Unfunded Liability, anybody?
The Issue: The old way of proposing appropriation measures without fund source identification.
Our View: A statute or constitutional amendment may be in order to prevent incurring unfunded liabilities.
It seems appropriate that a statute or constitutional amendment is introduced that would require the legislature to identify sources of funds for all future appropriation measures. This should discourage any measure from piling up nto what’s known as unfunded liability.
A good example is the approval of another unearned salary raise a year or so ago that has yet to be funded. If anything, it piles up an obligation requiring payment so mandated under the law at a time when our public coffers has suffered serious plunge in revenue generation. It also raised the hopes of recipients when in fact there’s no real hard cash to back it up. Had the measure identified sources of funds–to which authors stand a fat chance of finding one–it would have sailed or died quietly in the clerk’s office.
It is especially important that this step is taken to ensure that generous politicians don’t necessarily force posterity to shoulder ill-conceived debts that lack reasoned and realistic analysis. The days of the cargo cult mentality–an historical legend that an airplane would dump dollar bills from the blue heavens of paradise every other full moon–is long gone.
It goes without saying that all must converge to realistically assess economic indicators and how well would the CNMI fare when nothing else works. Yes, we’ve benefited tremendously from the bubble years in the Land of the Rising Sun. The bubble has burst a while back and we doubt that we would see anything like it anytime soon.
It is for this reason that a more stringent measure via statutory or constitutional provision is necessary to discourage the picnic attitude that seem to have been nurtured superficially since years back. The local coffers is basically empty, if not, ready for a real financial meltdown. We owe it to ourselves to require an obligatory review of all appropriation measures if only to prevent a bloated unfunded liability in the near and long term. Si Yuus Maase`!
