Balancing the Budget: The Debate

One might think that it is not difficult to agree that we need to balance the budget. But the problem these days is how. If you've taken a negotiation course in college (undergraduate, graduate, or otherwise), you'll recall that it is hard to get people to agree, especially when it comes to agreeing on something that they don't find valuable to their case or interesting to begin with. So you might be asking yourself, do I have a solution to the budget "crisis." The short answer is no. The backup is that when it comes to a statewide budget, the scope of what is on the budget is important (in other words, our perception of the budget). Everyone seems to talk about how they want the budget to be how it was "how they remember it." Well this is essentially impossible in that the scope of the budget now is so large (in part due to the population, items on the budget, and of course our favorite inflation). So the next question might be, well can the budget ever be balanced? The answer is yes, but we need to realize that everything is just as important as everybody's view on the topics. The simplistic route would be contribution to the actual budget. What this means if one geographic area (be it towns, cities, counties, etc) contributes more than another, their % of the budget should be weighted more than an area that contributes less (as far as money received as well as costs accrued). The problem that I can tell is that everyone wants the benefits but no one wants to pay the costs. I think this would be a good starting point to helping in balancing the budget as well as repairing the other problems caused by the financial meltdown.



Note: Although this is a simplistic model, when establishing the full report in who gets what and how much they have to pay, and showing people the figures, any reasonable person should be able to better make a case rather than going off of the basis of not liking a "competitor's" view and only wanting to have their own.