CLT
UPDATE
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Fee-and-Spenders run wild on Bacon
Hill
Senate budget leaders say it's time for cities and towns to stop griping about state aid cuts and start trimming their own spending.
The $22.5 billion Senate budget plan released today adopts local aid cuts of up to 20 percent, the same as the House's and Gov. Mitt Romney's versions of the budget.
Senate President Robert E. Travaglini and Sen. Therese Murray, D-Plymouth, said city and town officials have to accept the state aid cuts as inevitable and start dealing with them....
During an interview yesterday, she and Travaglini specifically criticized the Massachusetts Municipal Association for its advertising campaign that pushes for higher taxes and borrowing rather than municipal belt-tightening....
Travaglini said the state budget crisis is forcing a re-evaluation of all government spending. He called it politically unrealistic for local officials to expect the state to raise taxes when voters are adamantly opposed to tax hikes.
"Look at all the failed attempts at the overrides; there's a message in there," said Travaglini, an East Boston Democrat. "The governor has said no new taxes, the House has said no new taxes. I'm not going to put my membership at risk by involving ourselves in an exercise that's going nowhere."
The Patriot Ledger
Wednesday, May 21. 2003
Senate reveals $22.5B budget:
Adopts 20% local aid cuts
The state Senate, anxious to find new revenues without turning to taxes, yesterday proposed levying an annual surcharge on every Massachusetts home and business owner's insurance premiums -- just one of the $500 million in fee hikes contained in its budget blueprint for the next fiscal year.
The fee, which would be levied via a 2.3 percent increase is insurance premiums, is expected to add about $25 to the typical homeowner's costs, and generate $40 million to help fund local police and fire services, Senate leaders said....
Senate leaders, such as Ways and Means Committee chairwoman Therese Murray, insisted yesterday that the charges are not taxes, but user fees, because they pay for specific government services. That has become a frequent refrain on Beacon Hill these days as politicians look for money to ease the budget crunch in an antitax era.
But some watchdogs say there is no difference, and pointed to the proposed insurance surcharge on home and business owners as a disturbing example of a tax masquerading as a fee.
"Right now, we have a homeowner's policy that covers us if our home burns to the ground, and we're paying property taxes for the protection of our homes [by police and fire departments]," said
Barbara Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited
Taxation. "So what has the state done for you that you're not already getting?"
Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, echoed Anderson's comments.
"A surcharge on homeowners' insurance is not a fee, it's a tax, and so we're bending over backward to find surcharges or fees or some other euphemism because broad-based taxes have been ruled out," Widmer said. "So the fees are really adding up.
"It is striking the extent to which we are turning to fees to close the budget deficit, and stretching the meaning of the word fee," he added....
Senate leaders would go further than the House or Romney in seeking to raise fees. In addition to its new proposed increases, the Senate would adopt all of the dozens of fee-increasing ideas proposed by the House or Romney earlier this year.
The Boston Globe
Thursday, May 22, 2003
State Senate eyes new fees
Says proposed hikes would raise $500m
Critics said the proposal is another way for lawmakers to tap wallets while claiming not to raise taxes.
"They are fully aware that there is no appetite for taxes so they are trying to nickel and dime people," said Chip Ford of Citizens for Limited Taxation. "This is just another example of that."
Associated Press
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Critics: Senate relying too heavily on one-time funds,
new revenue sources
Some $800 million in higher fees and "tax loophole closings," about $500 million in one-time revenues, and a heavy reliance on federal reimbursements provide part of the answer. But closer analysis is needed to know whether well-intentioned Senate moves to protect health care services are sustainable.
And their claim to a no-new-taxes budget will surely be challenged by homeowners being hit with a new surcharge on insurance to raise $40 million for cities and towns.
A Boston Herald editorial
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Reforms applauded, spending a concern
Fee hikes are seen as more politically palatable than broad-based tax increases because they affect isolated constituencies. But a return to a 5.6 percent income tax rate is still the fairest way to close the gap....
Travaglini expressed hope that the budget will be on the governor's desk by June 15. It will still be an unfinished document until the Legislature provides more revenue to finance the essential services of state government.
A Boston Globe editorial
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Travaglini's agenda
Voters yesterday rejected a controversial $3.8 million tax override by 379 votes, sending the message they are willing to lay off dozens of teachers and town workers before raising taxes 19 percent.
The measure failed with 2,524 votes against and 2,145 in favor. Fifty-six percent of the town's 8,300 voters cast ballots.
Without the override, up to 75 teachers and school staff, as well as 30 percent of the town's police officers, firefighters and public works employees could be laid off....
"I thought Hopkinton was worth it. I guess it's not," said the Citizens Information Task Force member who has been pushing for the measure. "You want the cuts, have them. Cut teachers, cut fire, cut police."
The MetroWest Daily News
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
[Excerpt] Hopkinton rejects override
Just hours after voters narrowly defeated a $3.8 million Proposition 2½ override request that would have increased property taxes by 19 percent, Hopkinton officials yesterday were already considering bringing a smaller, more palatable proposal back next month.
Selectwoman Mary Pratt said she hopes to ease the tax burden without ravaging town services by dipping further into the stabilization fund and reducing the override appeal to $1.6 million.
"There are just awful consequences otherwise," Pratt said. "I want to go back for a lesser override and get it passed. I hope we can do that." ...
"The state thinks we're a rich town, but we have a lot of young people that have been hit hard by the economy and don't know if they can afford it," Pratt said. "Even if God stood at the polls with a
'Yes' sign, there were still people so determined that they would have voted no. And they did."
The Boston Globe
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
[Excerpt] Officials eye smaller override figure
They may share a school system, but residents of Wilbraham and Hampden parted ways yesterday when they went to the polls to vote for a Proposition 2½ override question, principally to fund education.
In Hampden, 853 of the 1503 voters who cast ballots rejected the measure, which would have allowed the town to assess an additional $353,569 in personal and property taxes, most of which would have gone to the Hampden Wilbraham Regional School District. Voters also rejected a debt exclusion measure that would have allowed the town to raise about $85,000 to pay for a new dump truck.
Next door in Wilbraham, a $1.4 million override question was narrowly approved, 2,425 to 2,364. Most of the override funds, $733,000, are earmarked for the school district.
The Springfield Republican
Sunday, May 18, 2003
[Excerpt] Towns split on vote to approve override
Charging state lawmakers with trying to circumvent the will of Webster voters, Gov. Mitt Romney last week quietly turned back legislation that would have let the town pay 50 percent of its retirees' health care costs....
Mr. Romney said he could not sign the bill because town voters on five separate occasions had rejected the proposal when it was placed on the local ballot. Most recently, on May 6, 2002, residents voted 1,512 to 828 to reject the plan.
"Just as I defend the will of the voters as expressed on state ballot questions, I hesitate to sanction circumvention of the local ballot results in Webster," Mr. Romney said. "At a time when local communities, like the state, struggle to balance budgets, the voters of Webster are entitled to a voice on a matter with significant financial implications for the town."
...
The governor's rejection of the bill serves as a test case, indicating Mr. Romney intends to stick by his pledge to reject local tax hikes that have not won the approval of local voters, Romney spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman said.
State House News Service
Monday, May 19, 2003
[Excerpt] Romney rejects Webster bill to aid town retirees
Governor sides with taxpayers on health costs
Ad campaigns by the Massachusetts Teachers Association have become as regular as the equinox. In recent years, radio and TV spots paid for by the state's largest teachers union have run every spring and fall, airing so frequently that the MTA has boasted to its members, "It will be nearly impossible for a member of the public, an opinion leader, or an elected official to miss our messages." ...
There is a familiar sameness to many MTA commercials. The ads that ran this spring weren't all that different from the ads that ran last spring, or the spring before that. (Some of the spots, in fact, were reruns.) Governors may come and go, budgets may swell and contract, but the MTA is forever calling for higher taxes and higher spending, or ominously warning us against lower taxes and lower spending....
That $2.3 million a year, by the way, is separate from the huge sums the MTA has poured into political campaigns -- including campaigns to fight tax cuts or promote spending. In 1990, for example, the union spent $1.3 million in cash and in-kind contributions to defeat Question 3, a tax-rollback initiative. In 1998, it spent an estimated $1 million to block Citizens for Limited Taxation's proposed initiative lowering the income tax to 5 percent. And when the CLT tax cut finally made it to the ballot in 2000, the MTA spent at least $850,000 trying to defeat it.
The Boston Globe
Sunday, May 18, 2003
The real message in the MTA's ads
By Jeff Jacoby
First of two columns
The unions do not spend all this money out of the goodness of their hearts. Their goals are not better schools or improved student performance. What they want is more income for themselves, and teachers unions only collect more income when public-school payrolls increase. That is why they constantly clamor for hiring more teachers.
And what they clamor for, they usually get. According to the Department of Education, the number of public school teachers in Massachusetts soared from 33,629 in 1991 to 70,236 in 2002, a 108 percent rise. During roughly the same period, public school enrollment in Massachusetts grew by only 17 percent. The explosion in teacher payrolls may not have led to better grades or more effective schools, but it certainly gave a boost to the union's bottom line.
Teachers unions, like all unions, want to make money and amass power. Those are the motives behind everything they say and do. They're not in business "for the children." They're in business for themselves.
The Boston Globe
Thursday, May 22, 2003
The bottom line for teachers unions
By Jeff Jacoby
Chip Ford's CLT
Commentary
Barbara has long been saying that the Beacon Hill
pols have got to be getting tired of all the whining by municipal officials for
more, more, more money. She expected this would be the reason if the
Legislature grants them new taxing power. Senate President Robert
Travaglini and his Ways and Means Committee chairwoman, Sen. Therese
Murray, made it clear yesterday that indeed they have reached the limit
of their endurance, targeting particularly the Massachusetts Municipal
Association with their vitriol.
It's unfortunate, though not perplexing, that in
their righteous and long-overdue wrath they chose to avoid the
Massachusetts Teachers Association -- the tax-and-spend lobby's wealthy
and intimidating third-rail that's currently running another media blitz
again demanding "increased revenue."
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby more than made up
for that predictable avoidance is his two-part series, stripping the
manipulative and parasitic teachers union naked.
You know the Legislature has seriously crossed the
line over to indefensible conduct when Citizens for Limited Taxation and
the so-called Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation find themselves in
agreement. Beacon Hill's effort to redefine the English language and
ignore the state Supreme Judicial Court's ruling (in Emerson
College vs. the City of Boston, 1984), to overtly impose taxes
thinly disguised as "fees," is too much even for MTF to
ignore any longer.
Ironically, the Emerson case was decided on the
very same issue after Boston imposed a new "fee" upon
non-profit organizations ... specifically for fire protection!
The SJC ruled that any such "fee" indeed was an illegal tax
and killed it dead in its tracks.
While everyone on Beacon Hill -- Gov. Romney, the
House, and now the Senate -- is touting their alleged "no new
taxes" budgets, the critical point is that all three branches are
intent on increasing state revenue from between $350-$500
million a year just through raising "fees," further
burdening the citizenry.
An overall revenue increase this year of about $800
million -- call it whatever they will -- on top of last year's $1.2
billion.
And come fall, we won't be surprised to see taxes as
taxes proposed on top of this.
So far they've gotten away with the
prescription drug "fee" on self-payers and they've gotten away
with the nursing home bed "fee" on self-payers.
The governor reluctantly pulled his plan to "fee" private
health care insurance on self-payers, but the Beacon Hill pols will keep
running with this "fee" scam until somebody stops them.
This homeowner's insurance fee scam may be just what CLT
has been waiting for: "standing" before the court to -- with
your support -- go after
many if not all of these illegal "fees."
When we took the Dukakis
administration to court over illicit fee increases (Ford vs. Secretary
of A&F Lashman, Suffolk Superior Court #89-2288) in 1989,
we predicted that illegal fees and increases were like a house of cards:
if the court pulls out just one card the entire house collapses. This
remains true today. Insatiable overreaching just might cost Bacon Hill
much if not all of this year's "no new taxes" $800 million
revenue increase.
It's become obvious that taxpayers need the state Supreme Judicial Court to
again assert itself, to once again rein in the fee-and-spenders
-- keep them honest at least for another while.
|
|
|
Chip
Ford |
The Patriot Ledger
Wednesday, May 21. 2003
Senate reveals $22.5B budget: Adopts 20% local aid cuts
By Tom Benner
Patriot Ledger State House Bureau
Senate budget leaders say it's time for cities and towns to stop griping about state aid cuts and start trimming their own spending.
The $22.5 billion Senate budget plan released today adopts local aid cuts of up to 20 percent, the same as the House's and Gov. Mitt Romney's versions of the budget.
Senate President Robert E. Travaglini and Sen. Therese Murray, D-Plymouth, said city and town officials have to accept the state aid cuts as inevitable and start dealing with them.
"We raised revenues last year by $1.2 billion. Half of that went to local aid so that we could protect the towns," said Murray, chairwoman of the budget-writing Senate Ways and Means Committee. "They didn't pay attention; they continued to spend."
Murray said it is "disconcerting" to her that some municipal officials oppose local aid cuts as the state seeks to close a projected $3 billion revenue shortfall for the upcoming fiscal year.
"If people aren't working, we don't have revenue. If we don't have revenue, we can't give it to cities and towns," Murray said. "And if they don't have revenue, they need to cut back on some of the things they do, or delay some of the things they are going to do.
During an interview yesterday, she and Travaglini specifically criticized the Massachusetts Municipal Association for its advertising campaign that pushes for higher taxes and borrowing rather than municipal belt-tightening.
Cities and towns "have taken really no cuts in the past three years, which have been very painful for state services, human services, health care services, and the layoffs we have done that we're going to continue to do," Murray said. "Now it's in their lap, and they've got to address it."
Travaglini said the state budget crisis is forcing a re-evaluation of all government spending. He called it politically unrealistic for local officials to expect the state to raise taxes when voters are adamantly opposed to tax hikes.
"Look at all the failed attempts at the overrides; there's a message in there," said Travaglini, an East Boston Democrat. "The governor has said no new taxes, the House has said no new taxes. I'm not going to put my membership at risk by involving ourselves in an exercise that's going nowhere."
The Senate budget plan is similar to the recently approved House plan in other respects, too. It calls for transferring functions of the Metropolitan District Commission to other state agencies and keeping the office of University of Massachusetts President William M. Bulger.
The decision to keep Bulger, a former Democratic Senate president, at the helm at UMass is a rebuff to Republican Romney, who had sought to abolish the office.
"If you look at what the office does, you couldn't possibly do away with the office," Murray said. "The office coordinates everything for the university system, so why would you throw that out when you just got it together eight years ago and it's doing a great job?"
In addition to adopting many of the fee hike proposals by Romney and the House, the Senate adds at least one more, an increase in the yearly fee for registered lobbyists from $150 to $1,000. "We looked at everything we possibly charge a fee for, and looked at whether we can increase that fee," Murray said.
The Senate plan sidesteps the debate over expanding legalized gambling in the state, with Travaglini and Murray saying the controversial question should be settled outside of the budget debate.
It would fully fund a senior pharmacy program, methadone clinics and state tourism grants.
While spending more money in some areas, the Senate plan differs with the House plan by not lowering a $1.2 billion borrowing cap. The House had sought to lower the cap by $400 million.
The Senate plan also sets the groundwork for merging the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and the state Highway Department, as well as paying off $12 billion in commitments to the School Building Assistance program and revamping the free hospital care pool.
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The Boston Globe
Thursday, May 22, 2003
State Senate eyes new fees
Says proposed hikes would raise $500m
By Raphael Lewis, Globe Staff
The state Senate, anxious to find new revenues without turning to taxes, yesterday proposed levying an annual surcharge on every Massachusetts home and business owner's insurance premiums -- just one of the $500 million in fee hikes contained in its budget blueprint for the next fiscal year.
The fee, which would be levied via a 2.3 percent increase is insurance premiums, is expected to add about $25 to the typical homeowner's costs, and generate $40 million to help fund local police and fire services, Senate leaders said. They also want to impose fee increases on every business that sells cigarettes, raise the $150 annual registration fee paid by State House lobbyists to $1,000, and adopt $390 million in new fees proposed by the House or Governor Mitt Romney.
Senate leaders, such as Ways and Means Committee chairwoman Therese Murray, insisted yesterday that the charges are not taxes, but user fees, because they pay for specific government services. That has become a frequent refrain on Beacon Hill these days as politicians look for money to ease the budget crunch in an antitax era.
But some watchdogs say there is no difference, and pointed to the proposed insurance surcharge on home and business owners as a disturbing example of a tax masquerading as a fee.
"Right now, we have a homeowner's policy that covers us if our home burns to the ground, and we're paying property taxes for the protection of our homes [by police and fire departments]," said
Barbara Anderson, executive director of Citizens for Limited
Taxation. "So what has the state done for you that you're not already getting?"
Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, echoed Anderson's comments.
"A surcharge on homeowners' insurance is not a fee, it's a tax, and so we're bending over backward to find surcharges or fees or some other euphemism because broad-based taxes have been ruled out," Widmer said. "So the fees are really adding up.
"It is striking the extent to which we are turning to fees to close the budget deficit, and stretching the meaning of the word fee," he added.
Senator Jarrett T. Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat who chairs the Public Safety Committee, stressed that the surcharge would be paid by insurance companies to the state, and the companies can decide whether to pass on the new fee to their policyholders. The state would distribute the money to cities and towns.
How insurance companies would respond was not immediately clear last night. A spokesman for the Massachusetts Association of Insurance Agents could not be reached for comment.
"It will not prevent all cuts in police and fire, but the $40 million will give [cities and towns] the ability to help keep those services at a decent level," said Barrios, who proposed the idea to the Ways and Means Committee.
Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, said cities and towns are desperate for the money, given the budgetary pressures stemming from terror alerts and cuts in local aid.
"Clearly, communities have been funding investments in technology and training and terror readiness with nickels and dimes," Beckwith said.
The Senate's plan to generate $2.5 million by increasing the license fee for businesses that sell tobacco products outraged many of the state's 4,000 convenience store owners, who say they are already saddled with high excise taxes and other fees associated with the sale of cigarettes.
"We pay more than our fair share in taxes on cigarettes," said Diana O'Donoghue of the New England Convenience Store Association.
Senate budget staffers could not say yesterday how much each store would pay under the plan. It is also unclear whether the fee could be passed on to consumers, who pay cigarette taxes that are among the nation's highest. The revenue raised would be used to pay for antismoking programs.
Murray, in describing the Senate's plan to close the budget gap, said the lawmakers relied on sometimes unconventional sources for their revenue-raising ideas. A lobbyist she would not name suggested raising the annual registration fee paid by him and his colleagues, for example.
"He said, 'We use your lights, your water, your phones, we're always in your halls," said Murray, a Plymouth Democrat. "'You should charge us more.' So I thought about it and decided it's a good idea."
Senate leaders would go further than the House or Romney in seeking to raise fees. In addition to its new proposed increases, the Senate would adopt all of the dozens of fee-increasing ideas proposed by the House or Romney earlier this year. Those plans include fees to file court complaints, and fees for identification cards and state exams, as well as hiking fees on manufacturers of alcoholic beverages from $6,000 to $10,000, and those who sell alcoholic beverages from $300 to $1,000.
Indeed, few sectors of the state economy would be untouched, as everyone from milk deliverers to pet food sellers to horse riding instructors would see their annual license fees rise.
Eric Kriss, Romney's top budget aide, said yesterday that the administration would review the Senate's proposal to determine if the new fees should be viewed as tax increases, which Romney has vowed to veto.
Noah Berger, executive director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, said that, while taxation can often provide a fairer way to raise revenues, not all fee proposals are regressive.
"Having just looked at it, it may end up being an intelligent and effective way to meet these public safety challenges," Berger said. "The fact that it makes sense in general to evaluate based on fairness and effectiveness doesn't mean that some fees are not good ideas in the end."
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Associated Press
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Critics: Senate relying too heavily on one-time funds,
new revenue sources
By Steve Leblanc
From insurance for the chronically unemployed to support for rape crisis centers, the budget released by Senate leaders on Wednesday avoids some of the harshest cuts of earlier plans.
But critics say the Senate is relying too heavily on one-time money and new, untested sources of revenue in order to avoid taking the ax to popular services.
Senate leaders say they're just doing a better job at managing the state's money by streamlining services.
"We're changing the way that the state does business," said Ways and Means Chairwoman Therese Murray, D-Plymouth.
The Senate plan relies heavily on one-time dollars, including a plan to transfer the Hynes Convention Center and Boston Common Garage to the state pension fund in lieu of a $145 million payment.
All told, the Senate uses about $430 million in one-time funds, compared to about $247 million in the House budget.
The Senate budget also includes about $500 million in additional fees, compared to about $395 million in the House plan and dips into reserves for another $175 million. The House leaves the state's stabilization fund untouched.
Some longtime budget observers say they aren't convinced that using one-time funds is a good way to support annual spending.
"It is problematic," said Michael Widmer of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Association. "Certainly they're using some one-time reserves to (balance the budget), which simply puts off the day of reckoning."
The Senate plan also sets up special sources of funds to support specific programs.
It pays for antigambling programs by funneling abandoned lottery prizes into the Department of Public Health and funds anti-smoking programs by increasing fees charged to tobacco retailers and wholesalers.
One of the more unusual proposals is to impose a "first responder" surcharge on homeowner and commercial insurance policies to create a new $40 million fund to help communities cope with state budget cuts to fire, police and emergency workers.
Critics said the proposal is another way for lawmakers to tap wallets while claiming not to raise taxes.
"They are fully aware that there is no appetite for taxes so they are trying to nickel and dime people," said
Chip Ford of Citizens for Limited Taxation. "This is just another example of that."
But the Senate plan won praise from Gov. Mitt Romney's budget chief, Eric Kriss, who said the challenge is to balance the budget not by slashing services, but by making government more efficient.
"There was always the prospect in a fiscal crisis of simply not being able to reform and just cut," Kriss said. "We're not cutting into the muscle and bone of state government, we are just doing a better job of running it."
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The Boston Herald
Thursday, May 22, 2003
A Boston Herald editorial
Reforms applauded, spending a concern
Do the numbers add up? That's the nagging question even as Senate President Robert Travaglini seemed to pull a rabbit out of the hat yesterday with the official unveiling of the Senate version of the state budget.
Medicaid coverage for 36,000 long-term unemployed was restored and Prescription Advantage was saved. The fact that those two programs alone cost about $200 million invites a healthy dose of skepticism about whether the budget's bottom line will hold up under scrutiny.
Some $800 million in higher fees and "tax loophole closings," about $500 million in one-time revenues, and a heavy reliance on federal reimbursements provide part of the answer. But closer analysis is needed to know whether well-intentioned Senate moves to protect health care services are sustainable.
And their claim to a no-new-taxes budget will surely be challenged by homeowners being hit with a new surcharge on insurance to raise $40 million for cities and towns.
But these quibbles aside, government reform and restructuring are happily no longer foreign concepts in the Legislature's upper branch.
The Senate tinkers with the Pacheco law, raising the threshold over which projects are subject to its rigorous provisions from $100,000 to $200,000. And it opens the door to aggressively privatizing skating rinks, pools and golf courses run by the soon to be defunct Metropolitan District Commission.
State employees will contribute between 15 percent and 30 percent, on a sliding income scale, to their health insurance premiums.
University of Massachusetts President William Bulger had nothing to fear from his former colleagues - his office is untouched - but the Senate budget does tackle longstanding higher education management issues.
Travaglini proposes that campuses retain their tuitions, incentivizing strategies to increase enrollment and reducing reliance on exorbitant student fees. And for the first time, UMass will feel a little tug on its reins as it is required to submit to additional reporting requirements and more closely cooperate with the Board of Higher Education.
Plans to consolidate health and human service agencies, better manage scarce court resources and curb Quinn bill costs round out an impressive Senate effort at reform.
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The Boston Globe
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
A Boston Globe editorial
Travaglini's agenda
Senate President Robert Travaglini's first budget, unveiled today, carries on the values of his predecessors but bears his own distinctive stamp. The Senate's traditional concern for education, health care, and the needs of the dispossessed will be maintained even in the face of a $3 billion revenue gap. And yet Travaglini, who describes being new to the process as "powerful and liberating," likely will offer sweeping reforms to rival Governor Romney's proposed changes. In a briefing yesterday, Travaglini confirmed the Senate's plan to restore health insurance benefits to 36,000 disabled and unemployed adults. He said the Senate will not retreat from its initiatives in prescription drug coverage for seniors or in education reform. He wants to restore much of the $40 million cut from the House budget for remedial programs for students who fail the MCAS exam, for example.
The budget does not contain new taxes; Travaglini says cost containment has to come first. Instead, it is expected to rely on substantial increases in fees. "There are no sacred cows," Travaglini said. "We touch everybody." Indeed, State House lobbyists will find their registration fees more than tripled.
Fee hikes are seen as more politically palatable than broad-based tax increases because they affect isolated constituencies. But a return to a 5.6 percent income tax rate is still the fairest way to close the gap.
Travaglini's budget is expected to move through the Senate by the end of next week. Then comes the hard part: the conference committee, where he will face off with House Speaker Thomas Finneran. Finneran has not shied from deadlocks lasting well into the fall to get what he wants. Travaglini's predecessor, Thomas Birmingham, seemingly spent weeks on a State House balcony with Finneran trying to compromise.
With a laugh, Travaglini said he warned Finneran: "If we wind up on the balcony, there's only one face the people are going to remember." Travaglini's ability to negotiate that relationship will be an important test of his leadership.
It already appears certain that this revenue gap will not be solved in one budget season. Both the House and the Senate have said further action will be taken, perhaps in the fall. Yesterday Travaglini and his able Ways and Means Committee chairwoman, Therese Murray, said they will meet with House leaders and Romney's representatives after July 1 to address the affordable housing crisis. Tax revenues and expanded gaming are also on hold.
Travaglini expressed hope that the budget will be on the governor's desk by June 15. It will still be an unfinished document until the Legislature provides more revenue to finance the essential services of state government.
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The Boston Globe
Sunday, May 18, 2003
The real message in the MTA's ads
By Jeff Jacoby
First of two columns
Ad campaigns by the Massachusetts Teachers Association have become as regular as the equinox. In recent years, radio and TV spots paid for by the state's largest teachers union have run every spring and fall, airing so frequently that the MTA has boasted to its members, "It will be nearly impossible for a member of the public, an opinion leader, or an elected official to miss our messages." The messages in the latest round of ads were that taxes should go up and that it would be disastrous if education spending went down. One ad lamented that "many" of the kids at "your local high school" would not be going to college "because the governor's new budget is putting their one chance of a college education ... out of reach." The MTA's advice? "Tell our political leaders to raise the revenues needed."
Another ad acknowledged that there is a $3 billion deficit "with painful cuts coming," but condemned the Romney administration for taking some of those cuts out of local aid. "Are you ready for massive layoffs of teachers and staff?" it asked. "Or should we tell our political leaders that ... it's time to show some resolve and raise the revenues our kids need?"
There is a familiar sameness to many MTA commercials. The ads that ran this spring weren't all that different from the ads that ran last spring, or the spring before that. (Some of the spots, in fact, were reruns.) Governors may come and go, budgets may swell and contract, but the MTA is forever calling for higher taxes and higher spending, or ominously warning us against lower taxes and lower spending.
To be sure this sense of deja vu wasn't just my imagination, I took a stroll through the union's advertising record over the past 15 years. Some snapshots:
June 1989: The MTA launches an ad blitz to denounce proposed education cuts. One TV spot features Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. If spending on public schools doesn't rise, it suggests, Noriega will soon have more drug customers in Massachusetts.
November 1991: The MTA spends $250,000 on a series of radio ads calling for more public outlays on the state's schools. "We must spend more and spend smarter," one ad declares.
April 1995: The MTA airs a new commercial blasting legislators for proposing to spend less on education than the union had expected. An MTA lobbyist, meanwhile, urges Beacon Hill to take the money out of emergency reserves. "This is a rainy-day fund," he says, and "it's pouring outside."
July 1999: The MTA rolls out a $1.5 million TV-radio-billboard offensive intended "to enhance the image of public education" and show that higher spending is yielding better schools.
April 2002: The MTA's biggest advertising barrage to date -- $1.4 million worth of TV commercials -- calls for higher taxes to stave off cuts in the state's education budget. Without tax hikes, it says, "there will be no new teachers and classrooms -- just drastic cuts, courses canceled, teacher layoffs ... and lots more students per teacher."
The pattern is pretty hard to miss. Occasionally, the union changes the subject, running feel-good spots about the American Dream or fiery denunciations of the MCAS exam, but on the whole its ad dollars -- now up to $2.3 million a year -- advance one consistent theme: Give us more money.
That $2.3 million a year, by the way, is separate from the huge sums the MTA has poured into political campaigns -- including campaigns to fight tax cuts or promote spending. In 1990, for example, the union spent $1.3 million in cash and in-kind contributions to defeat Question 3, a tax-rollback initiative. In 1998, it spent an estimated $1 million to block Citizens for Limited Taxation's proposed initiative lowering the income tax to 5 percent. And when the CLT tax cut finally made it to the ballot in 2000, the MTA spent at least $850,000 trying to defeat it.
Naturally, the teachers union is free to trumpet any message it chooses. But why is that message so often a demand for money? With an ad budget of $2.3 million a year, is a constant prescription of tax-and-spend really the wisest counsel the MTA has to offer? Why are there never ads about classroom discipline, student motivation, and parental support, issues of acute concern to so many teachers? Where are the ads advocating less TV and more homework? The ads calling for higher standards instead of higher spending? For more accountability instead of more taxes?
But no. Those aren't the union's top priorities; dollars are. The MTA puts its ad budget where its heart is, never losing sight of what it truly values most.
Next: Minding the union's business
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The Boston Globe
Thursday, May 22, 2003
The bottom line for teachers unions
By Jeff Jacoby
The Jayson Blair scandal at The New York Times has unleashed a flood of media coverage. Hundreds of stories, columns, and editorials have been printed and broadcast in the conventional media; dozens more have appeared on the Internet.
Yet nowhere in this gusher of news and comment can you find the views of The Newspaper Guild, one of the nation's largest media unions and the one that represents reporters at the Times. Neither Google nor Nexis turns up anything -- not a single article or transcript or Web post -- quoting a Guild official on the scandal's significance. No one seems to care about the union's reactions to the Blair affair, or its recommendations on how to prevent such ignominy in the future, or what it thinks the episode says about racial preferences in the newsroom.
And that is as it should be.
Because like all labor unions, the Newspaper Guild exists for one reason: to promote its members' economic interests. Those include higher pay, better benefits, easier work conditions, and less discipline -- all of which rank higher on any union's list of priorities than tightening professional standards or advancing the public good. No one asks the Guild's views on the state of US journalism for the same reason no one asks the United Auto Workers to comment on federal transportation policy: Anything they said would be tainted by their vested interest in winning more money and better terms for their members. Unions are special pleaders; no one mistakes them for impartial observers or disinterested honest brokers.
Except when it comes to teachers unions.
If the UAW proposed that domestic automobile manufacturers be paid a federal subsidy for each new employee they hired, everyone would recognize its self-serving aims -- to swell the ranks of auto workers and increase its own membership.
But when teachers unions demand hefty increases in education spending or mandatory reductions in class size, they get a respectful hearing. Union officials are routinely quoted in the media and invited to testify before legislative committees. And yet their aims are no less self-serving and their interests no less mercenary than those of any other union. So why the difference?
Part of the answer is that Americans think well of teachers, and teachers unions take advantage of that good opinion. When the public is asked to rate various professions for honesty and ethics, teachers are always near the top of the list. Union officials are typically closer to the bottom. "Given those results," asks Mike Antonucci of the
Education Intelligence
Agency, a public-education research firm, "which of the two words in the term 'teachers union' would you emphasize?"
That explains why the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, rarely uses the word "union" when describing itself. Go to the NEA web site, for example, and click on "About NEA." Nowhere in the long description does the word "union" appear.
But however much the NEA and its affiliates may try to disguise it, they are union to the core. Indeed, they are among the most successful unions in US history. The Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern observes in "Breaking Free," his engrossing new book on why so many public schools are dysfunctional, that "teacher unions now dominate the American trade union movement, accounting for almost 50 percent of all unionized government employees and more than 20 percent of all union members."
Teachers unions "cast a giant shadow over American politics," Stern writes, donating tens of millions of dollars directly to Democratic candidates and supporting them indirectly through independent media buys, union-paid campaign workers, and in-kind services. And this massive investment in political influence is supplemented by lavish advertising campaigns. I wrote on Sunday about the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which budgets more than $2.3 million a year for radio and TV commercials that advocate more public spending on education.
The unions do not spend all this money out of the goodness of their hearts. Their goals are not better schools or improved student performance. What they want is more income for themselves, and teachers unions only collect more income when public-school payrolls increase. That is why they constantly clamor for hiring more teachers.
And what they clamor for, they usually get. According to the Department of Education, the number of public school teachers in Massachusetts soared from 33,629 in 1991 to 70,236 in 2002, a 108 percent rise. During roughly the same period, public school enrollment in Massachusetts grew by only 17 percent. The explosion in teacher payrolls may not have led to better grades or more effective schools, but it certainly gave a boost to the union's bottom line.
Teachers unions, like all unions, want to make money and amass power. Those are the motives behind everything they say and do. They're not in business "for the children." They're in business for themselves.
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