Thousands of Virginia State employees will not be reporting to work on Friday, May 28. The one day furlough is one of former Governor Tim Kaine’s final cost cutting measures and will save the Commonwealth some $17-18 million. Essential employees such as police, emergency personnel, etc. will be on the job tomorrow, but will take their furlough days at another time.
Kaine actually proposed four furlough days for the biennium as a result of the financial crisis caused by the Warner-Kaine “Let’s Spend Like Druken Sailors” era. To be fair, there were far too many Republicans willing to go along with them. Fortunately a good chunk of those Republicans are also no longer in office.
But this past session, Governor McDonnell and the General Assembly managed to close a $4 billion dollar budget gap, without raising taxes and without additional furloughs for state employees. True, positions were eliminated, but so far, essential programs aren’t suffering. (That’s essential programs).
There’s hope that one day we can see Governor McDonnell in an exchange like the recent one with between New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and a teacher (who, by the way, couldn’t do the math to calculate her own salary), where Governor Christie said, “you don’t have to work here.”
The whole excercise brings to mind the words and wisdom of President Reagan.
Former Director of Office of Management and Budget Jim Miller told this story.
On several occasions each year there was a threat of a government shut-down, as Congress and the President failed to agree on a budget. One day, after a particularly difficult time when I thought negotiations would have borne fruit but didn’t, we came to the “magic hour” when we had to notify all non-essential federal employees to go home. I was pacing up and down in the Oval Office, apologizing to the President and wondering what to do next, when he turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Jim, Jim, just settle down. Let’s closer ‘er down and see if anybody notices!”
It’s a thought.
