A publication by Dr. Sarah Arnett measures the ability of each state to meet its financial obligation. She uses four different indices to analyze state solvency(mentioned below) and from there, came up with a State Fiscal Condition Index. Massachusetts ranks behind the likes of CA and NY, in this measurement, and if that doesn’t scream for new leadership, I don’t know what does.
Cash Solvency: how easily the state can access monies to pay near-term bills. Massachusetts ranked #40.
Budget Solvency: states ability to raise revenue to cover expenditures over a fiscal year. Massachusetts ranked #40.
Long-run solvency: this is a big one b/c it measures the “state’s ability to use incoming revenue to cover all its expenditures, including long-term obligations such as guaranteed pension benefits and infrastructure maintenance. Long-run solvency is less sensitive to economic trends than the other measures examined here”. Survey says….#47 for Massachusetts.
Service-level Solvency: the ability of state government to provide adequate services to its people. “A state’s service-level solvency is measured using taxes and revenue per capita, along with expenditures per capita.” Massachusetts ranks #43 in this regard.
State Fiscal Condition Index:
“Using the four solvency indices above, Arnett creates an overall State Fiscal Condition Index. She improves on past research about fiscal metrics by weighting each solvency indicator based on the timeframe in which it will affect state residents. Although the ranking is a snapshot in time, the states at the bottom are there due to years of poor financial management decisions, bad economic conditions, or a combination of the two. New Jersey and Connecticut face similar problems: tax revenues that have not kept up with expenditures, use of budget practices that only appeared to balance their annual budgets, and significant debt levels as a result of decades of using bonds without being able to pay for them (State Budget Crisis Task Force 2012). In addition, both states have underfunded their pension systems, resulting in billions in unfunded liabilities.”
Sober stuff, no? Massachusetts is ahead of CT, NJ, and Hawaii, but that is it. Our overall ranking is #47. I believe we have underfunded the pension system by $28 Billion, so before we look at raising more taxes to build grandiose public transit lines that few people will use, let’s first begin to improve our fiscal condition ranking. I won’t ask we that we shoot for the stars and try to beat Mississippi, no, that would be asking too much. But can we at least try to be better than Michigan? That asking too much of our politicians, and yes, our voters?
http://mercatus.org/publication/state-fiscal-condition-ranking-50-states
How could this “ranking” not be accurate?
If I had thirty million dollars to give away, I bet I could get some “academic researcher” to spew out some bullshit statistics, too.
The real questions are, why does darnfromwaltham hate everything about Massachusetts, why does he not leave and live someplace he likes better, and how long are the moderators of this site going to let him continue to bash every aspect of our state?
She is an analyst at the Government Accountability Office, MA in Economics and a PhD in Public Policy. Deval, or someone up on Beacon Hill who is reading BMG, should answer this study. Where is it wrong? Where is the flaw in the study? I am shocked that Texas is ranked 20th, and not in the top 10. Perhaps it’s not just Massachusetts politicians who blow smoke up the voters arse.
Secondly, to suggest I hate Massachusetts is simply untrue. I would say to you, that the politicians who ran cities like Detroit or Chicago, show the most hate toward the people who live there. And the politicians who are running this state, with a ranking of #47, displays hatred and hostility toward us and the next generation, who will have to clean up the fiscal mess they are leaving.
… in the study.
12:42 by my clock.
Cash solvency, Massachusetts, with it’s super-majority of Democrats, can raise revenues at the speed of light. Need to raise taxes, no problem, wheel out the sick and elderly, and hike taxes. That score, Massachusetts should be #1, amirite petr?
…the map you posted sure looks an awful lot like this map…
It’s not a one to one correlation, but that’s also an indication of the underlying flaws of the study…
than they contribute, likely have large military bases. Please note, I have always favored regional tax brackets, whereby, a family in Boston Metro pays a lower federal tax rate than the same family, earning the same income, who lives in Nashville, TN or Columbia, S.C.
Take a look at Texas, on par with MA. Me thinks Gov. Perry can teach Deval a thing or two about fiscal responsibility.
The flaw isn’t that they are, or might be, moocher states, It’s that the study fails to account for that possibility at all. The effect of federal spending upon the four indices they use is non-existent. Why is it non-existent??? I expect because they see the same thing I saw: a clear correlation between their map and the one I linked too…
Actually, that’s just the one flaw I saw immediately. There are others… like the unaccountably different weightings given to the four indices cited, especially the lower weighting of the ‘services’ index which is measuring, essentially, population density. It’s interesting, therefore, that sparsely populated states come out on top…
What do you think?
Stop the excuses and demand better results.
What If it is not an ‘excuse’ and it is the realilty? What happens if I have a temper tantrum and demand “better results’ and I don’t, in fact cannot, get better results? What if, because my basic underlying impetus for the tantrum is mistaken, I motivate change that doesn’t really change anything…?
Yeah, I’d be very, very skeptical of anything produced by Mercatus. From a great 2010 New Yorker article about the Koch brothers:
This strikes me as a perfect example of such “laundering”, whatever Dr. Arnett’s credentials.
That’s your story Dan, it’s right smack in front of your face and you missed it. Koch bros need to “adjust” that study a tad to make NJ look better.
NJ is terrible, facts are facts. But you recall this entire board during the summer of 2012 kept repeating the line “MA ranked 47th in job creation when Mitt was governor”? Remember that? Now we rank 47th in something else, and “the deniers” are ready with the excuses.
Hey, u like the Patriots on Sunday? I’m nervous about it.
it a BS Koch Bros front.
That was not an index. That was a simple list of real numbers, ordered to rank the states. If state X created 20 jobs and state Y created 21 jobs, then state X is first and state Y is second. That’s a ranking.
Here, the number 47 is an index of indices… a pointer to a pointer to a reference… as far removed as can be from a fact without it still being non-fiction. They took four very separate and very complicated areas for each state and swizzled them together each until 4 numbers popped up per state. Then, they weighted those 4 number and swizzled them all together in one big pot until one number per state appeared and then they called that a ranking.
Statistics isn’t pretty, and I’m not saying that their statistical methodology is particularly flawed, or all that unusual, but I am saying the number 47 in this instance is not the same as the number 47 in the instance of job creation numbers…
DFW cannot count to 50
http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/infographic-sp-state-credit-ratings-20012012-85899404785
Puzzling evidence!
I don’t see the Koch brothers giving them millions of dollars, so they must not be all that smart.
of an organization whose name appears in the Recent Comments list as “S&P,” but shows up here as”S&P.” Some kind of chicanery is at the root of it, I’m sure.
The trickery continues! The second instance of S&P in that comment was supposed to be like S.&.amp.;.P, without all the periods. It’s diabolical!
Massachusetts and its cities can borrow a dime, given collectively, there is an $83 Billion dollar hole in unfunded pension obligations. Promises made for health care retirees are estimated at $46 Billion. Its scary, no?
Massachusetts is AA+, in the second rank. It does not mean that Massachusetts is in a 15 way tie for second place… it means that Massachusetts is in the second tier.