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Since when is it a good idea to pay people for doing nothing? Kentucky taxpayers did a lot of that this year. The Kentucky General Assembly killed 669 bills this session, according to the Courier-Journal. Included in these was HB 349, which would have started to reform the state’s unemployment insurance program that is currently facing a deficit of nearly $732 million.
Legislators kill bills every session, but they should put a little more thought into the ones they are throwing out.
More importantly, legislators did not even pass a state budget, the one primary function of the General Assembly. Now that the session has ended, Kentucky taxpayers will be shelling out more than $63,000 a day for each day the legislators continue to haggle. The money includes more than $44,000 per day in salaries and expenses for legislators during a special session needed to pass a budget for the next biennium. Essentially, taxpayers are giving the legislators a pay raise for not doing their job in a timely manner. If this was any other job, they would be fired.
The bills they did manage to pass largely apply to common sense issues. Prison workers are not allowed to have sex with inmates anymore and there is a new law to combat domestic violence. These are obviously serious issues that needed to be addressed, but why were they not acted upon earlier? They are all issues that should have been dealt with a long time ago.
Kentucky is in danger of getting into a continuous cycle of bureaucratic pandering and politicking each session until every important bill takes several years to actually pass.
There are several bills that were killed this session that likely will inevitably pass in future years. Many people in Kentucky are upset about HB 301 being killed. That bill would have changed the dropout age in Kentucky from 16 to 18 and saved many young people from a bleak future.
Members of the General Assembly need to learn to compromise and get the job done. Legislators’ constituents should not have to pay them more money to get them to do the job they were elected to do.
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