OPINION: The budget will test Indiana's GOP leadership

To summarize the editorial, the Star trusts Senate Appropriations Chairman Luke Kenley (R-Noblesville) and House Speaker Brian Bosma (R-Indianapolis) when they say that state government just can’t get any smaller right now. So please don’t distract them; they’re doing the best that can be done. And by the way, the uppity insistence of a new governor on cutting state income taxes by 10 percent is not helpful.

“It was exceedingly difficult to keep the state on a fiscally sustainable path while tax revenues tumbled and the demand for services grew as a result of rising unemployment and falling incomes,”the Star editors wrote in outlining the leadership’s policy of protecting the major government revenue streams.

The problem, it seems, is that taxpayers haven’t done their part. They haven’t found taxable employment in numbers that the leadership judges adequate for the needs of government. But is the solution to maintain tax pressure on those employers and investors who might otherwise find ways to become more productive and create new jobs?

If so, that’s not policy, that’s accounting; we could program our Smartphone to do it.

Dr. King’s template skips over journalistic whim to empirically weigh leadership decisions on three factors: personality, politics and policy. However such a template is applied to the current budget debate, our guess is that business will not be done as usual the remainder of this session. For the legislative rank and file is by now fully aware that the electorate is concerned about its own little budgets at its own little statehouses (in most cases, kitchen tables).

What voters see in plain sight all around them is an Indiana, despite the proclaimed heroics of its legislative leaders, becoming a third-tier state. Indeed, Dr. King cites data showing us falling behind the nation and region in five of six key economic indicators.

Leadership, being leadership, might disagree with all of this. The warning signs can be dismissed as cyclical. The Tea Party can be co-opted. Issues can be muddied, incongruity explained, embarrassments covered, the unruly disciplined, facts disputed, reportage and commentary skewed. Power always thinks it will hold.

It cannot be denied, though, that we are returning to a time when Hoosiers want to send legislators to the Statehouse as friends and neighbors and not as mere lawyers to court. The difference is that friends are expected to sincerely share our beliefs, lawyers only to win the next case on the docket.

And you don’t have to be a Karl Rove to know what this means around the electoral corner. Voters will be looking for representation that is authentic and trustworthy. Compare the popular reaction to freshman Sen. Rand Paul’s impromptu filibuster with John McCain’s characterization of it as “wacko.” Compare the governor’s election-tested budget with the dismissive elitism of the Star editors.

Asking voters to pay for new infrastructure and shore up basic education because your super majority won’t swear off public-sector collective bargaining and a prevailing wage on public construction is irresponsible. It is asking your spouse to take a second job because you spent the grocery envelope on beer and pickled eggs.

Under such calculation, the laws of economics don’t apply to government itself. For Mr. Bosma and Mr. Kenley, past accounting and spending errors don’t carry over to the next page, do not prompt systemic adjustment. The leadership thereby proclaims itself supremely exempt from the rules by which the rest of us live.