The Idaho Legislature busted the budget. Time to kill vouchers | Opinion

There’s just no covering it up: The Idaho Legislature was deeply fiscally irresponsible this session. Now the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost — but it isn’t the lawmakers who will suffer.

It’s you and your kids.

Idaho lawmakers pursued the largest tax cuts in state history, initiated big new spending items like a brand-new $50 million state school voucher system, and failed to account for the obvious fact that President Donald Trump’s promised tariffs would slash economic growth and thereby tax revenue. (Sales tax declines, led by declining sales, is the main driver of the state’s tax revenue shortfall.)

This profligacy was led by breaking Idaho’s budget process — which functioned well for years. That process is now undeniably broken.

It used to work like this: A specialized group in the Idaho Legislature, called the Economic Outlook and Revenue Assessment Committee, meets at the start of the session. They hear a variety of presentations from economists, business leaders and other experts about the fate of the economy. Then they issue a projection of how much revenue the state can expect over the following year — a usually lowball projection, which resulted in repeated state surpluses.

This method is far from perfect — if you could reliably predict how well the economy is going to do over the next year, you would probably be pretty wealthy — but it does have one specific virtue: It forces the Legislature to make an educated guess about tax revenue, and then to design its budget with that constraint in mind.

This year, the budget-writing Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee broke that process, waiting to officially adopt a revenue figure until after big tax cuts and high-dollar spending priorities had been negotiated, as the Idaho Capital Sun reported. And it was not a lowball.

Imagine if you sat down on Jan. 1, and instead of figuring out how much you could spend this year based on your income, you instead bought everything you felt like buying — a new truck, a vacation to Alaska, a new house and reducing the number of hours you work — confident that your boss would give you a raise big enough that it would all work out. That would be a very foolish way to plan your household budget.

And it’s how the Legislature and Gov. Brad Little planned your state budget.

The predictable — and repeatedly predicted — results are now unfolding. According to Idaho Education News, agencies across the state have been told to spend only from their “maintenance” budgets (which aren’t really maintenance budgets) and to prepare to cut spending across the board by 6%.

This occurs during a time when Idaho has left its kids, especially in rural areas, in crumbling unsafe school buildings, where per-pupil education spending continues to trail most of the nation, where lawmakers have attempted to kick the working poor off Medicaid and where repeated tax cuts targeting the rich have left a significantly regressive tax system.

It’s not too late to at least cushion the impact of all these mistakes, and Little should have the courage to do it.

There is a very obvious holdback Little could enact to reduce the negative impact of irresponsible budgeting on everyday Idahoans. While holdbacks traditionally take the form of an across-the-board budget reduction — which seems like fairness but is actually a kind of laziness that avoids prioritizing spending on the most important things — that rule is not set in law or the state constitution.

So instead, Little should start with a 100% holdback for the state’s new voucher system, which started busting cost projections before it was even implemented. (And there hasn’t yet been time for the waste, fraud and abuse, prevalent in other states with voucher systems, to get started in Idaho.)

Because the voucher system is structured as a tax credit, there would certainly be a legal challenge, and Little might lose at the Idaho Supreme Court. Little can hold back spending in response to a revenue shortfall, but he can’t unilaterally raise taxes.

But this is a sort of accounting fiction, which the the court could see through. Because it is a refundable tax credit — that is, if you pay nothing in state income taxes, you’re still eligible to get a check for 100% of the voucher value — it is in reality an appropriation, not a tax break. You can tell this is true because not everyone who applies for the tax credit will receive it. Once the $50 million budget for vouchers is spent, the tax credit is unavailable to other applicants. This is an appropriation masquerading as tax policy.

It’s worth a try.

Zeroing out that $50 million budget for the next year, which experience in other states suggests would mostly benefit wealthy families who already send their kids to private schools, would go a long way to minimizing cuts in spending priorities that are far more beneficial — like funding public schools. Indeed, zeroing out voucher funding would reduce the cuts needed to the public school system by nearly one-third.

Little made a mistake by signing the voucher bill. He made a mistake by signing an enormous tax cut when it was obvious something like this could happen. It’s time for him to do his best to rectify those mistakes.

If he doesn’t, Idaho public schools get the ax, and vouchers sail on free and clear. That would be a disaster for Idaho education.