Slash And Burn Time For Bredesen

By Kleinheider Posted on July 29, 2008 at 1:54 pm

“Your way. It won’t work.”

~ “The Greek” in The Wire: Season Two

Cara Kumari echoes the AP on the lack of success of the state employee buyout and the repercussions:

Apparently, threats of layoffs haven’t enticed a huge amount of people to take the buyouts since last week. You may remember, the governor said last week that only 1,400 people had applied for the buyout. That number is up to 1,600 today. Only about 1,200 of the people who applied will actually get the buyout , due to how many other people in their job classification took it.

According to the Associated Press, the governor is now considering expanding the scope of the buyout and offering it to more state employees. The deadline for the buyouts is August 5th.

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Tags: Phil Bredesen, state employee buyout  

Did The Bredesen Bunker Serve Small Government Conservatism?

By Kleinheider Posted on May 20, 2008 at 11:16 am

Steve Gill this morning was talking with his listeners (or at them) and raised an interesting beef about the Bredesen administration’s proposed buyout of state employees.

Gill predicted that not only would the buyout end up costing more than projected he also believes that the buyout will not save as much money as is predicted. The buyout, he seemed to be saying, was ill-advised.

Gill also questioned whether the so-called Bredesen Bunker should have been built as the money used for the renovation on the Governor’s Executive residence could have been used for these employee buyouts.

Some points here that conservatives should consider. This buyout is purported to be for non-essential employees. These employees, that will be voluntarily dismissed from service from the state, are, in fact, the very kind of government job conservatives always rail against. What Bredesen is doing here is purchasing a reduction of the state bureaucracy. He is reducing not only the government’s size here, but also its scope.

Conservatives often complain that once big government moves in, once it is entrenched, it is impossible to unroot. The power of inertia, they believe, keeps big government going.

What will happen with this buyout is the opposite. Once these non-essential jobs have been emblazened with the non-essential tag they are unlikely to be filled again, even in fat times. These workers and their salaries, this reoccurring government expense, will be gone forever.

If you are a conservative, is not this one-time buyout of big government, a step in the right direction — no matter what the cost ?

On the flipside, the Bredesen bunker is, in fact, a one time expense.  It is a capital expenditure as opposed to a reoccurring expense. It is not bureaucracy.

Furthermore, the conservative must consider this: What if the Bredesen Bunker had not been built? What if that money had not been outlayed?

Well, the Steve Gill’s of the world might say, we would not be in this budget crisis. We would have been saved from this “catastrophe.”

But if we were saved from this budget shortfall then Bredesen would have been saved from having to make these tough choices.

The thing is, if you want to say that bunker is responsible for the budget mess, what you must also admit is that if it wasn’t for the bunker this buyout would not have been necessary, these nonessential jobs would continue to be filled and the leviathan would continue to drift along.

So following conservative logic and conservative principles was the Bredesen Bunker a good thing or a bad thing?

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Tags: big government, Bredesen Bunker, leviathan, state employee buyout, Steve Gill