Oh, life's a wonderful thing when the
good times are rolling on Beacon Hill. And obviously the House Ways and
Means Committee believes the good times will roll on forever.
The House budget-writing committee
took the governor's already rather generous $21.3 billion effort and
puffed it up to $21.7 billion, all the while insisting that not a dime
can be spared to return to taxpayers in the form of a tax cut.
First we discover that the legislators
have been hideously generous to themselves -- doubling their own per
diem allowances and granting themselves generous and unregulated
stipends for "district office expenses."
Then, as Herald reporters Ellen J.
Silberman and Joe Battenfeld documented
in yesterday's edition, the House budget is replete with legislative
pork -- $4.3 million in tourism appropriations alone that were never
requested by the state's director of tourism. There's a $750,000
"contribution" for Sail Boston, $200,000 for new air
conditioning for the John F. Kennedy Museum in Hyannis and $30,000 for a
clock in Haverhill. Apparently no project is too trivial to be
overlooked for such earmarking by legislators eager to curry favor with
the folks back home.
And the fun of unraveling the
mysteries of the House budget have just begun.
What's truly unfortunate is that the
budget also attempts to do some rather worthwhile things. It attempts a
long overdue reform of the state's special education laws, and would
approve a much-needed increase in the size of the state appeals court.
But legislative greed and pork-barrel
politics cast their long shadow over what could have been a far better
document.