The Indiana General Assembly has adopted a budget, the first on Indiana Gov. Mike Braun’s watch.
In part because our elected officials were caught off guard by revenue projections revealing a $2.4 billion shortfall. That forced lawmakers to go back and try to make the numbers balance.
Whether they were or will be successful remains to be seen.
What’s clear is that they operated more out of a commitment to their assorted fantasies, biases and prejudices than they did out of any recognition of reality.
As was to be expected from an overwhelmingly Republican legislature, they focused on cutting spending rather than increasing revenue. To hit their belt-tightening targets, they focused their fire on education and public health.
Therein lies at least one problem.
Even in normal times—and these are not normal times—this approach would be self-defeating.
Economists have been projecting a coming worldwide labor shortage for at least the past 15 years. Birth rates have slowed dramatically in this century while life expectancy has remained static or, in some places, has even increased.
This means that every year there will be proportionally fewer people of working age to provide for the needs of more and more people who have left the workforce.
That presents a challenge not just for Indiana, but for states and nations everywhere. Skilled labor will be the most valuable resource for at least the next generation—and communities all over the globe will be scrambling to find bright, well-trained people to fill their workforces.
And what will bright, well-trained people be looking for as they search for a place to live and labor?
Well, contrary to what our state’s leaders seem to think, it’s not low taxes and deregulation.
No, what they want are, among other things, good schools for their children and a strong medical care system should family members get sick.
Those, of course, are the very things Indiana’s leaders decided not to protect or prioritize.
That’s a steep climb all by itself, but circumstances make it even steeper.
President Donald Trump’s misguided tariffs and the accompanying trade war will wound the entire U.S. economy, but the deepest gashes will be felt in states such as Indiana.
There’s a reason for that.
The leaders of other nations have taken Trump’s measure. They know where his tender spots are.
They understand that he never has wanted to stray too far from his political base, particularly his most fervent supporters in rural America.
The tariffs and trade barriers they have imposed in response to the president’s threats and herky-jerky, on-again-off-again implementation of U.S. tariffs have hit and will continue to hit red states the hardest.
That’s not by accident.
They’re targeting the people who support Trump, both to send those voters a message and to create a fire in the American leader’s backyard.
The effect of this Trump-created trade fecklessness for Indiana will be dramatic. The bet here is that this is not the last time revenue projections will have to be revised downward as Indiana farmers and other agricultural producers find it more and more difficult to sell their products in international markets.
Thus, at the same time that Indiana is battling harder and harder to persuade good people to settle and work here, the state will have less and less of the things they value to attract them.
A smarter, more discerning set of Hoosier leaders would have invested in building the sort of social infrastructure that would lure qualified labor here, but doing so would have imposed an unacceptable burden on our elected officials.
Many—maybe even most—of them have pledged fealty to MAGA, but their notion of making America great again is taking it backwards to some illusory past found only in the dreamiest imaginations.
Theirs is an impossible task because time is a river. It runs in only one direction.
No matter how our leaders may wish to return Indiana to an earlier age that never truly existed, they cannot do so any more than they can make the Mississippi flow from south to north.
Meanwhile, the present trembles beneath our feet and the future … well, the future gathers like a tornado in the making.
Buckle up.
