It’s the economy, Colby.
Missing from Colbert I. King’s Oct. 30 Washington Post column, “Hard Choices on the DC Budget,” was any mention of this word: Recession. King’s concern that a public discussion of proposed budget cuts is a trick to justify tax increases employs a few sleights of hand too. In his analysis of how we got to a $175 million shortfall, King fails to acknowledge that record-setting job losses, falling commercial property values, and declines in the value of DC residents’ savings have led to a nearly $1 billion drop in DC’s expected revenues. Yes, some overspending has contributed to the current budget woes, but the main reason for the plunge isn’t simply due to DC government waste, fraud, abuse’or even because of the DC Council, as King suggests. It is due to the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Here’s where we do agree with King: We need to solve our $175 million budget shortfall by taking a balanced approach, through a mix of revenue increases and expenditure cuts. “Both should be on the table,” King wrote in his column. We couldn’t agree more.
DCFPI, along with more than 60 community, labor and faith organizations, have come together to urge Mayor Fenty, Chairman Gray and the DC Council to make revenue part of the budget balancing package. A balanced approach to maintaining services and meeting growing needs could include:
 Increasing the income tax rate on the wealthiest. DC residents earning $40,000 pay the same marginal tax rate as those making $1 million. Raising the rate on income above $200,000 would bring in millions of dollars and affect less than 5 percent of DC households. For many, the increase would be no more than the cost of a cup of coffee a day.
 Ending DC’s tax exemption for interest paid on out-of-state bonds. Only DC and Indiana provide income tax breaks for residents that invest in other states’ infrastructure. Eliminating this exemption would raise needed revenue and help give District residents an incentive to invest in DC’s roads and bridges, rather than in other states’ projects.
A cuts-only approach would be counterproductive. The Great Recession continues to blow holes in city and state budgets throughout the country, and that means less money is available to maintain everything from trash collection to libraries to emergency housing for families in crisis. Like other states, we have cut spending across the board ‘from child care to public safety to human services’and and we’ve dipped into reserves to maintain critical investments. As mayor-elect Gray recently said: “We’re not only down to the bone, we’re into the bone marrow.”
DC residents want to keep the forward progress of our city. Cutting even deeper into our budget makes it much harder for the city to push aggressively on school reform, maintain our great new libraries and rec centers, and meet the needs of the thousands who remain out of work.
Informing DC taxpayers about the potential harm of further cuts isn’t a cop-out, it’s reality.
