WASHINGTON — The nation’s governors, who gathered in Washington thisweekend for their annual winter meeting, warned that automatic spending cuts scheduled to go into effect March 1 would lead to severe joblosses in their states, putting the nation’s fragile economic recovery in jeopardy.
Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, said he hopes President Barack Obama and members of Congress take note.
“When we stand united together as governors, Republican and Democrat alike, we force them to listen,” he said. “If all the governors are speaking with one voice, they don’t have any choice but to listen.”
But even if the voices of the nation’s chief state executives are heard, Beebe said it doesn’t necessarily follow that Congress and the White House will come to an agreement.
“I’m a real pessimist about what they do up here,” he said. “I’m prepared to live with and deal with whatever they do and make it work for Arkansas.”
The automatic, acrossthe-board cuts were agreed on by both parties in August 2011 and were meant to be so painful that lawmakers would never let them go into effect. To try to force both parties to agree to a broad deficit-reduction deal, Congress passed $85 billion in automatic cuts - known as “sequestration” - that will fall in the current fiscal year and be split evenly betweendefense and nondefense programs.
Governors of both parties who were in Washington for the three-day National Governors Association meeting said they feared the effects of sequestration.
Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Phil Bryan said he feared defense cuts would mean huge job losses at Ingalls Shipbuilding, the state’s largest private employer. Unemployment, he said, would in turn lead to a greater dependency on social programs, which also would see their budgets cut.
“Rather than taking a meat ax to it, Washington has to sit down and do a better job of determining what are the targeted cuts that will have the least amount of effect on the economy,” Bryan said.
Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware, a Democrat and chairman of the National Governor’s Association, said the cuts - particularly in programs aimed at educating workers - would put the brakes on an economy that is just starting to rev up.
“One of the frustrations is that a number of us are seeing the economy coming back after a very difficult several years,” he said. “When we have a potential negative impact to workforce training programs, that’s a real negative.”
But like their counterparts in Congress, the governors did not offer a clear preference for how to solve the budget impasse.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have argued that tax increases would stymie economic growth and should not be part of the equation. Democrats have pushed to include tax increases and argued that making cuts insocial programs disproportionately places the burden of narrowing the budget deficit on the poor.
Gov. Mary Fallin, an Oklahoma Republican, said she feared 20,000 job losses as a result of sequestration. A study conducted by Stephen Fuller, an economist at George Mason, put the number of job losses in Arkansas at 9,000.
Fallin said the growth of the nation’s budget deficit would not be slowed by tax increases. Instead, she said, programs will have to be cut.
“I’ve seen spending escalate and escalate,” she said.
Gov. Neil Abercrombie, a Hawaii Democrat, disagreed.
He said House Republicans, with the support of Tea Party groups, have taken a “let’s tear the place apart” approach to governing that supports lower taxes.
“This ideological approach is that government itself needs to be eliminated,” he said.
Because of their deep philosophical differences, Democratic and Republican governors have not favored a specific budget plan. Instead, Beebe said, the governorshave tried to push “generic work-together approaches.”
While the threat of sequestration looms large, Beebe said the “front burner” issue for most state executives is mounting healthcare costs.
He did not provide any specifics on a meeting Friday he had with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on options the state has for expanding Medicaid coverage to include 250,000 more Arkansans.
Currently the health-careprogram for children and the poor covers about 780,000 Arkansans.
Beebe said he found Sebelius receptive to ideas pushed by Republican state legislators designed to increase the role for privatesector health-care providers.
“Some things we might have thought were not possible are possible,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s additional flexibility or flexibility that was always there and we didn’t realize it. Either way, it’s a pleasant change.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 02/24/2013