What Recovery? Who to Blame for that "Streetlight Tax" in D.C.

This weekend, the NEW YORK TIMES provided a valuable accounting of the impact that the recession is having on state and city budgets. The short answer: not good.

Nothing, it seems, is off the table. In Pima County, Ariz., the County Board of Supervisors increased an assortment of fees, including the cost of AIDS testing. Florida has proposed raising medical visit co-payments for inmates in state prisons. Parking fees at the Honolulu Zoo could rise by 500 percent if a proposal there goes through.

Politicians tend to regard fees as more palatable than taxes, and more focused too. If a state needs to finance an infrastructure to oversee fishing, why shouldn’t fishermen foot the bill? But groups like the nonpartisan Tax Foundation in Washington worry that governments are now using fees to shore up budget shortfalls rather than cover specific costs incurred by specific users.

Was this nightmare unavoidable? I feel we have to look back to the weeks when the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) was being debated in Congress—specifically, to the February conference negotiations, led by “moderate” Sens. Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins (both R-ME), Arlen Specter (R-PA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Ben Nelson (D-NE). As many people wrote at the time, the trio of Nelson, Snowe and Collins seemed preoccupied with slashing a fixed amount of money from the ARRA, without regard from where it came or what tangible impact it would have on the lives of their constituents or the country at large. The bizarre political fixation with “fiscal discipline” (tell it to the Bushies!) fused with the inner-beltway virtue of “centrism”, drove these lawmakers to demand $100 billion be shaved from the Recovery Act (a nice round number—but why not $85 billion? Or $105 billion?).

Sadly, the Democratic Congress, and a White House eager to look bipartisan, enabled these preeners. The conference resulted in a slashing of $40 billion in state aid, once aimed at shoring up the budgets of the same local governments that are, one after the other, sliding into serious deficit mode.

Why was this conference outcome so disastrous? Well, just about every state has a mandate to balance its own budget (the federal government does not; as we’ve seen, it can essentially print however much money it wants). So when the cash needed to prevent school firings, maintain police presence, emergency response and, say, sewer maintenance, fell through, governors were forced to make the tough and sometimes inhumane choices outlined in the TIMES story. In Washington itself, Mayor Adrian Fenty is attempting to charge a “streetlight fee” to make ends meet.

Of course, in the aftermath of the ARRA’s passage, progressives were encouraged to be thankful that a bill of this size had passed at all. Fair enough. Among other very needed outcomes, the ARRA is, as a stand-alone, “one of the biggest clean energy bills ever passed in Washington,” says a reliable policy source. But, as Paul Krugman and others pointed out, colorfully, in the aftermath, something still stinks—wasn’t the purpose of the ARRA to *prevent* the kind of suffering that we now see these centrists have wrought?

One supposedly need 60 votes to pass anything out of the Senate these days (see Ezra Klein for more), so perhaps we’ll never know what the alternatives were. But demanding that state funding be cut to appease some vague god of bipartisanship—or worse, just the egoism of the swing senators—is a raw deal. The folks hit in the TIMES story know this. And the American people should, too.

—DAYO OLOPADE

Covers the White House and Washington for The Root. Follow her on Twitter.