There’s much more to say about the impact of the passage of health care reform on the Gov’s race, but for now, I must just note this outstanding nugget from today’s Globe article on that subject:
When WRKO cohost Todd Feinberg noted that some have concluded that state budget increases attributable to the health care law have not been out of line, Cahill shot back: “They’re lying, to put it bluntly.”
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[Mass. Taxpayers Foundation president Michael] Widmer laughed when responding to Cahill’s slight: “It’s a total misreading of the state’s health reform law. He’s confusing health reform with Medicaid, which has been a problem since the 1980s.”
ROFLMAO! How long has Tim been Treasurer, again? Shouldn’t he have learned this stuff by now?
Please share widely!
Sigh
I was at his speech @ Suffolk Law yesterday. Tim for Governor doesn’t even understand the relationship between state income/sales taxes, local aid, and local property taxes. Or he does and he’s playing dumb because he couldn’t run on the truth. He had some cherry-picked numbers for me that painted a very misleading picture.
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p>But seriously, as a town Finance Committee member (and candidate for Selectman), I guarantee we would have cut property taxes if we’d been receiving enough local aid $ to cut taxes and provide the same services. And as much as we disagree over a lot of the issues facing the town of Great Barrington, my predecessors on the FC would have as well. Actually, it’s not even up to us. It’s up to the voters. We can only recommend, but Town Meeting would’ve steamrolled us if we were sitting on piles of cash and refused to recommend tax cuts. But fun fact: we’re not getting those local aid $, and haven’t been.
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p>And citing the fact that towns and cities didn’t cut property taxes in FY 2004-05, when local aid was increased over 2003 levels, is absurd. Everybody spent that time just trying to keep their schools functioning a little bit better than Texas schools after the major cuts in the 2002 and 2003 budgets.
When he says “I don’t trust local government”, what he really means, at least for the 298 towns in Massachusetts, is “I don’t trust the voters.”
The same principle doesn’t apply in the cities with city councils…well, turnovers happen. Over a hell of a lot less.
The great majority of legislators are from cities. As are agency staffers.
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p>Case in point – local aid numbers. I was in a position of dealing with cities and towns on behalf of the state. I would be pressing for speeded up reimbursements and estimated numbers at the begining of March, and agencies acted as if I were daft. I tried to explain that towns NEEDED this info/cash in order to set tax rates, and got a long silence. And eventually the reply, ‘But the fiscal year isn’t until JULY!’
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p>Here’s a fun fact for you – when Deval Patrick set up his advisory committee for municipal government? All mayors. NOTHING from town meeting communities, despite the 2 – 1 majority of municipalities in the state having that form of government. And THEY are providing the administration with all the advice and counsel regarding towns!
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p>I’m getting to where I don’t want to increase local aid – I want to eliminate it. Lower taxes and/or allow communites to keep all the meals/motel/sales tax revenue they generate in lieu of local aid – because a dollar sent to Boston is a dollar lost forever.
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p>BTW – Cahill WAS Norfolk County treasurer, so he SHOULD know better – further evidence that he is just a maroon.
PP, you’ve done this a lot lately, and you’re driving me nuts.
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p>The nugget:
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p>If true (and you’ve got enough cred that I believe you unless I have reason to doubt), that’s a mistake. There should be at least one reliable voice from both representative TM gov’t and from open TM gov’t. No doubt. But then, you bury it with horseapples:
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p>Just as land doesn’t vote, munis don’t vot. People do. Most people in Massachusetts live in cities, not towns. Your 2-1 statistic, while correct, is crap.
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p>Furthermore,
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p>Really? Go ahead — advocate that your community turn down state bucks, ranging from cherry sheet to highway match. Turn it the 40%ish on building schools.
What I was saying was out of the 351 cities and towns, about two thirds are town meeting. I was speaking about the state dealing with this form of government, not implying that the majority of people live in such a community.
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p>That said – why aren’t towns passing the meals/hotel tax? Because town meeting won’t enact it. Why are they so anxious about local aid numbers before the budget is done? Because they have to set the budget and tax rate with DOR long before the Legislature acts. And so on. There’s a genuine disconnect – strong mayor or city council communities can make changes at a faster rate and with consolidated authority. Boards of Selectmen can’t even enter into binding collective bargaining agreements.
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p>’Municipal’ is a set of 351 clients for the state, regardless of population and voters. Only about 120 are considered when drafting regulations, making reimbursements, and so on.
I just called out your stat as correct but not helpful.
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p>As for why towns are/aren’t passing… my Town already did. I voted for it. Town Meeting “season” is late spring, and I have no idea how many communities have it on the warrant. As for hotels, I have no idea how many communities in which there is a hotel of some sort, or, likewise, a restaurant of some sort have it on the warrant.
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p>Like I wrote, you’ve got a nugget there — the state ought to do better about the way it interacts with town government and process. But then you buried it in a statistic which is really irrelevant, and a Republican mantra that government simply uses $100 bills to light cigars, when you know damn well that “Boston” does send dollars toward your town.
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p>And again, the state doesn’t have 351 clients. It has 6.5 million. This framing that all 351 are equally important is nonsense. People are important. Let’s do well by our citizens, including those who live in towns (the nugget). Don’t oversell it.
… I’ve got to imagine that the likelihood of voting in a Hotel or meals tax would bear some congruency with the likelihood that the anticipated revenue could be big enough to actually make a difference. For most smaller municipalities I’ll bet the revenue potential amounts to the equivalent of budgetary ‘noise’.
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p>Indeed, if you wanted a point to be made here, you could project potential revenues for each municipality on an apples to apples basis and show it as a percentage of the individual municipal budgets and then rank them. Then you could compare those amounts to the equivalent of the delta of what local aid used to be. You might then be able to make some conclusions as to the ‘fairness’ to some municipalities vs. others based on the new revenue source’s ability to make up for shortfalls being disparate by municipality in some demonstrably unfair way.
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p>But hey, what do I know?
For the record, based on the 2008 census estimates as recorded in Wikipedia (as well as that august site’s listing of which municipalities are cities and which are towns), 3,342,812 MA citizens live in a city. 3,166,667 live in a town. 51.35% to 49.65%.
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p>But even were it 99% to 1%, there should still be one town rep on that advisory board to highlight the differences and help out the 1% (or 49.65%) who live in towns.
On the issue of health reform.
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p>And I’m dusgusted that he would so willfully exploit voters fears, manipulate our collective ignorance and attempt to so blantantly cash-in on the GOP chicanary on reform.
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p>He’s lying, to put it bluntly.
As I recall she was cursed to be always right yet always disbelieved. The concern here is that he WILL be believed, but NOT be right.
I forgot that she was right!
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p>I should have forgone the attempt at loquacious alliteration and just said: “Tim is a Craven Jerk.”
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p>Sorry, Cassandra, I didn’t believe
You really had the power.
I only saw it as dreams you would weave,
Until the final hour.
From today’s Globe:
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p>Shocking.
Increasing enrollment in Medicaid was always a key part of health reform. This was done partly by expanding eligibility and partly just by expanded outreach. As a result, a large part of the newly insured are on MassHealth. So it seems fair to me that most of the recent increase in MassHealth spending would be attributed to health reform.
Sure. The most recent increases are at least in part due to health care reform. But as Mr. Widmer (for whom I have the highest respect, as he is a fair and balanced user of the numbers) points out, Medicaid budgets have been a problem since the 80’s when I started out in medicine. Despite the fact that Medicaid pays crap from the provider perspective, it’s one of the biggest line items in every state budget, and has been since at least 1986 (when I started med school, and started paying attention to such things).
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p>So no, it is emphatically not fair to attribute most of the increases to health reform. Some, yes; enough to break the budget, arguable. Most, not so much.
It just seemed to me that Widmer was disregarding the possibility that health reform had any role in the recent spike in Medicaid expenses. Clearly, it had to have a significant role. But I may be reading something into his quote that he didn’t really mean. As you say, Widmer knows his stuff…
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p>As to how much of the recent increase in Medicaid is due to health reform, I guess we’d have to look at the numbers.