A leader in Georgia’s Senate said the budget will dominate the upcoming legislative session, with little else “ambitious” to come up from elected officials.
“Beyond the budget, I don’t know that there’s going to be a very ambitious agenda at all,” said Sen. David Shafer, the president pro tempore of the Senate.
The Duluth Republican was the featured speaker Thursday at the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce pre-legislative breakfast at the Augusta Convention Center.
“We’ve had some tough years. We passed a budget in 2007 that would have spent $21 billion, and several years ago we passed a budget that only spent $15.5 billion,” Shafer said.
The budget approved in the last session was $19.9 billion, up from $19.3 billion a year earlier.
Shafer said the state government is better off smaller than $21 billion because it forced leaders to focus on “what government ought to do.”
“And a lot of the people who complained about the cuts don’t want to talk about how we got to $21 billion to begin with,” Shafer said. “In 1992, the population of Georgia was 5.9 million people. The budget for state government was $5.9 billion.”
Shafer said that 15 years later, the breakdown went from $1,000 per person to almost $2,500 per person for state government in the $21 billion budget.
“During this period of explosive government spending, which somehow managed to ignore the infrastructure needs of the state … all that money was plowed into social services for which we have very little to show,” Shafer said.
via Budget to dominate Georgia legislative session | The Augusta Chronicle.
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