Geoff Schoos’ s column in The Cranston Herald this past week made some excellent points about what the Governor can choose to do to keep single mothers from having to quit their jobs because they can’t afford childcare. That will be the dilemma for the lucky ones who make $14.26 an hour or less. I’d like to see the Governor live for a month on $14.26 an hour. This is about $400.00 a week after taking out deductions for taxes and health care. After paying $150 a week for childcare, that leaves you about $1000 a month. After $700 for rent, you’ve got $200 for food ($50 a week for food — ha! trying spending this at the grocery store once you have a kid when formula is $25 a week) and $100 for heat and electricity. That means you have no money at all for the phone bill, car payments, bus fare, clothes, or anything else.

These cuts are a recipe for disaster for the people on the bottom rung of our economic ladder. They are a recipe for disaster for people who are a few steps up the the ladder who happen to have a kid. How can this be good for our economy?

…No matter how he characterizes his budget proposals, it’s important to understand that a budget is a political document. And as a political document, it’s about nothing but choices. The political scientist Harold Laswell once defined politics as “who gets what, when, where and how.â€? Nothing answers that question or brings Laswell’s definition into clearer focus than a government’s budget.

Thus, the governor has a choice between recommending a freeze or, better yet, a roll-back of last year’s tax breaks for the wealthy and reducing child care benefits for struggling families. He has a choice between recommending the closing of the corporate investment tax loophole and raising fees for hard-working Rhode Islanders. He could have recommended reform of the historic preservation tax credit beyond his “buy-back� suggestion instead of proposing an intermittent shutdown of state government. He could have proposed to rescind the scheduled elimination of the 5 percent capital gains tax rather than proposing to suspend DCYF services to children over 17 years of age.

In short, the governor has plenty of choices. He chose to side with those who have economic – and thus political – clout, against those with neither. Now it’s the legislature’s turn to choose. At the end of the budget process, we’ll all know who got what, when, where and how. [full text]