Micheli: We must stop calling each other names and engage on key problems – Wyoming Tribune

A few thousand years ago, King Solomon declared in Proverbs 29:18: When there is no vision, the people perish. While the wise King Solomon probably had bigger and deeper things on his mind when he recorded those words, after watching the Wyoming Legislature this past session, it seems like he was talking directly about us, about the state of Wyoming in 2021.

After this session, the question keeps coming back to me what is our vision? What is the vision for the state of Wyoming? The problems are easy to define massive structural deficit, unsustainable spending models in K-12 education, continued lack of ability to diversify our economy and attract new industries and the struggles of our natural resource-based economy.

Who in this state is stepping forward to honestly talk about those problems and give us the path forward to resolve them? What do we want Wyoming to look like in five years, 10 years, 20 years, and what steps can we take today to put us on that path?

I do not pretend to have the answers, but I can tell you a few things that are not vision and are simply making our problems worse. We are now dominated by performative outrage and performative politics. We spend hours fighting about things that serve no purpose other than to put on a performance and punt on actual meaningful legislation.

First, simply putting on a performance and disparaging everyone that tries to honestly address this problem is not helpful. This sort of name calling is not only childish, it is counterproductive. Tearing down others without offering solutions is intellectual laziness. Besides, the performative crowd is just flat wrong on so many things.

Did you know that Wyomings general fund budget was approximately $3.5 billion in 2010. Today, it is $2.97 billion. That same legislator you are calling names is responsible for a 15% cut in government spending over the last decade. That is not inflation adjusted, that is not a reduction of a proposed increase (the way the federal government counts cuts) that is a reduction in actual dollars spent. We spend $500 million less dollars today than we did 10 years ago. Show me any other government in the world that could say that.

Heck, we like to say government should be run like our household budgets show me any other household budget that is 15% less today than it was 10 years ago. The cuts have been deep, and they have been real, and our legislators should get credit for that. Calling those legislators names is simply absurd.

Second, because we have made such drastic cuts to the general fund, essentially all of the available cuts left are going to be painful. I laugh at the performative types that talk a big game about cuts during election season, but then get to Cheyenne and are the most vociferous against specific proposed cuts. Specific, actual cuts have constituents and cause real pain to those constituents.

Finally, and probably most importantly, we have got to find efficiencies in our K-12 education spending. We just do. From 2010 to today, our state has increased education spending by almost 25%. At the same time we are cutting everything else in the state, education spending has actually increased at a pretty dramatic pace. How is that even possible? We can and should combine school districts; we can and should reduce money spent on administration and things outside of the classroom; we should stop paying for ghost positions; we can and should implement efficiencies like combining health care plans that save money, but protect teachers and the classroom.

None of those things are really that hard. It just takes courage to take on the education establishment. The ironic thing is, if teachers dont engage and work on these things now, they will be the ones that bear the brunt of the massive cuts when they come and they will come.

One last point: Wyoming is perhaps the largest beneficiary of the blue state bailout from Bidens COVID-19 legislation. The bad news is we are officially a blue state and part of the blue state bailout because we cannot seem to balance our budget. The good news is this bailout buys us another couple years to fix our problems.

We can engage on those problems and start to fix them NOW to give us the softest landing possible or we can continue to ignore them and go over the cliff. Engaging now takes courage. We will have no choice when the cliff comes.

Matt Micheli is a Cheyenne attorney, a longtime political consultant and former chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party. Email: Matt_Micheli@yahoo.com.

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Micheli: We must stop calling each other names and engage on key problems - Wyoming Tribune