After saying he wouldn't accept stimulus money in 2009 ("We need a stimulus bill, just not this one. It’s too big, it’s too expensive"), the Governor of Mississippi ended up applying for the federal dollars. While the stimulus was just too big for Barbour, he's now stashing away $97 million dollars from this year's budget -- even during the rashest of cuts to healthcare, education, mental health, and the like.
Now, if the stimulus was too big, you'd think a state could've spent it all in the past year and half. But Barbour is refusing to help schools and universities as they wrestle with current crises:
Education budget cuts, resorting to firing teachers, and cutting classes. Mississippi has cut its mental health budget by 8% for three consecutive years, not counting Barbour's proposed closing of hospitals, resulting in mental health patients being jailed more often than usual for lack of resources.
Now that the stimulus is running out -- but it was just too large! -- Barbour wants to save the remainder until 2012.
Some school district superintendents are crying foul over some state leaders' plans to squirrel away $127 million in Medicaid stimulus money instead of doling it out this year.
A large portion of the money was to be used to help offset cuts to public schools, but educators learned last week that Gov. Haley Barbour and some House and Senate leaders want to put the dollars in Mississippi's rainy day fund.
Rainy day? Here's some statistics -- not of a rainy day, but a storm:
Mississippi’s mental health budget has been reduced 7 percent from FY10 budgeted levels and 22 percent from FY09 budgeted levels. Over time, these cuts have resulted in the reduction of 200 beds at the state mental health hospital, closure of 24 supervised apartments at a state residential center, closure of a state adolescent dorm, and elimination of some early intervention programs.
The cuts to mental health I've experienced personally -- you may remember a diary from not too long ago.
Mississippi's current unemployment: 11.1% (national average: 9.6%)
Over the course of FY10, Mississippi cut by 7.2 percent funding for the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, a program established to bring per-pupil K-12 spending up to adequate levels in every district.
Barbour cut higher education by almost 4%. The University of Southern Mississippi, foreseeing budget cuts and the lack of future stimulus dollars, is cutting five entire degree programs and 29 professors, faculty, and staff -- a $14.7 million cut. Business leaders near the university cried foul immediately.
Now back to the article at hand. Barbour thinks it's all sunshine in Mississippi when he couldn't be farther from the truth. Is this the guy the GOP is betting their futures on?
"I understand fiscal responsibility, I understand trying to be conservative fiscally, but I just need to know what the definition of a rainy day is," said Ocean Springs School Superintendent Robert Hirsch.
Me, too, buddy. Me, too. Haley Barbour for president? Please -- you guys can have him.