Fenty Finds Out What it Feels Like to Actually Make Tough Choices

Well, there's at least one young, charismatic leader in Washington who is actually willing to make "tough choices" and go through the budget instead of just talking about it.

Congress might want to take a gander at D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's budget when it reaches the Hill for approval in June, for some lessons in restraint. Fenty's proposed budget does quite a bit of what Obama promised to do with the federal budget, but hasn't. (Although the city council and Congress will still have the opportunity to stuff it full of unfunded unicorns before final approval, so don't count on it staying this way.)

He's targeting more than 1,600 jobs, many of which were ill-scrutinized additions to the work force during boom times.

In a $5.4 billion spending proposal for fiscal 2010, Fenty (D) laid out a plan to lay off 776 employees and further reduce the workforce through attrition and elimination of vacant jobs. The cuts are spread throughout city agencies, including 250 positions in the public schools, 240 in the mental health department, 138 in public works and 118 in the finance office.

So, Fenty has made the very tough choice to lay off roughly 2 percent of the D.C. public workforce to meet budget requirements, while Obama makes the tough choice to give lawmakers 90 days to cut his budget by a whopping .003 percent. As Greg Mankiw reports, that's rather small potatoes (or, should I say "tall lattes"?):

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year--approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

Fenty's cuts have put him at odds with labor unions, who demanded they be involved in the budget to dictate suggest "alternative spending cuts." Fenty's office has refused to bow, almost as if they're standing up to the powerful special interests that have had too much influence in Washington for too long, right Obama?

Mayor Fenty is also actively looking for redundancies and inefficiencies. Why, it's almost like going through the budget line-by-line:

As an example, Tangherlini said, the city has separate fleet maintenance departments to repair vehicles for the fire and public works departments when a single unit would do.

He's rewarding performance (in public charter schools, which added 17 percent enrollment, and will see 8 percent more funding) over failure (in public schools, which lost enrollment and will lose funding accordingly).

He's also raising fees on parking meters and business registration, which has him taking heat:

Brown also called the proposed fee hikes tax increases. Fenty, who pledged during his mayoral campaign that he would not raise taxes, declined to characterize the increases as such.

"From my perspective, taxes are being raised," Brown said.

Now, I'd prefer to see fiscal discipline come through cuts rather than tax hikes, but the fact that Fenty is making good-faith efforts to sacrifice some government largesse makes his tax hikes more palatable than the sacrifices Obama will ask of Americans without having sacrificed any of his own priorities.

He's even managed to cut the overall size of the budget, compared to last year, by five percent- the first such decrease in a decade. Remember that "net spending cut" Obama promised?

But one of Fenty's tough choices has put him in the cross hairs of one of the diverse city's minority constituencies. It's hard to cut government spending or services, period. But when government spending and services have been sliced and diced to validate the voters of countless minority/interest groups- a practice to which liberals are particularly prone- it becomes even harder to make rational decisions about which services are truly necessary.