Republican Senators released their budget plan earlier today, but we noticed something a little funny in their proposal. The GOP budget numbers include the FY 2012-2012 revenue in their revenue pool, but then calculate the percent change using FY 2010-2011 dollars, which doesn’t count the new money.

Basically, the Republicans are saying “sure, we’ll use that new billion dollars from the February budget forecast, but we won’t measure our cuts against the expected spending standards in that forecast.”

I don’t know about you, but to us that looks like pretty shady accounting.

When you readjust the numbers, some areas actually have deeper cuts. What’s clear is that almost everything is being cut, but their tricky accounting hides the fact that they are cutting education and health and human services.

Here’s what the new numbers look like:

Education: .17% cut without the shift, 9.38% cut with the shift

Higher education: 14.1% cut

HHS: 12.97% cut

Agriculture: 14.04% cut

Environment: 24.53% cut

Jobs/economy: 38.63% cut

Transportation: 22.2% cut

Public safety: .5% increase

State government: 53.3% cut

Aids and credits: 9.64% cut

This number trickery in their budget makes it clear that Republicans do not want to be honest with Minnesota citizens about how their budget will affect the folks they represent. We need to make sure that the Republicans are honest and upfront about the ways in which their drastic budget cuts will hurt the state we love.

 

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