UNWISE BUDGETING

Last week, Gov. Carnahan unveiled his Fiscal Year 1996 budget for state government. At a whopping $12.8 billion, Missouri's budget is up 4 percent over 1995. Thanks to a booming economy and the lowest unemployment rate in 16 years, state government will benefit from $257 million more in revenues this year.

In his State of the State message last week, Carnahan claimed to have gotten the message of last November's elections, especially on the issue of tax limitation. The governor has a proposed constitutional amendment that he says would accomplish this. There is an adage that says there is no zealot like a convert. But there is ample reason for Missourians to be suspicious as to whether a governor who did so much to feed public demand for tax limitation will now deliver them from the depredations of the taxers and spenders with whom he has staffed his administration.

The governor is responding to public demand for stiffer sentencing of violent criminals -- and the exploding prison population it causes -- by proposing to build two new prisons and to expand others. He proposes to pay for these expansions through lease-purchase. This method of funding what should be one of the first obligations of state government is dubious and open to question. Lawmakers should scrutinize it closely and make every effort to find the money through other means out of the state's annual operating budget.

One important issue the governor shorted in both attention and money was the state's Rainy Day Fund. In 1993, when in its first year the Carnahan administration faced the enormous challenge of a historic flood, state government was able to find approximately $27 million from this fund to meet extraordinary expenses. State government met this challenge without a tax increase. This was, of course, a tribute to the disciplined fiscal management of Carnahan's predecessor, John Ashcroft. The lesson here is obvious: State government should husband its resources prudently, replenishing this fund for a future rainy day.

Unfortunately, the lesson of the Great Flood of 1993 seems lost on the current administration, which has budgeted an increase of only $3.6 million in this fund. State law permits holding up to $250 million in this account. Budgeting for a cushion of at least an additional $50 million would seem prudent and should be a high priority for lawmakers.

It is noteworthy that, except for touting his Medicaid waiver proposal currently languishing with the federal government, the governor was largely silent on health care reform. Bitter fighting over this issue dominated so much of last year's session. In a press conference following his speech, Carnahan said he had no stomach for another losing effort. Given the fact that his health care proposal was a breathtaking expansion of government's involvement in health care, this is all to the good. Through it all, the governor took pains to distance his proposals from those of the Clinton administration in Washington, suggesting further that he is trying to get the conservative message voters sent so loudly last fall.

The governor's rhetoric sounds as conservative as any governor in recent Missouri history and justifies the quip of the lawmaker who observed: If you closed your eyes, "you would have thought it was John Ashcroft up there talking." It is up to all members of the General Assembly to hold the governor to account, so that the facts will square with his eyes-on-the-next election rhetoric.