Key to good state budget: Compromise

By John Huebscher

	John Huebscher

When he ran for president in 1968 as a third party candidate, the late Gov. George Wallace often said, "There isn't a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans."

Were he alive, Wallace wouldn't say that about the Democrats and Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature. As far as the state budget is concerned, there is a $10 billion difference. Resolving that difference is the legislature's summer task.

Democrats control the Senate and Republicans hold the Assembly. Both parties use their power to craft budgets reflecting respective visions of what Wisconsin should look like and what part government should have in making it that way. In the process, both parties have lived up to the themes and messages of the last elections. In this sense, both have kept their promises to voters.

Now both must keep another promise: resolving their differences for the sake of the public interest. Initially, that task falls to the eight-member Conference Committee of four Senators and four Representatives. This committee will negotiate a budget compromise to submit to all 132 legislators.

This could happen by mid-August. Or, it may take much of autumn, for differences are numerous and real. By any measure, 10 billion dollars is a lot of ground to cover.

As the conferees begin, they may wish to consider that most voters are practical people. They care about issues and they have values that mean a lot to them. But they also live every day with the knowledge that they can't have everything they want. They know give and take is a necessary part of life.

The conferees are people of good will. They know what they have to do. They know some voices will be louder than others. Some voices may run ad campaigns intended more to inflame opinion than to enlighten it. It won't be easy, but in the end they will produce a budget.

We citizens can help.

First, we should identify programs or proposals in the budget that are important to us. The Catholic Conference has done that, identifying priorities in areas of children and families, education, corrections, and health care.

But we can't let it go at that.

We can also remind legislators that compromise is not a dirty word when it comes to setting spending priorities. We can tell them we know that our wishes aren't the only ones that matter, that other towns and people may have needs equal to or, in some cases, greater than our own. We can assure them that we will judge their work by the state as a whole, not the funding for one program, one community or one special policy issue that may not even have a fiscal effect.

This may sound overly hopeful. But such pragmatic commitment to the common good has been the rule not the exception in our state since 1848. Let's hope the conferees, their colleagues, and we citizens remember that.

(Huebscher is executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, the civil arm of the state's five diocesan bishops.)