The liberal Washington State Budget & Policy Center fact checks a supposed AP fact check on the Democratic sound bite that the legislature has cut $10 billion from the state budget since the Great Recession hit in late 2008 (or the new Great Depression, as NYT columnist Paul Krugman has it this morning ).

Late last month, the AP ran a story saying the $10 billion figure was overstated. Gov. Chris Gregoire has been using the number to dramatize just how much cutting she's already done as the state faces yet another shortfall and ponders more cuts (or, as Democrats prefer, new revenue).

The AP pointed out that many of the "cuts" were actually planned increases that got scrapped, such as pending cost of living increases for teachers or new Basic Health Plan enrollees. Good old Morning Fizz was a bit skeptical of the AP story at the time. Noting that the AP's math dropped the the estimated cuts to about $7.7 billion, we wrote:

Fizz would bring that back up to at least $8.7 billion, though, given that [AP reporter Mike] Baker scoffs at $1 billion in cuts to higher ed which he says legislators made up by authorizing tuition increases. It’s hard to discount $1,800 a year more for UW students as anything but a cut to higher ed.

Now, in a new report, the WSB&PC says the $10 billion is merely "the floor" of what's been cut. First, they get to $10 billion by comparing every budget between 2009 and now, calculating the drop in spending in government spending budget to budget, though they do not provide a line item account of the cuts.



However, they point out, that  the $10 billion does not capture the actual drop in spending on government services. By failing to keep government services at at least the same level as the previous year, the baseline for measuring cuts misses a whole batch of programs that have already been cut.

For example, if a program is in the budget one year, but not the next, then it isn't calculated as a cut during the third year, because the new baseline is lower. Who knows how much money would have been budgeted for programs that were cut if they were still included as line items in the latest year-over-year comparison? That error compounds as you compare declining service levels year after year.

"As you're funding fewer and fewer services than before," says WSB&PC researcher Kim Justice, "there's no way to know how much a program you once funded would cost" during subsequent years.

They write:

Some have argued the budget cuts reported to date are mere accounting tricks – that actual service reductions have been much lower. In fact, the opposite is true. Budget cuts are significantly undercounted in our state budget process. That’s because every year that reductions are made, the current service baseline, or “maintenance level,” is reduced (see Box 1). The maintenance level has been diminished with multiple rounds of budget reductions. And, cutting from an ever-shrinking baseline masks the true magnitude of the cuts enacted so far.

The maintenance level refers to the cost of maintaining the same level of services from one fiscal year to the next, accounting for factors such as general price inflation, increases in the population, and increases in the number of people qualifying for support.

The maintenance level is recalculated each year to account for changes in state law enacted the previous year and for increases or decreases in caseloads. Because it is recalculated annually, it is unknown how much it would cost to provide pre-recession levels of services in the current year.

Additionally, the group's report tackles the conservative talking point that government budgets have actually grown in recent years. Republicans like to point out that this biennium's $32 billion (now $30 billion) budget is bigger than the previous biennium's $28 billion budget. However, as the Budget & Policy Center points out, the GOP fails to mention inflation—and increasing caseloads for social, health, and human services, thanks to the flailing economy.