Thomas Cook from the WRTV Capital Watch Blog has a great new piece illustrating how more and more Hoosiers are suffering under the Daniels economy, yet fewer and fewer are receiving state benefits.

Governor Mitch Daniels has made it abundantly clear that his road to higher office will be painted black — you know, the color of his oft-touted budget numbers. Surplus! Fiscal responsibility!

Anyway, the truth of the matter is a bit more bleak looking in Mitch for America land. Sure, Indiana has “balanced the books,” but much of this balancing involved shifting huge burdens off the state and shouldering local governments with crippling debt and a political suicide pact that required either slashing local services or enacting a local tax increase.

Tax increases that the purportedly anti-tax Governor Daniels was all-too-willing to support, it’s worth noting, along with his sales and cigarette tax increases.

In this morning’s Star, Maureen Groppe takes a look at yet another area of state services that has fallen into disrepair while Mitch’s Golden Age proceeds unabated in the realm of carefully-managed public relations. Here’s the latest story the Governor’s office doesn’t want to talk about:

Indiana has an unemployment rate above the national average, but its welfare rolls are getting smaller. Why? Indiana has some of the toughest eligibility rules and smallest benefits in the nation, state officials say.

“You have to be poorer than poor,” said Jim Dunn, policy manager for Indiana’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash aid. “Even though Indiana has been hit hard with the employment loss, anyone who continues to get unemployment benefits has too much income to qualify for cash assistance in Indiana.”

Cook further elaborated on the extreme restrictions of Indiana…..

A family of three can’t earn more than $378 a month in Indiana to get cash assistance from the federal-state program. Only Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana have stricter limits.

“It’s ridiculously low, and we should adjust it,” said state Senate Minority Leader Vi Simpson, D-Ellettsville.

One would think that Daniels’ hard-earned “preservation” of a nearly $1 billion state surplus might have, you know, resulted in some positive developments for those who have been hardest hit by the economic collapse that Daniels maintains he is protecting us from. As it turns out, though, Indiana has maintained an absurdly meager program for needy Hoosiers. From the Star’s sidebar:

Cash assistance limit for a family of three:

» Indiana: $288 per month, 11th-lowest in the U.S.
» Ohio: $410.
» Michigan: $489.
» Alaska: $923, the highest amount in the nation.

Change in number of Hoosiers receiving benefits, 2005 to April 2010:

» Medicaid: 27 percent increase, to 1,076,522.
» Food stamps: 45 percent increase, to 811,061.
» Welfare cash assistance: 26 percent decrease, to 104,591.

Mitch Daniels’ state budget surplus victory: Political gold for his future ambitions, and that’s all that should matter to us, right?

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Governor Mitch Daniels has sure put the state of Indiana in a fine mess.

As you recall, back in December of 2006, ignoring a loud chorus of critics and failing to learn from other states (Texas and Florida) where similar efforts had failed, Mitch Daniels stubbornly decided to forge forward with an enormous, 10-year, $1.16 billion deal with IBM Corp. to upgrade the state’s paper-based welfare application system to a system using a statewide call center and online document processing.

Part of this new plan was to shift 1,500 of the agency’s 2,200 caseworkers to the private sector, and in doing so, the Governor ignored the numerous critics who argued that outsourcing such a critical government function was a mistake.

Turns out, the critics were right all along. The supposed new and improved system was fraught with errors and riddled with problems from the beginning.

The list of headaches were lengthy and included issues with the processing of food stamps, bugs that repeatedly wreaked havoc with the system, and a lawsuit filed by The American Civil Liberties Union alleging that disabled Hoosiers were being denied benefits improperly.

Here’s more from the AP, via The Republic -

In its lawsuit, the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration is seeking to recover $437.6 million it paid IBM through Jan. 31, plus the costs of any third-party lawsuits, federal penalties and state employee overtime incurred as a result of the deal. The state is seeking triple damages, or more than $1.3 billion.

Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM countered with its own lawsuit, asking for $52.8 million in deferred payments and equipment costs that it said the state still owes. IBM said it followed the state’s instructions, but the contract designed by the Daniels administration didn’t allow for the economic downturn that created tens of thousands of new welfare applications.

Both lawsuits were filed in Marion County courts last Thursday.

But the lawsuits are not the first to result from the IBM contract. Carmel attorney Scott Severns has a federal class-action lawsuit pending in Indianapolis seeking to bar the state from cutting off aid to people while they appeal the decisions to deny them benefits.

“It’s certainly refreshing to see the state stating clearly what happened. If we had had that kind of transparency three years ago we could have avoided a lot of this,” Severns said, noting that only one public hearing was held just days before Daniels signed the deal. “It was tragic for the people who were affected by it.”

What a fine mess you’ve created, Governor Daniels.

It is clear that that both IBM and the State of Indiana have made mistakes in this nightmare of a deal. The greatest of which was how the Governor repeatedly refused to listen to critics and heed warnings signs which showed that this was a terrible deal to begin with.

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Many Hoosiers are celebrating the wonderful news that General Motors will be adding hundreds of jobs to the automakers’ Southern Indiana plant in Bedford. In addition, GM plants in Marion and Fort Wayne have also added hundreds of jobs.

As you recall, back in March of 2009 President Obama laid out a framework for General Motors to once again achieve economic viability. GM, one of the most recognizable and largest businesses in the world was one of the auto companies assisted through the President’s Auto Restructuring Initiative.

Governor Mitch Daniels was never shy about his strong opposition to this plan and repeatedly spoke out against it, saying essentially that it was a waste of taxpayer money and would never succeed.

However, we are now seeing the beginnings of the resurgence of General Motors, as hundreds of jobs once thought to be lost are returning to the Hoosier state.

And despite Governor Daniels’ negative assertions about the Auto Restructuring Initiative, GMs’ Chief Financial Officer recently stated that remarkably, the company has a reasonable chance of turning a full-year profit in 2010.

What’s ironic in all of this celebrated news is that Lieutenant Governor Becky Skillman announced that she is going to be joining with GM executives for today’s job announcement event at the Bedford facility. Ironic in that the Governor’s office has been so critical of this plan all along.

It appears that Mitch Daniels and his office want to revel in the benefits of the President’s Auto Restructuring Initiative after being so strongly against it. How can that be?

Mitch Daniels has been adamant and outspoken in his opposition of the Auto Restructuring plan. In fact, Daniels stated back in 2008 that he was “skeptical that Congress can help the struggling U.S. auto industry.” And that “the only thing we know for certain is the way they’ve been doing business does not work and throwing taxpayer dollars after it won’t make it work.”

Governor Daniels could not be more wrong and is clearly trying to have it both ways on this issue. 

He can’t be against the Auto Restructuring Initiative - slamming it and the President’s efforts on this front in the press, then send his Lt. Governor to a ceremony celebrating new jobs created by the New General Motors.

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A new study out yesterday from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities throws water on Governor Mitch Daniels’ assertions that health care reform will somehow bankrupt the Hoosier State. It turns out — as usual — that Mitch’s math just doesn’t add up.

Indiana also commissioned an analysis of the state’s spending under health reform (albeit for an earlier version of the Senate health reform bill) that is based on faulty assumptions. The analysis asserts that Medicaid enrollment will increase by 495,000 as a result of health reform. Yet, according to Census data, only 264,000 uninsured people in the state have incomes below 133 percent of the poverty line and thus would potentially qualify for Medicaid. The analysis also wrongly assumes that low-income adults now covered under the Healthy Indiana Plan would be covered by Medicaid under the regular Medicaid matching rate. In fact, the federal government would cover nearly the entire cost of covering these individuals under the Medicaid expansion because they would be considered newly eligible for Medicaid.

Another day, another half-truth from the Daniels camp(aign).

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While Governor Daniels has rolled out his new, “improved” drivers license program — if things weren’t complicated enough, we will now have two different kinds of identification floating around the state — the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette continues to question the impetus behind the new, tougher regulations.

According to a news release issued by the governor’s office Wednesday, “States are required to begin issuing compliant cards in January 2010, and the federal government has mandated that states complete their compliance by the end of 2016.”

Not so, according to Jim Harper, director of Information Policy Studies for the Washington-based Cato Institute. The federal government doesn’t require the states to do anything under the Real ID act, passed in reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“If your governor says that he is ‘required’ to do anything by Real ID, he’s trying to avoid his responsibility to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Indiana residents from federal government incursions,” Harper said in an e-mail. “That’s shameful.”

All that aside, the Guv’s office continues to avoid any meaningful discussion of the effect these rules could have on low- and no-income Hoosiers as they struggle to let their voices be heard in the democratic process.

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