Via the LMT:
The newest member of Idaho’s 5th Legislative District delegation continued his calls for fiscal restraint and “cutting the fat” during a meeting of the Moscow League of Women Voters on Wednesday.
First-term Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Moscow, told about 90 people at the 1912 Center that he opposed legislation this session authorizing another $300 million in GARVEE debt financing to pay for transportation improvements.
“Forget about more GARVEE,” he said. “What we need to do – and you’re not going to like this answer – is learn to live within our means. If we want good roads and bridges, we need to give up something else. We have to give up the fat.”
I like the idea: if you are going to add something to the budget, you must first remove something else.
Foreman opposed about 40 percent of the budget bills presented during the 2017 legislative session – including the higher education budget that helps fund the University of Idaho and the state’s other public colleges and universities. Many of the bills, he said, contained “too much pork.”
“Depending on whose numbers you use, we grew government by close to 10 percent,” he said. “That’s absurd. I voted no on a lot of bills and took a lot of heat for it, but I’ll go back next year and do it again.”
The conservative Idaho Freedom Foundation estimated that the fiscal 2018 budget grew government by about 9 percent, after one-time expenditures were removed. Overall general fund spending, however, increased 5.4 percent year-over-year.