The House Democrat Review is a weekly feature that gives Tennesseans an in-depth look at what our Democratic state legislators have been working on this week, and a glimpse into what’s planned for the coming week at our state house. This week:

• State Budget
• Truth in Campaigning

Final revenue projections to be released in preparation for budget negotiations

(NASHVILLE) – As many committees and subcommittees conducted their final meetings of the 2009 Session, the Tennessee House of Representatives also began the process of drafting a final budget for the upcoming 2009-2010 fiscal year.

“We deal with a variety of issues throughout the year, but the most important work we do is creating a balanced budget that funds those programs important to working Tennesseans,” said State Representative Joe Pitts (D-Clarksville). “Our state has a tradition of passing balanced budgets and this year will be no exception.”

On Friday, the state funding board meets to set revenue projections for the coming fiscal year. Expectations are low that state revenues will make a significant rebound. Once the projections are announced, state representatives will begin the final stretch of the 2009 session. Governor Bredesen is also expected to deliver his final budget amendment later this month.

“Even though we have the help of the American Recovery and Revitalization Act from Congress, the bottom line is that we have to make some very tough cuts in order to balance our budget,” said Pitts. “Just like working families across Tennessee have to make tough choices in these tough economic times, so too will the House of Representatives.”

DEMOCRATS LEAD CHARGE FOR TRUTH IN CAMPAIGNING

Legislation holds political campaigns and bloggers to same standards at news media

On Monday, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to adopt the “Fair Campaigning Act of 2009,” a bill that would address false attacks and hold political campaigns, organizations, bloggers and others to the same standards as traditional news media outlets.

“The public has for too long been subject to false and inappropriate ads from out-of-control political groups,” said Pitts. “No matter what party you belong to or what issues you support, you should always speak truth to the public and those who choose to promote false information should be held accountable.”

Under the bill, if a person or campaign knowingly publishes, broadcasts, or distributes any false and defamatory campaign literature or political advertisement relating to the conduct, fitness, or record of a candidate for public office, then that person could be held liable in a court of law.

“For too long we have allowed false information to run around as truth and rewarded such inappropriate behavior,” said Pitts. “With this legislation, civil discourse and quality debate among candidates is protected and those who engage in lies can be appropriately punished.”

The legislation is scheduled to be heard in the Senate State & Local Government on May 5th and could be passed by the Senate later this month.

Well to hear our conservative friends tell it… heck no. And they wouldn’t lie to us, right? Seriously, the conservatives’ lack of credibility aside, let’s take a look at the hard facts and do the math on the cost of doing nothing when it comes to health care reform.

• FACT: In the past eight years, healthcare premiums for family coverage have risen more than five times faster than wages. With 7.9% unemployed, many families are at risk of losing their health coverage.
• FACT: If the state keeps losing jobs at the rate it did last year, by next year, 384,425 people in Tennessee will be unemployed by 2010. 48.35% of insured Tennessee residents depend on their employers for their health insurance. If nothing is done to stem the economic downturn and reform our health care system, 69,259 Tennessee workers will lose their current health coverage, meaning that 28,684 more people will likely enroll in COBRA. That leaves 40,611 people who will have to enroll in Medicaid, fend for themselves in the private market, or become uninsured.
• FACT: In Tennessee, approximately 1,301,000 non-elderly people spent more than 10% of their pre-tax family income on health care costs in 2008. 87% of those people have insurance, but are under insured. 1,133,000 Tennessee residents with insurance spent more than 10% of their pre-tax income on health care costs, and 333,000 spend more than 25% of their income. By 2016, projections show that Tennessee families will have to pay close to $19,400 for health care or over 44 percent of median household income. This would represent a 70 percent increase over 2008 levels.
• FACT: As of 2007 there were already 126,186 uninsured children in Tennessee, and more than 714,361 uninsured adults. 276,378 of uninsured adults in Tennessee also live below the Federal Poverty Line. Tennessee’s economy lost as much as $3.57 billion because of the poor health and shorter lifespan of the uninsured in 2007. That equates to $4,000 per uninsured Tennessee resident.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that skyrocketing health care costs add to families’ already overwhelming burden, threatening their health and financial security. The message is clear that we cannot get our economy back on track without repairing the American health care system.

We can do better, but not without a fight against the big moneyed interests who support people like Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker and their commitment to the status quo when it comes to America’s healthcare system. To find out how you can help in the fight to help solve our healthcare crisis, I encourage you to get involved with the Change That Works campaign here in Tennessee. Change That Works is a project of the Service Employees International Union and is committed to advocating at the grassroots level for quality, affordable healthcare for all. Contact their campaign office to find out to get involved at 615-244-9794 or visit online at www.changethatworks.net/tn.

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President Hall took the time to personally communicate both the increase and his plan for making up the remaining budget shortfall to all of APSU’s students. In his plan, the budget for instruction is to be held sacred and remain untouched. Similarly, the President hopes to avoid cutting any teaching positions, filled or vacant (for the purposes of the budget, money is allocated as if these positions will be filled), another erstwhile goal. Unfortunately, this leaves two areas that will receive big cuts, maintenance and operations, two areas in which Austin Peay has already been struggling in recent years to meet needs. Announcements of various service interruptions in things such as water, electricity, or heat and air due to failure of campus infrastructure are common enough that students expect those emails.

However, President Hall isn’t at fault here. As much as he can do, he does not have control over how the Tennessee Legislature appropriates funding, and he is simply doing the best he can to compensate for their bad decision making. The figures on pork spending for this session aren’t in yet, but looking at last year’s expenditures reveals more than 260 million dollars in spending that is questionable at best, and an amount that is more than enough to cover the shortfalls in essential budgetary items.

Top on the list is Boll Weevil eradication, yes, you heard right. Fiscal year 2007-2008 (that’s last year) featured 6.5 million dollars to combat the little buggers. Yes, they don’t do very much for cotton crops, but according to most estimates there are less than 9,000 of the quarter inch long insects alive in the state in total, meaning taxpayers are spending $730 dollars per insect to attempt to kill them. The kicker, the Boll Weevil population has been stable for roughly a decade. Fortunately, its biggest proponent, Senator Wilder (who coincidentally was president of the Tennessee Cotton Ginner Association in the past and still owns Longtown Gin and Supply Co.) has gone the way of the dodo in the Senate. Hopefully this abysmal waste of resources goes with him.

Next up, 70 million dollars over five years (12.2 million dollars per year) to pay farmers to grow switch grass (a type of prairie grass that most farmers would call a weed) instead of corn to produce ethanol. Before the environmentalist nut-jobs start pointing out this is investing in alternative energy, let’s take a look at something. Ethanol is NOT, I’ll repeat NOT, a viable alternative to gasoline. For starters, ethanol is more expensive to make than gasoline, period, end of story, not changing in the near future, which means it WILL cost more per gallon that gasoline. Second, ethanol contains approximately 30% less energy than gasoline per unit volume. This translates to the Ford Focus at 29 miles to a gallon on gasoline achieving only 20 miles per gallon on ethanol, meaning you have to buy and burn more ethanol to go the same distance. That leads to point number 3, biofuels made from Switch grass grown on land intended for corn production (a staple crop in Tennessee by the way, and a highly profitable one) leads to a 50% increase in carbon emissions as compared to growing the corn and using the gasoline instead. Point 4, this also makes no economic sense. According to the United Nations there is a global shortage of staple food grains including corn. So, instead of growing corn, which could be sold on the world market to help such a shortage, Tennessee wants its farmers to cease corn production (exacerbating the shortage) and grow economically unviable (if it was profitable on its own, why would we pay them?) switch grass. Axing this alone would cover almost the entire budget cut that the TBR system raised tuition to cover.

Corruption also rears its ugly head in Tennessee, at least last year. Rep. Janis Sontany (D-Nashville), put in for $52,000 in earmarks to various organizations, she sits on the board for all of them. She also sent $10,000 to Seth Norman’s drug court. He provided her with generous campaign donations. Rep. Mary Pruitt (D-Nashville) set aside $55,000 for a group she helped found, plus she’s an ex-officio board member. Rep. Barbara Cooper asked for $61,000 for organizations that her own campaign claims she is a key member of.Rep. Joe Towns (D-Memphis) pushed for $10,000 for his college fraternity (which is even more suspect and worthless than the previous examples). This doesn’t even begin to include kickbacks given because of friendship or political contributions.

Speaking of corruption, how about how legislators have been using their general office funds (taxpayer funded general fund that is meant to cover things like paper, printer cartridges, schoolhouse flags, etc) to pay for their campaigns. Again, Rep. Towns takes the cake for the most egregious offender, spending $2,251 to send out campaign newsletters. At least four other legislators have done so. Legislators are also very fond of abusing their Per Diem allowances. House Speaker Pro-Tempore Lois DeBerry (D-Memphis), Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey (R-Blountville), and the Mister Speaker Jimmy Naifeh (D-Covington) all billed the state for more than $30,000 in Per Diem. All three of them billed the state for a trip to China. Speaker Pro-Temp DeBerry billed the state a total of $31,967 with 14 out of state trips. That is, she billed the state for her full allowance for 199 days. That’s far longer than the legislature is supposed to be in session, by about 109 days, actually. Just what were the taxpayers funding on those extra days exactly? Sen. Doug Jackson (D-Dickson) and Rep. Towns both claimed more than $25,000 is Per Diem. In total 22 legislators claimed more in Per Diem than their $18,123 base salary (Speaker Naifeh has a base salary of 3 times that, by the way and he was still in the top 3 for Per Diem billing). Speaking of outrageous though, how about Reps. Sherry Jones and Brenda Gilmore (both D-Nashville) who live less than 10 miles from their offices at legislative plaza and still claimed better than $22,000 in Per Diem allowances. These ladies sleep in their own homes every night, so how they managed to spend $22,000 on room and board traveling to Nashville will forever remain a mystery.

Also, cronyism is alive and well in Bredesen’s administration. State employees received a 3% raise last year; Bredesen’s cabinet received raises that averaged 23%, for not doing their jobs. DCS failed to investigate child deaths in a timely manner, then failed and refused to share the findings with prosecutors and judges. The commissioner received a 63% pay raise. Economic Development failed to collect final reports on over $865,000 worth of grants. Are we rewarding good service, or handing out bones here?

On loose ends in parks and recreation, the state lost over 1.4 million dollars on golf courses, $500,000 on a feasibility study of making a “fishing trail” and “stocking it with fish.” Grant, on a technicality, most parks cost the state money for no profit, but the golf courses charge for use and are supposed to be self sustaining. Only two of the fourteen courses were self sustaining, the two located in urban areas. The other 12 scattered across rural Tennessee in such odd places and Chester County lost money at insane rates. As for the fishing trail idea, the feasibility study is half a million, wagers are open for how much the actual project, the environmental impact studies, continual stocking expenses, etc will cost the state, for no apparent reason.

Another odd project is the resurrection of the Tennessee River ferry between Houston and Benton counties. It cost the state 1.2 million dollars to put the service in operation again, and costs approximately $1,380 per day to operate. Twenty-three people per day pay $.87 to make use of it, meaning the taxpayers are subsidizing 98% of each passenger’s fare (if one were to charge those 23 people the $59 and change their tickets would need to cost to equal the cost of running the service) for something that 99.99… of the people in this state will never hear of, much less use.

This brief rundown cannot even begin to account for every piece of unneeded spending in Tennessee. The lavish and decadent spending at the Governor’s mansion remains, the so-called obligatory spending on the abysmal socialist failure that is TennCare remains unchecked, and there is still no guarantee that money legitimately and wisely appropriated to different agencies was spent wisely or well, or will be in the coming fiscal year. Perhaps instead of asking for hard decisions on spending cuts, Governor Bredesen and the General Assembly should look to remove some of these outrageous and unneeded items of spending first that no one will notice or miss.

“Controlling pre-holiday spending to dodge post holiday blues” is the theme I’ll address today. Extravagant spending, that is, budget breakers, will inevitably come back to haunt the spender. Purchases that looks good in those days leading up to Christmas can precipitate stress after the emotion of the season is pass and one returns to reality. A stack of bills is devastating to morale and defeats long term plans for financial security.

How are we to get a grip on and control our urge to spend, which forfeits our future? One sane way to influence our expenditures is through the power of suggestion. Our suggestions to ourselves. Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine picking up the mail to find a dozen bills demanding payment. A handful of such “downs” have a sobering effect on the way we plan our holiday spending.

By all means realize it is the season to be supportive and generous. There are charities and families that receive renewed motivation for doing good with a little money to help move them forward.

One business leader, Dion Williams, maintains a philosophy of intently examining the family holiday budget. He says “my wife and i go over every single person we are buying for — including adopting a family for charity — and we decide how much to spend.”

This CEO gives us valuable insights for managing spending. The first is attention to charitable giving. There are needy families that would have a much merrier Christmas with a small donation to help them along. Our Salvation Army can assist in our efforts to be generous in giving to families. I also believe that that our budget for the holidays should include those who provide valuable services to us throughout the year. For example, it is our practice to give a cash gift or check to the one who picks up our trash weekly. Let’s also imitate my neighbor who last year included a gift to her mail carrier. Our veterinarian and family doctors merit a place on our gift list. For these, I avoid things like baked goods and believe a gift card is more functional.

Many of us have been taught it is better to give than to receive. Christmas is the appropriate time to brighten the lives of those who contribute to the quality of our lives.

In managing money, the following sage advice is given on doing good and yet not suffering a hangover from Christmas giving:

• Never ship anything when rushed…
• Do online research first…
• Take frequent breaks to take stock…
• Count everything you are spending…
• Set a budget…
• Careful budgeting will produce a merrier Christmas and a much better post-holiday season.
• Sensible use of credit cards opens us to further good feelings after the holidays. As rational individuals we can chose not to run into debt and create trouble for ourselves. Using a tax refund in April to pay off delinquent accounts from the holidays can cause extreme stress.

Rev. John Wesby was a wise financial planner as well as a church founder and leader. Regarding finances. He said:

“Make all you can, save all you can. Be wise, compassionate and generous in holiday spending.” The wisdom comes in knowing your financial abilities and limitations.

First, let’s talk about the all-important meal table. You’re probably planning on having some friends and family at a table together for the holidays, so why not give them something good to look at besides your cooking. For this project, a little bit can go a long way. First, consider a tablecloth. Nothing dresses up a dull table like a tablecloth. Even a cheap one from Wal-Mart can help spruce the kitchen up. And, don’t even think about forgetting the centerpiece. What else will guests have to talk about when the awkward silences and family feuds set in? This is where some creativity comes in play.

For my centerpiece this year, I used a simple glass candleholder with some festive poinsettias on it. I also had some holiday garland laying around, so I opted to wrap it around. Then, I added a pumpkin spice tea light. Presto! Instant centerpiece. You can get as creative as you like with this. You could also make a gingerbread house or even take a simple basket and fill it with fresh fruit and add in some greenery from your local arts and crafts store.

Next, let’s discuss stockings. Of course, you could go out and purchase beautifully hand crafted stockings or you could make your own and personalize them with glitter, fabric paint, feathers, ribbons, or whatever else you like. This is an excellent project for little ones because they get to create something that they will be able to enjoy for years to come. One day when they look back at what they created, they’ll think back to the excitement and joy of creating their own individualized stockings throughout the years. Be prepared to get messy, and give plenty of time for any glue or paint to dry. This year, we took new white tube socks that we didn’t need and fabric painted them to create some very unique holiday stockings.

Perhaps the crowning glory of your holiday decorations is the Christmas tree. This year, since our Christmas tree is only four feet tall, we wrapped a large box in Christmas wrapping paper and dressed it up as a present to place our tree on to give it more height. Next, we placed items on the branches that had special meaning to it. We have ornaments we’ve had since we were youngsters; I added a breast cancer awareness bracelet, a key chain that I liked, and we added items from trees of family and friends.

We strung popcorn to give it some more decoration, added lights, and even put some Halloween garland that was leftover on there. We topped it with a witch’s hat from Halloween and a pair of 3D glasses from my first 3D movie I ever saw. Some might call it tacky, they can even call it ugly, but there’s not a single decoration on that tree that doesn’t mean something special to us.

Now that your home is decorated for the season, don’t spend all your time there. Go out and enjoy the holiday season. Take a stroll through Christmas on the Cumberland. The light display is on Riverside Drive and is open from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM Sunday through Thursday. Friday and Saturday, it stays open until 11:00 PM. Or, you could go out and enjoy a live theatre production at our local Roxy Regional Theatre. They offer a “pay what you can” night to make live Theatre available to everyone. Go out and have a cup of coffee at one of Clarksville’s many local cafés. I enjoy Mugsy’s on Fort Campbell Boulevard. They’ve got a reward program where after ten drinks your eleventh is free.

So after you’ve managed to decorate and enjoy your holiday season on a budget, sit back and relax. Spend time with family and friends and let them know how much you enjoy having them in your life.

Don’t forget to leave milk and cookies out for Santa and carrots for the reindeer. Remember to wish for peace on earth, goodwill towards men, and money leftover to pay January’s bills!

Best Wishes,