"The Gimme Lobby smells blood from a self-inflicted critical wound and it is circling, moving in for the kill."
CLT Update
Oct. 22, 2003
MTF cheers on Olympic distance runner Romney
Now, facing severe cutbacks in services, Kriss, like Romney, rejects any tax increase on the grounds that it would inhibit the economy....
On Tuesday Romney distanced himself from Kriss's comments. On the same day, Ardith
Wieworka, commissioner of the Office of Child Care Services, spoke in favor of greater educational opportunities for preschoolers. If the governor is serious about this, he ought to propose a tax increase to provide better education for these little takers so that they can become givers when they grow up.
A Boston Globe editorial
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Give and take
Governor Romney appears to be distancing himself from these remarks by his chief budget writer last week. Talking about people as givers or takers divides people in ways that obscure the causes of our fiscal crisis and make it harder to bring people together to solve it. A more useful way to measure spending trends is to ask whether, in the years leading up to our fiscal crisis, state spending was growing as a share of personal income or falling. The answer is that it was falling....
While the decline in state spending as a share of income demonstrates that our current fiscal problems were not caused by too many "takers," perhaps it is also worth asking a more basic question: Is looking at "givers" and "takers" at any particular moment in time an appropriate way to make policy? ...
The reality is that over the course of our lives, virtually all of us will be both givers and takers. But looking at ourselves that way does little to help solve the state's fiscal crisis. That will require taking a hard look at what really happened in the 1990s, deciding whether the removal of more than $3 billion a year from our tax stream made sense, and making hard choices to bring available revenue into line with the costs of providing essential services.
The Boston Globe
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Governing 'givers vs. takers'
By Noah Berger
Chip Ford's CLT
Commentary
Don't you just love it when you're proven prescient
only a day later! It's especially satisfying when the proof is so
willingly surrendered by the opposition.
The Boston Globe's editorial elite don't often
surprise me. Though they shocked us with their opposition to the
graduated income tax in '94, the only other taxes I recall that they've
opposed were the tax on printing ink and equipment, and a sales tax on
newspapers. I could have written today's editorial for them yesterday,
but they couldn't have paid me enough.
And Noah Berger didn't creep up on me either. But he
and his organization are an interesting study in how politics works when
you don't get your way, when the public's turned against you in large
numbers.
It's like the word tax. Everyone on Beacon Hill is
bright enough to recognize that the word "tax" in publicly
unpalatable, especially after the Legislature raised taxes by $1.2
billion only a year ago. So last year they increased "fees"
by half a billion more.
Can't get a Proposition 2½ question past taxpayers
in local communities? Then just create a new "trash fee" and
charge for a service that historically was provided by property taxes!
We might not see "tax" increases for some
time -- but revenue will continue to increase -- right along with state
budget spending, just as it did again last year.
So when TEAM (Tax Everything And More) couldn't get
past its name recognition or our definition of it, TEAM simply morphed
into the more prestigious-sounding but no less tax-and-spend
Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.
When Jimmy St. George became too much of a lightning
rod for tax-and-spenders -- having gone down in flames again and again
at the hands of taxpayers -- they just replaced him and substituted Noah
Berger, an aide to former Senate President and failed gubernatorial
candidate Tom Birmingham.
Jimmy then and Noah now hate the fact that statistics
prove Massachusetts has the fifth-highest per capita tax burden in the
nation -- the total amount the state takes from us divided by the total
population -- so Jimmy didn't and Noah won't ever mention it.
Instead, Noah and his ilk prefer to talk about
spending, using "percentage of total personal income." This is
the amount a state spends relative to the total amount of income earned
by everyone in that state.
"Percentage of total personal income" spent
by the state provides a statistic with no relationship to how much the average
taxpayer can afford.
The relevant factors in this equation are, how much
does a state spend per capita (average of all citizens in that
state) compared to how much total personal income is generated
within that state by productive workers.
Here in Massachusetts, with high wages and a plethora
of profitable entrepreneurs and business leaders, the actual revenue
dollars the state extracts from its workforce easily exceeds many
other states with a higher "percentage of total personal
income." We don't need to spend as large a "percentage of
total personal income" to actually spend more cash per
capita than they.
Massachusetts rates fifth nationally in our tax
burden and sixth in spending per capita.
That's right, sixth in spending per capita!
The real question is, how much does a state
need to extract to provide essential government services without
gold-plating them at taxpayers' expense?
Never mind that the state budget has doubled over the
past decade or so and continues to expand, Noah and the Gimme Lobby
still grab for more and always will because ... More Is Never Enough
(MINE), and never will be.
If they ever manage to take it all from us,
they'll still be back looking for more, more, more. It's what
they do, who they are.
|
|
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Chip
Ford |
The Boston Globe
Thursday, October 23, 2003
A Boston Globe editorial
Give and take
Eric Kriss, Governor Romney's top fiscal adviser, wants to shift the balance between the "givers" and "takers" of government services. His cramped view of government would deny the state an expansion of programs to benefit all the citizens of the Commonwealth.
"I mean an ecosystem-like balance between those who contribute through taxes and those who receive government benefits," he said in a speech before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce last week. "What ratio is sustainable? Lyndon Johnson's Great Society figured it to be around 9 to 1 -- that is, 90 percent should help the bottom 10 percent rise up.... Forty years later our ratio at the state level is more like 3 to 1."
Kriss acknowledged in a telephone interview that he knew of no one in the Johnson administration who used that 9-to-1 ratio. But this statistic allowed him to make a political point to his audience. "Some -- most in this room probably -- are net contributors, while others are net beneficiaries," he said. The ratio betwen givers and takers turns out to be a critical variable of government."
In this wealthy society, a contest between the haves and have-nots -- which the Kriss philosophy would provoke -- almost always means a defeat for the poor. The Great Society programs that endure today are those that benefit all classes. Medicare provides health insurance for the elderly in a way that transcends income, and Medicaid finances nursing home care for the elderly without impoverishing their children. Burdens are lifted from old people and their younger relatives, and all of society benefits.
At about the same time as the Great Society, a wave of reform in Massachusetts produced an improved transit system, community-based care for the mentally ill, education programs tailored to children with special needs, new protections for the environment, programs to prevent and deal with the consequences of child abuse, and, more recently, a reorganization of the education system to insure that no community in the state offers inferior schooling. All of these required more revenue, which was generated by a sales tax and increases in the income tax.
Now, facing severe cutbacks in services, Kriss, like Romney, rejects any tax increase on the grounds that it would inhibit the economy. Higher taxes did nothing to impede the booms of the '80s or the '90s, and the new programs made Massachusetts a better place to live.
On Tuesday Romney distanced himself from Kriss's comments. On the same day, Ardith
Wieworka, commissioner of the Office of Child Care Services, spoke in favor of greater educational opportunities for preschoolers. If the governor is serious about this, he ought to propose a tax increase to provide better education for these little takers so that they can become givers when they grow up.
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The Boston Globe
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Governing 'givers vs. takers'
By Noah Berger
"The ratio between givers and takers turns out to be a critical variable of government ... What ratio is sustainable? Our ratio at the state level is more like 3 to 1 ... and the trends are unsettling." -- ERIC KRISS, secretary of administration and finance, to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce
Governor Romney appears to be distancing himself from these remarks by his chief budget writer last week. Talking about people as givers or takers divides people in ways that obscure the causes of our fiscal crisis and make it harder to bring people together to solve it. A more useful way to measure spending trends is to ask whether, in the years leading up to our fiscal crisis, state spending was growing as a share of personal income or falling. The answer is that it was falling.
We don't have exact data on how many people in Massachusetts use more in services than they pay in taxes. Most people are both users of government services and taxpayers; for each individual this ratio changes over time. But we do have good data on government spending trends: We know how much of total personal income in Massachusetts is used to provide government services, and we know how that has changed over the last 25 years.
In 1979 state and local government in Massachusetts together spent 18.8 percent of the total personal income of residents. By 2000 (the most recent census data available) state and local spending had fallen to 16.5 percent of total personal income -- a drop of more than 10 percent.
The drop in government spending as a share of income was greater in Massachusetts than in any other state in the nation.
If we look more narrowly, just at the last decade and just at state spending, we see the same trend. Spending by the state fell from 9.4 percent of total personal income in 1991 to 9.1 percent in 2002.
While spending was held in check in the 1990s, taxes were cut repeatedly and deeply: Forty-two tax cuts were implemented, reducing revenue by more than $3 billion (even after accounting for the value of the few tax increases in that occurred).
Those advocating the largest of these tax cuts said it would provide "a tax cut for working families without cutting a single program." In the long run it can't work that way. While it may have seemed possible to cut taxes by billions of dollars with no pain during the boom years, when the bubble burst it became clear that those cuts had created a significant structural budget gap.
While the decline in state spending as a share of income demonstrates that our current fiscal problems were not caused by too many "takers," perhaps it is also worth asking a more basic question: Is looking at "givers" and "takers" at any particular moment in time an appropriate way to make policy?
There are about 100,000 senior citizens receiving Medicaid services; thousands more receive substantial assistance in paying for prescription drugs. Most of these are people who have paid taxes their entire lives. Are they givers or takers?
There are almost a million children in Massachusetts public schools. These children are receiving more in services from the government than they are paying in taxes. But evidence indicates that the more these kids are given today -- in the form of high-quality public education -- the more they will give back as adults. Are they givers or takers?
We all benefit from police protection and fire protection, clean air and clean water, a prison system that keeps criminals off the streets, and courts that administer justice. Are we takers if the fire department saves our home or if one of us is the victim of a serious crime requiring police, judicial, and prison resources to punish the offender?
The reality is that over the course of our lives, virtually all of us will be both givers and takers. But looking at ourselves that way does little to help solve the state's fiscal crisis. That will require taking a hard look at what really happened in the 1990s, deciding whether the removal of more than $3 billion a year from our tax stream made sense, and making hard choices to bring available revenue into line with the costs of providing essential services.
Our fiscal crisis presents difficult challenges. Those, including Secretary Kriss and our legislators, who are working to try to meet these challenges, deserve our respect, whether or not we agree with everything they say.
In the end, our budget crisis can be solved the way most tough problems are solved: with hard work, shared sacrifice, common purpose, and a commitment to make the future better than the past.
Noah Berger is executive director of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.
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