Reflect for a moment on the 1980s.
Because those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
Those were the days of the
Massachusetts Miracle. A booming economy was going to produce a
cornucopia of money for the state government to accomplish all good
things.
The state is in danger of forgetting
the collapse. It could happen again, the annual report of the
Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, "Land Mines in a Field of
Plenty," cogently points out. We think the best preventative
medicine, paradoxically, is the slate of tax cuts proposed by acting
Gov. Paul Cellucci.
For the past five years or so,
Massachusetts has shown extraordinary fiscal discipline and made
remarkable savings in may programs.
But expectations are ballooning.
Cellucci’s administration has eased its predecessor’s annual
borrowing limit from $900 million to $1 billion for the next five years.
Bond issues already authorized and likely to be approved soon amount to
2 ½ times that five-year limit.
The first law of economics is that
wants are always greater than the means of satisfying them. The first
law of politics is that wants become needs.
Government satisfies wants and needs
by coerced extraction of wealth from those who create it. Practically
coincidentally with the foundation’s report this week appeared
warnings that wealth creation could slow down. The Greater Boston
Chamber of Commerce discovered four of the five growing industries
(health care, financial services, high technology, higher education and
tourism) that drive the economy as a whole) are growing more slowly here
than in other states. (The exception is financial services.)
The foundation concluded the
governor’s three-year tax cuts "may well be affordable if the
administration and the Legislature continue to work together to
constrain spending growth in the ‘budget busters’ and avoid
expansion in all but a few priority areas."
With all due respect to the
foundation, this is backward.
The fiscal discipline of this decade
was the result of limited revenues. The best way to "constrain
spending growth," and enhance the ability of our economy to compete
with the rest of the country, is to keep revenues limited by enacting
the governor’s tax cuts.