How many months will I be paying that back…starting each month with that hit to my budget? Always in the hole…no end in sight.
It hurts, and no one wants to live that way. But that’s exactly what we’re asking Montanans to do.
What’s really sad is that we’re asking residents to borrow money when they don’t need to.
The sheer arrogance of the bankers!
Someone…please, please grab the leaders of the Montana Democratic Party by the shoulders and shout in their ears:
Wake up you idiots!
Who's getting the interest on those 20-year bonds the governor is asking for to pay for this infrastructure bill? As Chuck Johnson reports, that comes out to $67.8 million the State of Montana will pay extra because we chose to borrow instead of pay as we go.
This is what a fool would do, or someone that has banker hooks in them.
Why not leave $150 million as a surplus? Why do we need $300 million so bad each go-round? Here’s what we’ve always had before:
There’s a document out there called the Legislative Budget Analysis 2017 Biennium: Volume 1 – Statewide Perspectives, Preliminary Edition that has all this information and more…and it’s free! (state reporters, you can use it…TV folks too!)
Ah, the Hegelian Dialectic…it’s a bitch!
What else is a bitch is $14 million out of our budget for 20 years. Those are some tight bonds tying our hands. We can’t allow this. We can’t allow the next crop of government leaders to have this blemish staring them in the face right when they get into office. And didn’t Brian Schweitzer try like hell to pay that bond debt down? How much do we have, anyways?
GO/GF (Yellow) is general obligation bonds that primarily go to building state buildings. We were carrying about $17 million of that in 2006, but by 2026 we should have that paid down to $5 million.
Twenty years to pay off $12 million? That’s too slow, way too damn slow! We’re losing money, but you guessed it, the bankers are making money so they want to keep this the same.
No, sorry…they don’t – they want us to increase our debt so they can profit even more, getting better suits and shinier shoes. I hope they don’t buy anymore cologne, because it smells like shit, a fact I’m sure many of the legislators in Helena can attest to.
GO/GFP bonds (Pink) are bonds we used for the St. Mary’s diversion dam and the Montana Heritage Center. There’s some tribal compact stuff and some federal stuff, and it’s about $3 million, not too much.
GO/GFP/Bud bonds (Green) are where the action’s at this session, and these have gone up like wildfire, from about $5 million for 2016 to $16 million for 2017.
What the hell?
It’s easy to say that Montana has to balance it’s budget each year, but that doesn’t really paint the whole picture, colorful as it is, now does it?
No, Montana might have a balanced budget, but that just means she’s damn good at covering up all that debt. Currently we have about $16 million, but in 2017 that’ll shoot up to $27 million or so. By 2018 we’ll have $30 million in debt, and then it’ll slowly begin to recede, getting to $22 million by 2026…about the time some of our current leaders’ kids are thinking of getting into politics…if they’ve managed to survive in the state and haven’t had to move.
Oh, and don’t think that we might not add to that. We know there’s always more stuff to build, and right now Montana needs $7.4 billion in infrastructure improvements. Kind of makes this sound like chump change, doesn’t it? Kind of makes you realize we’ll have a big infrastructure bill every session…doesn’t it?
But what about that special session in 2007? What about it? We had quite a high percentage of money that year, according to those graphs, what happened? And no one knows what we’ll need for fire money. In a few years no amount of surplus will be enough anyways – the feds will have to fund it when it becomes hundreds of millions of dollars every summer.
No, I think we both know that the Montana Democratic Party has gotten too cozy with bankers, Wall Street, dark money, and just about everything else they should be standing against. But if they don’t stand against it they’ll get elected. They can’t get elected without the money, after all, not a one of ‘em.
And that’s the situation we find ourselves in, in this the year of our Lord 2016. God help us.