Green: Trust me on budget, I don't have a clue

You won't be surprised to hear that Wisconsin still has a budget deficit.

The good news is that it is "only" $1.5-billion, less than half of the $3.2 billion budget hole Gov. Jim Doyle inherited after 16 years of Republican budgets.

The deficit dominated much of the debate in the 2002 governor's race, as candidates debated how to plug what they thought was a $2.8-billion hole. One Wisconsin Public TV debate featured the three Democratic candidates, with no moderator, trying to come up with specific proposals to fill it. Doyle offered a specific, written plan later in the campaign.

And after Doyle won the election, the number turned out to be much bigger than the $2.8-billion target.

But Doyle put together budgets that have reduced the deficit without raising taxes, as he promised. In fact, he's cut taxes for veterans, businesses, and manufacturers, and held the line on property taxes while still investing in our schools.

He did it in part by cutting $670 million in state overhead, reducing the size of the state workforce, auctioning off 1,000 state cars, even selling eight state airplanes.

There's no magic solution. It's a case of going through the state budget line by line to find savings, economies, and cuts.

Mark Green is trying to make taxes and spending the centerpiece of his campaign. He's come out for a constitutional amendment, sight unseen. Whatever the Republican legislature likes is fine with him, as long as it's simple and has a nice name attached to it. That's basically his position; I'm not exaggerating.

Green, of course, spent several terms in the state Assembly voting for budgets and programs that created the deficit Doyle inherited. He's one of the big-spending Republicans from Tommy Thompson days, and he's kept right on spending and running up gigantic federal deficits as a member of Congress, where they measure it in trillions instead of billions.

But now, Mr. and Mrs. Wisconsin, Mark Green is coming back from Washington to solve your financial problems.

How's he going to do that?

Saying he's fuzzy on it would be giving him too much credit. Today's Journal Sentinel:

In a statement, Green said he'd limit spending and make cuts: "The first rule of being stuck in a hole is to stop digging. That's just what we'll do if I'm elected governor."

Green's statement said he'd use revenue growth to help offset the deficit. That stance differs from statements last week from his spokesman, Rob Vernon, who said revenue increases would be given to taxpayers or used to pay off debt.

In other words, Green has no idea what he would do, but he'll say whatever sounds good. He does know something about digging holes, having helped dig some big ones in Madison and in Washington.

One of the constitutional amendment proposals would limit revenue rather than spending; has he thought about how that would factor in, as he talks about how to use the "revenue increases?"

It's early in the campaign, perhaps, but not too early for Wisconsin's news media and the state's voters to start demanding from Green the same kind of specific answers they expected -- and received -- from Doyle in 2002.