Of all the surprising things that 2020 has brought to us so far, number one has to be watching Mitch McConnell pushing to defund the police. I don’t know about you, but that was definitely not a square on my “2020 Apocalypse Bingo Card.”
I sense skepticism: are you skeptical about Mitch manning the barricades alongside BLM? Hear me out. But first, let’s talk about money.
State and city budgets are remarkably like the budgets you and I have to live with: when either one of us runs out of money, we have to stop spending it. (Unlike the Federal government, which can run at a deficit—and often does.) Also, just like with our own budgets, states and cities have two immediate actions they can take when they are confronted with an unbalanced budget: they can spend less, or they can earn more. When you or I are faced with the need to earn more we do things like pick up extra shifts or start driving Uber. When states and cities need to earn more, they raise taxes.
If for some reason we can’t (or won’t) take those steps (such as lack of time or taxpayer anger), we spend less. We stop going out to eat, we cancel HBO, we put off the next oil change. States and cities, however, don’t really have the same number of options. Things that many people might consider “luxuries” such as arts funding and highway beautification projects are typically funded through voter approved programs, meaning they can’t be halted until they are “unvoted.” Other expenses have been allocated through budgets that have needed to pass through multiple layers of public oversight, debate, and votes for approval, meaning those expenses would also require the same level of attention and time to undo.
That leaves discretionary spending. And one of the areas that are most dependent on discretionary spending? State and city services, like the highway patrol and the local police.
What this means is that as revenues (taxes) fall (and when people are staying home for nine months, revenues are most certainly falling), spending needs to fall as well. A recent survey of police chiefs around the nation shows that a majority of them have seen revenue shortfalls necessitating budget cuts of around 10-15 percent, with the promise of more on the way. Remember all of those scary attack ads featuring an unanswered 911 call in “Joe Biden’s America”? Well, they might have to be rewritten with the tagline of “Mitch McConnell’s America” instead.
This is because in all of the many different pandemic relief bills that have been put forward since the first one passed in March the one thing that has stayed constant is Mitch McConnell’s refusal to support states and cities. Enhanced unemployment is on the table for Mitch. So is a second round of checks, small business grants and loans, and school funding. Heck, he’s even said he’s willing to remove the liability shields protecting his corporate overlords. But he refuses to budge on helping out states and cities. In other words, he refuses to fund the police—a move that has made people on both sides of the defund the police debate equally unhappy, since the type of defunding McConnell is advocating is hectic and unplanned, and will most likely lead to the cutting of the services and hires who are most likely to help marginalized communities. Which, come to think about it, might be McConnell’s plan all along.
The bottom line is that if you support defunding the police, you should be actively working to strip McConnell of his senate majority. And if you don’t support defunding the police, then you should be doing the same. In fact, let’s make “Ditch Mitch” the center square on everyone’s “2021 No More Apocalypse Bingo Card.” Who knows? Maybe it will be the year we all experience winning again.
(Want to help dethrone Mitch McConnell? Go to one of the many organizations that are actively working to win the senate runoff in Georgia—such as fairfight.com—to donate and volunteer, and hopefully we will all be shouting Bingo! come January 5th.)