one of the great mysteries of history and science. While it is known that this meeting did occur. What was said remains a matter of conjecture to this day. Bohr's only recorded comments about the meeting are in an unmailed letter to Heisenberg, which was released to the public just under a year ago. It sheds little new light on the mystery, even though Bohr composed several drafts. After the war, Heisenberg was never again warmly received in the family of world physics.

Nationalism/ethics: One issue raised by the play that remains relevant today is the balance that scientists must strike between loyalty to the interests of the countries that they live and work in and a greater ethical responsibility to evaluate the global implications of that work. Heisenberg was a fierce German nationalist; he truly loved his country. And when he came to Copenhagen in 1941, Germany was winning the war, and the United States hadn't yet entered it. The play shows Heisenberg as a complex and conflicted person. Though he was not a member of the Nazi Party, he traveled throughout Europe during the war and headed the German bomb program -- privileges he could not have enjoyed without the favor of the party, I think.

Why was there no German bomb? There seems to be a whole raft of reasons why the German bomb program never developed a nuclear weapon. They were, in fact, almost two years ahead of the West in their work on the atom, until 1942, when the concept of a nuclear weapon became a major concern for the Allies. Adding urgency to the Allied perspective was the justified fear that the Nazi program was under the very capable direction of Heisenberg. But in June 1942, Hitler announced that only projects that could be completed in the course of nine to 12 months would be fully funded by the Third Reich, Heisenberg's team was convinced that the possibility of developing an atom-based weapon was several years away. So in a meeting with Albert Speer, the sole arbiter of what projects would qualify, Heisenberg asked for barely enough money to fund the building of a reactor -- certainly not the many millions required to finance a bomb program. Why didn't he ask for all the money? Our conjecture is that he was well aware of the dire personal consequences that could result from failure to produce a finished product in the prescribed time. Attention may also have been diverted from the project by Hitler's fascination with the V-2 rocket. Since this weapon had actually been developed, there was no waiting to see if they would work. And one can't overlook the fact that the leading theoretical scientists had left the country and were working primarily for the Allies in Britain and the U.S. Finally, Heisenberg's fundamental error in calculating critical mass doomed the program. The what-ifs are too frightening to contemplate. If he had gotten his calculations correct, or realized his error sooner, then there would have been every chance that London would have experienced nuclear devastation long before the West could have developed their bomb.

The UNANSWERED QUESTION raised in the play: If Hitler (insert SADDAM HUSSEIN) had the atomic bomb, would he have hesitated to use it on Amsterdam, Paris or London or to blackmail the rest of the world into submission?

Gary Rust is the chairman of Rust Communications.