Patrick releases new budget
Governor Patrick’s first budget lacks the innovation and reforms his campaign promised. But let’s start by acknowledging how artificial the entire government budgeting process is. Beacon Hill built this year’s budget with an 11% escalator. A rational growth rate is 3% like the Federal Reserve tries to maintain in the overall economy. Did Beacon Hill really think tax revenues would rise 4 times faster than the GNP?
So how did Governor Patrick close the gap? First, he realigned state spending with normal economic growth by proposing a 4% rate. Although it’s a better number, it’s still optimistic when you consider the state economy is lagging the nation. But the really amusing part is how a 4% growth rate is called a “cut”. By comparing Governor Patrick’s budget to the projected budget instead of the previous year’s budget, our politicians are trying to create the illusion that everything is cut to the bone. And if “selfish” taxpayers ask us to do anything more, we’ll be throwing little old ladies out on the street.
Next, and stop me if you’ve heard this before, the governor is raising taxes. Business is first on the chopping block. They were complying with the tax laws, but they should have been “volunteering” another $500 million so the governor is going to help them by closing those “loopholes”. However, shared responsibility is the people’s business too. Therefore, the governor is proposing that towns get additional taxing authority so they have more ways to reach into your pocket with meals and hotel taxes to name but a few.
But to make the new taxes a bit more palatable, Governor Patrick proposes returning a percentage of the increases to you in property tax relief. For example, $75 million of the $500 million in new business taxes is returned to a few of us as a property tax credit. They’ve made similar means tested promises on local option taxes because apparently people who own houses in the state don’t eat at restaurants. What a deal, eh? For every additional dollar they take from us, they might give us 15% back. How will the approximately 7% of us lucky enough to get this 15% back ever spend it?
So where is the tough outside reformer people thought they elected? There isn’t anything creative or innovative here. He ducked politically sensitive areas of the budget like police details for roadway utility work. Insead, he took the easy way out by raising spending and taxes, but we could have elected almost anyone to produce that result.
Archived in: Economy, TaxesFebruary 28, 2007 at 1:33 am | Trackback
18 comments
What kind of “uniter-not-divider” announces that Massachusetts is “littered with the carcasses” of businesses (like Wang) within a forum named in respect as Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall?
Lets not forget that this 4% increase includes fully funding the new Health Care mandate, and includes a 5% increase in local aid (aka: property tax relief, so long as you get your local government to act in that way).
I’d love to see it done without closing those “loopholes” in the business tax law, but as Mass has the 47th lowest business taxes in the nation, and a brand new health care mandate to deal with, I can’t consider it a travesty. If someone want to propose a better way with specifics, I’d be glad to listen. I’d love to hear one so I can write to the governor and support it.
Meanwhile, while you like to say the budget is 4% higher, that’s ignoring supplementals from last year. In total its only 0.9% higher - less than inflation, *and* covers the new health care burden (see table on page 2: http://www.bluemassgroup.com/upload/budget2.pdf)
As far as living up to his campaign promises, he’s expanding full day kindergarten, adding police to the streets, and has made a first great step in transparent government with the new website: http://budget.mass.gov/budget/ (btw, does anyone know which line includes the new health care mandate? numbers below are from the summary)
Bottom line:
Total spending in FY 07: $26.482 billion
Proposed budget for FY 08: $26.714 billion
*including* $472 million for the health care mandate and $310 million addition aid to cities and towns
“Lets not forget that this 4% increase includes fully funding the new Health Care mandate”
We’ve fully funded a program that hasn’t started and whose cost estimates rise every time a new one comes out? I’d submit that the cost of this program is still a huge unknown. We can however be sure that costs will be much higher than estimates.
“includes a 5% increase in local aid (aka: property tax relief, so long as you get your local government to act in that way)”
Right. So it’s my responsibility to fight my town for those tax dollars? If Deval Patrick’s true goal is property tax relief with the local aid increase, why not cut out the middle man and give all of us direct tax credits like his other means tested program for senior citizens? Local aid is not property tax relief, and it’s disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
“’d love to see it done without closing those “loopholes” in the business tax law, but as Mass has the 47th lowest business taxes in the nation, and a brand new health care mandate to deal with, I can’t consider it a travesty.”
Forbes disagrees with your assessment and ranks MA 49th (as in next to last) when it comes to business costs.
http://www.forbes.com/2006/08/.....tates.html
Additionally, how do you explain businesses leaving the state if taxes and costs are as low as you suggest?
“he’s expanding full day kindergarten, adding police to the streets, and has made a first great step in transparent government with the new website”
He promised a 1000 new cops. Why are only 250 hitting the streets? He also promsied $700+ million in savings, which never materialized. And he’s selectively transparent when it benefits him and has just as many closed door meetings as anyone else did.
Not a very strong effort, Fred.
> We’ve fully funded a program that hasn’t started and whose
> cost estimates rise every time a new one comes out? I’d submit
> that the cost of this program is still a huge unknown. We can
> however be sure that costs will be much higher than estimates.
Agreed, but the point is that when comparing year-over-year growth, its disingenuous to ignore the fact that there’s a significant new program, which everyone knows will have substantial costs, involved in the comparison.
Costs of continuing expenses (just by subtracting that $472M) actually went from $26.712B in FY 07 to a proposed level of $26.32B in FY 08, and that’s without adjusting for inflation. Its not a decrease in total costs, but it is a decrease in current programs overall.
> Right. So it’s my responsibility to fight my town for those
> tax dollars?
This is a democracy. If you want your government to do something, tell them, and act on it. Vote. Run yourself. Don’t just complain. As I’ve said a dozen times on here, if you go to a town board meeting with 5 friends or family members, you’re probably the biggest crowd in the room.
And I’ve done what I’m talking about. I’ve gone to town government meetings and have spoken out. As one example, when I was in HS I was the first student to speak out about a new scheduling proposal (which I and many friends thought was awful), and we got the BoE to find an alternative that we all thought was better and ended up implementing that. Yes, Virginia, it works.
> Forbes disagrees with your assessment and ranks MA 49th (as
> in next to last) when it comes to business costs.
Okay, and a fair point. But thats not Forbes disagreeing with me. You know very well that taxes are only one proponent of costs. Don’t play dumb. Forbes says “Index based on cost of labor, energy and taxes.” Yeah, no kidding, Mass is gonna have a high labor cost than less densely populated places and the fact that Forbes ranks us 7th in quality of life.
As I said, give an alternative. I’d like to hear the options. Pulling from the rainy day fund? What cuts would you propose? Perhaps show me proposals from the Mass GOP or local pols. I’d honestly like to hear them, and if I can get behind one or more of them, I’ll make my voice heard.
> He promised a 1000 new cops. Why are only 250 hitting the
> streets? He also promsied $700+ million in savings, which
> never materialized.
A little thing called a billion dollar deficit. And, I dunno where the supposed ’surplus’ came from when we were already pulling $450 million last year (FY 07) from the rainy day fund.
He’s starting on them. Doing what he can is better than nothing. Meanwhile, I don’t see how you have it both ways - saying he should be cutting more, yet that he’s not spending enough on certain program.
Meanwhile, last year’s $26.482B, adjusted for a modest 2.5% inflation, would be $27.379B. Actual budget is, oh guess what, $665M less than that (including health care).
> And he’s selectively transparent when it benefits him and
> has just as many closed door meetings as anyone else did.
The meeting thing is red herring and always has been. Of course all meetings aren’t going to be open. Very few will. Government can’t work like that if they can’t have private discussions, if everything is going to be open to public scrutiny. No one ever said they would or that that was the problem.
What needs to be open and available is the results of those decisions. An itemized budget, and other bills, with time for people to peruse them and evaluate them and offer feedback. Unlike the health care bill which was decided in closed doors (fine) and rammed through in a matter of hours (maybe a day or two?) before the public had any idea to understand what was in it (not fine).
OP:
You’re arguing with a solipsist whose lifeblood is coursing with the iron of statism, and his bogus pieties are just tossed in like tinsel. The argument always shifts, the cognitive disonance is always there, the salients are fortified or abandoned altogether and evidence of his presence hidden, and the generalizations and banalities are deployed like hoplites. It’s no use.
Let him have the field. Everything proceeding from his original values will be contrary to conservative thinking, and he’ll miss your philosophical point entirely and dance like an amorous snow goose when cornered. You need to educate liberals before you can argue with them, and this format just doesn’t work that way.
> You’re arguing with a solipsist whose lifeblood is coursing
> with the iron of statism, and his bogus pieties are just
> tossed in like tinsel.
Awww, what happened to me having “some recognition of reality”. I thought you were starting to like me
> Everything proceeding from his original values will be
> contrary to conservative thinking
Definitely true, we’ll never agree on values. Doesn’t mean we can’t come to an understanding on the facts.
Fact is Patrick’s submitted budget took on a massive new program and cut (yes, flat out cut, in nominal, nevermind real terms) the remainder of state spending. And even including the big new program, the increase is negative in real terms.
You don’t have to like it still, I don’t expect you will. That’s fine, we can agree to disagree there. But that doesn’t mean you need to spin facts and ignore facts to consider it a 4% increase.
> You need to educate liberals before you can argue with them
Oh mighty Rhod, please educate me in the ways of the world such that I may shed my ignorant views, for surely you are the one true keep of all that is good and right and holy. For thou art truly a god of thought and justice among men. Amen.
I’m not going to spend much time with your post, Fred. Your weird use of Emoticons is R.D. Laing, double-bind strange, and it terminates, in me, any deep consideration of your maturity or rational stability on any issue.
And second, the dueling-banjoes technique of isolating sentences and responding to them is an indication of your inability to grasp an entire concept, and compose an original, creative response to it.
Third, it’s occurred to me elsewhere that you could calculate the speed of an executioner’s axe and evaluate friction loss without a moral clue, or concern as to what the axe was used for, or the motives of the state that deployed it.
Fourth, you shouldn’t try to satirize a correlation between my disdain for your objectivity with metaphysics, godliness, the transcendent; the religious. You have a sparkling ability with facts combined with a low understanding of most everything else, and because of it, your last paragraph is childish, derivative and silly.
Is that clear, Fred?
PS to Fred:
In several places, recently, you’ve prattled and preached about participatory democracy, the power of the group and the virtues of changing what you don’t like.
Seems to me that’s the philosophical tack you could take with me, rather than just snivelling about my observations. If you don’t like what I say, prove me wrong.
Do you have a political and moral philsophy that isn’t fabricated from the lowest-common denominator tropes of pop liberalism?
I’m an engineer by trade and schooling, and a left-brained person by nature. I think of things on a point-by-point basis. On a fact-by-fact basis. Not as a conceptual whole. To me, the points make up the whole. An argument is a sum of its sub-points. I’m not ignoring the argument as a whole, I’m examining the different portions of it. Perhaps that explains my perspective and my style a bit better.
On the executioners axe thing, I thought you guys were the ones pro-death penalty (avoiding using a smilie for your sake).
My satirizing of your comments is because many times you come across as if you believe you are the only one who knows all that is right. And that anyone who disagrees must therefore be unable to grasp the concepts - and need education and correction - incapable of productive thought - rather than simply having a different set of priorities and moral values. It can come off as being extremely full of yourself, as if you can do no wrong, hence the deity/religious references.
At a lower level, I absolutely believe in the participatory democracy. That actually matches traditional conservatism as in power to the states and local authorities. I’d rather see money sent more locally where you and I can have more direct influence.
My political and moral philosophy is a combination of what I feel is just, fair, and wise - which aren’t always the same thing, at which time I attempt to strike a balance. If you feel that match pop liberalism, I apologize. But I assure you I am acting, voting, and thinking from my own conscious and my own knowledge.
Interesting. Unsatisfying, but interesting.
I don’t think I’m always right, I just think you’re wrong, and your cerebral manifestations don’t justify anything. I was right, you’re a solipsist, and that’s all there is.
What follows from that is relativism when it suits you, because it allows you to dispense charitable banalities about the equivalent value of every idea while concurrently sustaining the illusion that what you believe is the truth. It can’t be both, and you’re uninterested in which is actually true. This is intellectual laziness and, worse, passivity.
The difference between the two of us is that I know the world is complicated and mysterious and enigmatic, with a truth buried inside, and you’re interested only in what can be quantified. If I had a choice between the cold, regulated thought of a post-Enlightenment Man like you and the leftist revolutionary with a bomb in his pocket, I’d choose the bomber. He’s more reliable, more honest and more trustworthy. He feels something.
(Contd)
This isn’t personal. I’ve lived a long time, and there’s no point in plowing over experience as an indication of anything except sentience and materiality.
Except this. I dragged myself up from the slough of effete ’60’s leftism and down a long road to a certain kind of liberation. I know your drill, I know your talk, I know the people and I know the heart, or lack of it, in the dreary defense of the idea that material prosperity and good state budgets, and good intentions produce material well-being. This is at the center of everything you believe, Freddie, left-brained or not. That’s no excuse. You have reason given by something, and you aren’t using it.
That’s your world, and its liturgy and dogma is always the same tired charlatanry. Make a difference, make yourself heard, keep the kindergartens open, staff the police forces, feed the hungry..with the same mad buffoonish intensity of my generation of leftists and all those in between who created the sewer of pathologies we see around us every day. You’ve emptied the world of Belief and anything transcendent in your pursuit of the best social machinery and the most egalitarian distribution of assets. It didn’t work; it doesn’t work, it will never work.
Rhod:
Have you ever noticed how your vocabulary and tone changes whenever you are arguing with a liberal? You develop this pretentious, smug, tone, as if you are trying to constantly prove that you aren’t as stupid as they think you are. Why are you so insecure about your intelligence? You don’t actually speak like that do you? Why the need to modify your language? It is really transparent.
BaldeagleMA:
What do you suggest?
baldeagleMA,
Seems clear to me Massachusetts liberals need education in conservative thought.
Baldeagle (and Fred):
I’ve been thinking about your comment, Baldeagle, and you have a point, but I think you came in rather late. The metaphors and controlled anger were there because I’d finally lost patience with him. At other times, I just stopped responding. Not this time. Fred and I have disagreed on lots of things, and most of our exchanges have been pretty ordinary. Nothing exceptional.
If you’ve dug into our past struggles, you’ll find that they were seldom worse than snide and sarcastic, at least on Fred’s part. I was more critical, but not the pretentious, obnoxious brute you see. I’ve believed all along that we’ve been more direct and forthright with liberals than they are with us, but Fred is a special case. I don’t come here to fight, but I know a cold techno-liberal when I see one.
Fred’s also a bright guy, an agnostic on lots of things (I think), and left-brained, which he seems to think justifies his misunderstanding of the whole. Are we seeking to understand each other? I think so, but nothing ever comes from our exchanges, and I don’t accept the alibi that brain-side dominance is valid.
And while I have no desire to convince Fred of anything, when our disagreements grind to a halt, it’s usually because of perceptions, denials and evasions, and odd conflicts like the cloying presence of an Emoticon, and the trivialization of issues that are apparently important enough to discuss, but not important enough to take seriously. Fred and I have discussed this before, several times. Fred’s answer is “get over it”. Well, if his ideas are contradicted by cartoons, he insults me AND himself. This is not a game, and we’re not children.
Fred and I had disagreements, also, about how open-minded either of us was, and where our particular understandings lay, and why we believed as we did. I won’t belabor that matter, but it was always seemed, to me, a one-way street. We’re the lab rats, Fred’s the detached scientist. In any case, the fact remains…Fred thinks the state has a large and beneficial role to play in daily life and I think the state, in all its forms, is destructive and inefficient, and must be questioned about everything, its programs evaluated constantly, and its scope limited.
What happened in this exchange, finally, was the convergence of my disdain for Fred’s kind of glib liberalism and my anger with its representative type. I’ll make no excuses for what I think is true about liberalism. I’m not an uber-conservative either, and some of the dirtiest unprovoked remarks and stereotyping I’ve encountered in the blogosphere have been from liberals, even before I acted like the person you described. I think you just don’t like what I have to say, and therefore dislike my usage and observations in trying to explain hard-to-explain issues.
I’ve said all this to Fred, so I’m no betraying him. I’ll be as polite and candid as I can if you have any further comments. I have a feeling you and I have argued at other times, when you used another blog name. Fred can comment at any time if I’m wrong.
“its disingenuous to ignore the fact that there’s a significant new program, which everyone knows will have substantial costs, involved in the comparison.”
The legislature couldn’t withdraw the program? Change the benefit structure? Cut another program’s funding? You’re falsely assuming that there aren’t numerous other options because a tax and spend liberal assumes the only option is putting their hand back in your pocket.
“This is a democracy. If you want your government to do something, tell them, and act on it. Vote. Run yourself.”
This is comically bad logic. Can I pay my electric bill by telling them to contact the mortgage company for a share of that payment? Patrick said he was going to give us property tax relief. Giving someone else the money and then claiming they could share it doesn’t qualify as giving us property tax relief.
“You know very well that taxes are only one proponent of costs. Don’t play dumb.”
Exactly why I said look at the overall cost of business. You can claim one particular tax is amazingly low, but that ignores the fact that MA is a high tax state. Patrick is utilizing the same fallacious logic when he says other states have closed the loopholes too. Those states probably have a much lower overall tax burden.
“Forbes ranks us 7th in quality of life.”
You think companies rate the availability of an opera house extremely high when making these decisions? I hear CEOs get bonuses if their companies operate in areas with a great theater district too. (That’s sarcasm.) In fact, how many working people in MA can afford a night at the opera house or theater district? The Cambridge crowd might live here for those reasons, but most people could care less.
The bottom line is costs and jobs matter a lot more to businesses and people than the soft factors Patrick pushes.
“A little thing called a billion dollar deficit.”
A deficit based upon out of control spending projections.
“He’s starting on them. Doing what he can is better than nothing.”
Sorry, but the “hope” thing got checked at the door when he became governor. It’s fine to run that vision when you’re campaigning, but it’s not acceptable when you actually have to get things done. It’s time to deliver.
“The meeting thing is red herring and always has been.”
Yeah, like most of his attacks on Romney too.
Rhod,
What BaldEagle sees as defensiveness is I believe what I’ve referred to with the earlier deity remarks, and what you referred to as ‘critical’ - telling me how ludicrous I am, or how I misunderstand everything, or can’t grasp it, etc. Perhaps I was wrong to read it the way I did, and perhaps it is more of a defensive posture, I dunno.
You can rest assured I do not think you dumb, by any means (if you care anyway). You clearly have deep convictions a sharp-eyed view of the world around you. I disagree with the way you see things, but not your ability to see it.
If you’ll forgive me one specific quote, I think you sum it up well here:
“Fred thinks the state has a large and beneficial role to play in daily life and I think the state, in all its forms, is destructive and inefficient, and must be questioned about everything, its programs evaluated constantly, and its scope limited.”
I agree with how we see things different - mostly. I am more than willing to question the state and if it can be reduced or made less intrusive, but I do think the effect is important and can (and should) be beneficial. As an example, I fundamentally prefer a Mass-style approach to health care reform rather than a single payer or government provided insurance system.
Although the characterization of yourself being the case it seems you should have nearly as much objection with OP on this thread as you do with me. And certainly you would have nearly as much objection to Kerry Healey - whose 50 (was it? I forget the number) ideas involved definite addition regulation and spending - as you do with Deval Patrick, who managed to keep state spending mostly flat year-over-year.
I’m sorry to hear you find me ‘glib’, or insulting. I mean no such thing. If you could care to provide any examples (there’s me being the scientist) again, I would be interested to know what specific exchanges caused some of your various comments in your reply.
> The legislature couldn’t withdraw the program? Change the
> benefit structure? Cut another program’s funding?
Of course they could. Which is why I asked to provide specific alternatives, which no one has yet provided. But don’t go around complaining about missing $700M in cuts, when, the real numbers show, that real, ongoing state spending was cut by $600-700M
If you want to say the state government should cut or decrease funding for the health care initiative, than argue that, but don’t go yelling about how spending growth is out of control, when the real numbers say just the opposite.
> This is comically bad logic. Can I pay my electric bill by
> telling them to contact the mortgage company for a share of
> that payment? Patrick said he was going to give us property
> tax relief. Giving someone else the money and then claiming
> they could share it doesn’t qualify as giving us property
> tax relief.
Well then you weren’t paying attention. Patrick said he would provide property tax relief primarily by restoring aid to cities and town. There was some talk of credits and senior exemption, but the main point always was aid to cities and town. And reduction of that aid in the first place was a major cause of the increase in property taxes to begin with.
Meanwhile, Boston recently passed a law that said if they were allowed to have meal and hotel taxes, they would reduce property taxes by a corresponding amount. Is your local government doing that? If not, be involved. I’m sorry that participating in democracy is ‘comical logic’ to you.
> Exactly why I said look at the overall cost of business. You
> can claim one particular tax is amazingly low, but that
> ignores the fact that MA is a high tax state.
You’re mixing apples and oranges a little still. Corporate-wise, Mass is a low tax state (its not one tax that’s low, its all of them). But on the greater point you’re right, cost of business is not low, and that needs to be looked at as a whole. As I said from the start, I’m no particular fan of the corporate tax loophole closing thing, but as ~$650M was already cut from real, continuing state expenses, its not like there was no effort to cut anything. Suggest more that should be cut and if I like it, I’ll support it instead.
> Sorry, but the “hope” thing got checked at the door when he
> became governor. It’s fine to run that vision when you’re
> campaigning, but it’s not acceptable when you actually have
> to get things done. It’s time to deliver.
I wasn’t talking about hope there. I was talking about how taking a first step on overall goals is still a positive, even if its not all the way. You seem to wish to claim its not positive enough, fine, but its still not a negative.
> “The meeting thing is red herring and always has been.”
> Yeah, like most of his attacks on Romney too.
Fine, as long as we agree that this private meeting this is and always has been a red herring.