You don’t have to take my word for it, see http://massachusetts.onpolitix.com/news/60000/tax-receipts-rise-nearly-2-billion?referrer=wwlp.com
The State House News Service is reporting this, as well.
The question then becomes why remove the clothing allowance from kids in foster care and welfare? Why cut jobs for the cognitively impaired and the blind? NO this should NOT mean tax cuts, but rather restoration of basic services to folks like dentures for those on masshealth.
Tell me, what cuts would YOU like to see reversed? I, for one, would like to see more money funneled into public higher education as the surest route to jobs, keeping young people in Massachusetts, and the economy humming along – and the cost of community college education reduced especially for former foster children, students who received special education but can thrive and succeed in training for the jobs that require community college associate degrees and certificates, and anyone who met the right need based criteria. There is no better bang for the taxpayer buck. And, yes, at least $40 million for the judicial branch.
Most would consider Boston the hot bed of higher ed. in the state but cities such as Springfield, Holyoke, Northampton and Westfield all count higher ed as a signifigant portion of their ability to generate future economic growth. Forget the fact that this states future relies heavily upon innovative knowledge based industries how about the maintance crews, admin support staff, and cafeteria workers that will see their jobs shed before that of a prof. or other high level employee at a higher ed insitute, these are exactly the types of people that can ill afford a potential layoff and could use some reassurance that their jobs are safe maybe that will create a little consumer confidence and create some demand
Aid to cities and towns. We have been hammered over the past 2 years.
Here is the general government aid to Springfield from 2000 to the present:
FY2000: 28,774,977
FY2001: 31,662,215
FY2002: 34,087,198
FY2003: 34,087,198
FY2004: 28,974,118
FY2005: 28,974,118
FY2006: 34,917,280
FY2007: 44,382,546
FY2008: 45,286,984
FY2009: 45,286,984
FY2010: 33,354,581
FY2011: 32,020,398
Springfield is receiving less state aid this year than it did 10 years ago, and far less than it did before the Great Recession.
Keep in mind that with the Proposition 2.5 levy ceiling, due to falling property values and foreclosures (plus hundreds of properties now gone due to the tornado), the city of Springfield will likely have to cut property tax revenues so that it doesn’t tax more than $25/1000 of total assessed value.
So in other words, even though we have increased needs, we will have to decrease our tax revenue, and thus our spending to meet those needs, because we are nice enough to have plenty of “affordable housing” for the region. And state aid has also decreased, for a double-whammy.
Restoring this may not be on the top of the list for a community like Wellesley, which gets so little state aid that it can live with the cuts pretty easily, but we are seriously hurting over here in Springfield and the other Gateway cities.
We’re still in an economic slump and we need to focus on jobs now before we focus on the future. Cities and towns could (re)hire librarians and teachers and police officers and so on with that money, and those newly-employed people would then have money to spend at local businesses, and so on. Besides, when it comes to education, our elementary and high schools have cut a lot of valuable variety in the past decade and we should encourage them – with state money – to add it back. Sports, art, music, metal and wood shop, cooking, … there’s long term economic payoff in broadening students’ horizons.
Secondly, invest in infrastructure now, because that also creates jobs in the short term, and it’ll save us a lot of money in the future. Those Storrow Drive tunnels are literally crumbling – how much do you think it’ll cost if we wait ’til they collapse? The MBTA badly needs money too.
But does it look to anyone else like FY2011 is right around the 12-year average?
oops!
The avg is $35,151,000
You must have one of those new fangled calculators over there. Be kind, would you? I admitted I wasn’t great at math.
Question to clarify: are those three big numbers attributable to stimulus funds at all? If not, where did they come from? I honestly don’t know. I’m guessing. And if they’re a result of stimulus money:
–what would those three numbers have been without it?
–what would the average over that period have been without those three years or with those three years adjusted to what they would have been?
I admit ignoring inflation is a mistake and my math is bad. Let’s not get unpleasant about it.
but I do have a fancy computer.
This is cherry sheet money, data taken from the state DLS website. I do not believe it includes any stimulus money. The big boost was when Deval Patrick was elected, he stopped diverting the lottery money to the general budget (which Romney implemented). The lottery money is supposed to go to cities and towns based on a fixed formula. But when the fiscal crunch hit, Patrick did the same thing as Romney and capped the aid.
That’s the rub — over the course of 12 years, with no increase in the general government aid, that means annual cuts in services. Show me a city or town that is taking in the same amount of property tax as it was 12 years ago — there are none. General Government aid equalizes revenues for [mostly] cities that were squeezed by the Proposition 2.5 levy ceiling oh so long ago. Those cities/towns had their local revenue cut, and the state kicks in aid to compensate. But the aid hasn’t changed in 12 years even though costs, particularly things like healthcare, have skyrocketed.
for every $1 a city or town puts in toward mass transit (MBTA or otherwise) the state will put in $1. The money will be spent to improve the mass transit which significantly effects that town. For Quincy, it would be red line south of Park and buses. For Framingham it would be the Worcester purple line.
The money would go toward mass transit capital projects already on the books, be they for safety upgrades or speed/reliability upgrades.
If $1:$1 isn’t the right ratio, we’d find out what is. Lets get a little multiplier on that money, and use it to clear out the backlog of capital projects needed for mass transit.
And then we wonder why people west of 495 are cool by default to candidates who aren’t
with stops in Great Barrington, Amesbury, New Bedford, and Provincetown.
until 1960 Boston and Maine operate passenger rail service all the way from Boston to Troy, NY. (by way of Fitchburg, Gardner, Athol, Greenfield, North Adams and, yes, Williamstown) Having commuter service on that corridor wouldn’t make sense (the distances are too far), but having a once a day passenger train, with a connection to the Amtrak Vermonter service in Greenfield, might.
During this over-all economic downturn I think it is crucial to maintain housing and health services for families at risk for homelessness and for people with mental health and developmental impairment issues – that’s actually the less expensive bit.
On the macro level, we need to bail out and expand public transportation statewide so that communities can start to act on smart growth/planning issues that require decreased dependence on cars. The T is on the verge of financial implosion just when we need it most. Our future economic growth (and ecological sustainability) depends on smart, multi-modal transportation infrastructure. The civil engineering contracts would be pretty juicy for employment, by the way. Let’s not blow it!
.
nt
I am hot and cold on the virtues of a sales tax holiday.
I just know how much everyone here likes it.
So does the Governor.>/a>
Our bridges, highways, and rail systems are falling apart, and you guys again want to slash taxes.
When times are tough, you guys want to slash taxes because times are tough. When times are good, you guys want to slash taxes because times are good. We’ve already tried it your way, and the results have been abysmal.
Enough is enough. We need MORE, not less, tax revenue.
The title of this post is not accurate. Receipts aren’t $2 billion ahead of estimates, they’re $2 billion ahead of FY ’10. Some of that increase was already in the estimates. Also, much of the increase appears to be from capital gains taxes which only happen when the stock market goes up. If the market doesn’t do well over the next 12 months, most of that revenue won’t recur in FY ’12.
So, as Michael Widmer suggests, the priority should really be to beef up the rainy day fund. Health care costs are going up and Federal $$ are probably going down, so it makes sense to prepare for more lean years ahead.
Unexpected revenues should go to crumbling bridges, roads and public buildings. Work on stuff that’s been ignored or pushed aside for years.
Can we even afford three more yrs of patrick?
Deval has helped manage the Massachusetts budget extremely well over the past few years, leading in fact to the very $2 billion increase in tax receipts that are the subject of this diary, I’d say that yes, we can most certainly “afford three more years of Patrick.”
It’s a big reason why Patrick’s popularity in the Commonwealth keeps rising, while the popularity of other governors, like your (not so) wonder-boy Chris Christie are plummeting like rocks.
What does that even mean? Take a deep breath somervilletom and understand that you very well may be 100% incorrect.
And who are “you guys?” I’m a registered indie if that helps confused youralready confused self.
You asked “who are ‘you guys’?”
I mean, very specifically, you and centralmassdad who call yet again for A Sales Tax Holiday and reducing the income tax.
What “Enough is enough” means is that we’ve had enough relentless, blunt, and devastating tax cuts. It is long past time for tax increases to be on the table, especially on the wealthiest of residents of this state that is among the wealthiest in the nation which in turn is among the wealthiest in the world. If you and CMD want to live the lifestyle of states like Mississippi and Tennessee, I strongly encourage you to move there.
I don’t care whether you call yourself “Republican”, “Democrat”, “Independent”, “Libertarian” or anything else — greedy and selfish demagogues have been pandering to greedy and selfish anti-taxers since Proposition 2 1/2 passed in 1980, and the catastrophic results are all around us. They surround us at the local level and they are on display every day at the national level as anti-tax crazies steer us at top speed into a brick wall.
The delusional madness that cutting taxes does anything except enrich the already-wealthy is destroying us. We have thirty years of economic data to show that “supply side economics”, “Laffer Curve”, and all the rest of that voodoo economics is pure unadulterated self-serving fiction.
Our transportation system is falling down, for crying out loud.
When you or anybody else has something — anything to offer besides “cut taxes”, then I’ll listen.
that this comment will prove persuasive. “Greedy and selfish demagogues” …. well, they’re people too.
Not innocent myself by any stretch — I promoted the “Crazy Uncle” post the other day. But I think we could be less personal in the comments section, at least.
I wrote: “… greedy and selfish demagogues have been pandering to greedy and selfish anti-taxers …”
I think it’s pretty clear that the “greedy and selfish demagogues” I refer to are public officials who have been beating the drum for slashing taxes — in good times and bad, whether or not the revenue losses are affordable — for more than thirty years. Of course they’re people.
Nevertheless, they are public officials who have chosen a path that has had and will continue to have catastrophic consequences for the public good. In my view, “greedy and selfish demagogue” is well within the envelope of appropriate and honest characterization of the behavior of these officials.
I’m more than a little cranky, and being told I should be more polite about how I characterize people who are literally destroying the state and nation where I live is not “persuasive” to me.
I did enjoy the Crazy Uncle post, btw.
The trick is to do it in a way that is also economically stimulative. Like much else there is a right and wrong way to do this, but there are definitely ways that serve the greater good vs. ways that are simply giving away the store.
There’s a good chance that an income tax reduction will occur automatically as a result of this surplus by operation of current law. Surprise!!
But if MORE tax breaks are needed, the best way to serve the greater good would be to increase the amount of the state Earned Income Tax Credit. This $$ would go largely to families with children earning $45,000 or less, and like unemployment benefits, this money would get put back into the economy right away.
(Wonk alert — MassBudget chart here showing that high-income taxpayers spend less of their personal income on state and local taxes than do low income taxpayers.)
I invite you to offer any evidence that tax breaks, at the state level, have helped in the past or will help now. If cutting taxes helped, then our local economy should be booming. It is not.
I see no “right” way to cut taxes today. We face massive investments just to keep our public transportation system running, and larger investments needed to bring it into the twenty-first century.
I think that every penny of this “surplus” should be invested in transportation infrastructure, and there is a long line of deserving places for it after transportation.
You’d tax the air we breath if you could. Your understanding of economics is damned aweful.
Do you believe that it is possible that your economic theory whereby taxing to meet every need vs. cutting and finding efficiencies may, in fact, be destroying the USA? I happen to believe that people who believe in taxing us into the stone age are destroying any chance we have of passing a better life onto our kids, a great American tradition.
Submitted w respect!
how is it reasonable to refer to any increase in taxes as “taxing us into the stone age?”
People barely have enough to make the car payments, pay for groceries, and put the kids through college. Where does this additional tax revenue come from? Huh?
One starting point is to increase the capital gains tax and estate/gift tax, for households whose net non-home worth is in excess of, say, $10M. There is no shortage of wealth in Massachusetts. The problem is that that wealth is highly concentrated in a tiny number of people.
Your tirades:
exemplify what I mean by “greedy and selfish demagogues”. I have not proposed taxing those who “barely have enough to make the car payments, pay for groceries, and put the kids through college.” I might add that funding for college tuition is one of the first areas where misguided efforts to slash spending are targeted. If you want to protect some of those middle-class families you posture about, I suggest you direct your focus to those who are taking the money out of those family’s budgets.
are a horse’s ass! A big, large, horse’s ass.
The guy that’s having trouble will all those bills happens to be me.
You are either not one of the people Tom wants to tax more – in which case you’re beating someone else’s drum – or you have over $10M, in which case any difficulty you have paying those bills is imaginary. If you have that kind of money and can’t live within your means, you won’t get much sympathy from the people you pretend to defend.
BTW, name-calling such as what you resorted to above suggests that you were probably looking in a mirror when you wrote it.
I don’t think this accomplishes what seems to be your goal: sufficient government revenues to support all of the things you want to the degree you want, without dangerous deficits. Maybe that isn’t your goal.
On the national level, the big Democratic goal of the last year, which they did not achieve, was to preserve the “Bush” tax cuts on everyone other than those whose incomes exceeded a certain threshold. This was a good goal, in my view, because the existence of a modestly progressive tax system promotes a degree of societal fairness. Oh, and it would have raised a small amount of additional revenue– but far, far less than the cost of the “Bush” tax cut on everyone else.
In other words, even if you were successful in shifting the slope of the tax system in a more progressive direction, it wouldn’t really solve the long range problem that the government continually spends far more than it gets.
There are those who pretend that “more taxes on the rich” is THE solution. Their position is as credible as Norquist’s.
Ultimately, there is going to be a lot less spending. Less generous Medicare. Smaller COLAs in Social Security and a few more years before eligibility. Fewer F-35s and, God willing, fewer invasions of Middle Eastern despots’ countries. And there are going to be higher taxes. Less, or no, mortgage interest dedcution. Smaller exemptions. Fewer deductions. Higher rates in EVERY bracket.
We live in a consumer economy. We have, since 2000, choked off the money available to consumers, and instead concentrated it in the hands of the very wealthy. The economy is, therefore, bumping along between “Great Recession” and “Jobless Recovery”. This cannot be fixed so long as we continue to strangle the consumer economy.
The way to stop strangling the consumer economy is to put more wealth in circulation. The “dangerous deficits” aren’t the problem, they are a symptom of the problem. Further cuts to government spending, especially in the areas currently targeted, exacerbate rather than help the problem. We need higher, rather than lower, spending on unemployment benefits. Higher, rather lower, spending on medicare. Higher, rather than lower, spending on social security benefits. We need these things because that spending stimulates the economy — it puts more wealth into circulation.
I don’t care how the wealth distribution problem gets solved. For awhile, it seemed that the economic revolution enabled by the internet and web was going to allow market forces to solve the problem. Instead, the very wealthy learned how to manipulate and control the new markets.
Tax policy may not solve it either. Ultimately, the problem might not be solvable.
The baby boom is entering retirement. I don’t know what you mean by “less generous Medicare”, “Smaller COLAs in Social Security”, and so on, but I do know that the baby boom presented an enormous challenge to the America of 1950 — a challenge that our parents and grandparents were largely successful in meeting. We are, so far, failing miserably to meet the challenge presented as the baby boom enters retirement.
One way or the other, a consumer economy in which virtually ALL consumers have no money is not sustainable and will collapse. With all due regard to those who rely on “free market” mechanisms, those mechanisms have utterly failed since 2000. Our reliance on those mechanisms has dramatically increased the wealth concentration in America and effectively impoverished nearly everyone.
The question is whether or not we will admit this and, having admitted it, what if anything we are prepared to do about it.
the tax rate my wife and I paid [filed jointly] this past year: 11%. In fact, I made an error on the return and the IRS mailed me $399.99 because I “overpaid.”
We could afford to pay higher taxes. 11% just isn’t enough. Our mortgage deduction is too high, and its structured to benefit those who pay a lot of money for a home, even when a less expensive home will get the job done. We also manage to claim a loss on our rental income every single year, despite the fact that we gain positive cash flow and equity… and most folks with a rental property like ours don’t even report it on their taxes!
Obama has somehow identified $250,000/yr as the threshold for higher taxation. I think that number is too high. I think families making half that should face higher taxes too. $125,000/yr won’t make you rich, but its far more than the average household is bringing in, so I have a hard time believing that folks with that kind of income “barely have enough to make the car payments, pay for groceries, and put the kids through college” unless you mean payment on their other Lexus or paying cash for their kids’ tuition.
That’s where the additional tax revenue comes from, and it is significant. That, and estate tax, capital gains tax, and other “non-income” tax which only seem to be paid by the rich and always at a lower tax rate than the middle class pays.
They’ll take your money. Shit send it to me. By the way, pay a tax preparer if you can’t do the damn form correctly.
My work here is done.
1. Taxes work because we all pay, not because one guy pays. The “pay more” argument is a stupid response. If you think taxes are too high, perhaps you should just go ahead and pay less. Take your chances with Los Federales. You could probably make foolish arguments from low security prison.
2. I’ve been doing my taxes by hand for 10 years. I’ve made one (known) error for $400, which the Feds gave back. It ain’t worth paying somebody else to do my taxes, both because (a) its too expensive for the number of hours required, and (b) because by doing them myself, I learn new techniques to minimize my own exposure.
I’m not arguing that I should pay more. I’m arguing that all people like me — and all people richer than me — should be paying more.
In closing, I’m thrilled that your work here is done. Your arguments are thin, your attitude lousy, and your contribution to the site stops at your celebrity status.
You aren’t short each month because of taxes. You’re short because our country is pursuing an economic path that channels more and more money to the top and less and less to everyone else. You’re short because your employer or your business is losing customers because more and more people are losing their jobs so that “shareholder value” (i.e bonuses to executives) can rise.
Here’s a dirty secret — whatever you earn, your Republican overlords still believe that you make too much money. They would be happier if you earned less. That is their perspective, it will always be their perspective. So they pursue policies that make that happen — they weaken unions, they support big business mergers that throw people into unemployment, they don’t like the concept of a minimum wage, they don’t like welfare or unemployment (they’d rather have really, really desperate people searching for jobs).
If you’re really scraping by each month, odds are that trading the small amount you pay in taxes for the things you get for those taxes would be a really, really bad trade.
According to this Wicked Local article, the state’s rainy day fund went from $2.3 billion in 2008 to $700 million at present. Starting to replenish that would be the responsible thing to do.
Using it to address some of the state’s deferred maintenance backlog would also be smart.
Replenishing the stabilization fund, which helped cushion some of the blow to government services over the past couple years, should be the first priority. Concurrent with this gradual replenishment should be restoration of social programs cut during the recession, as amberpaw argues.
In the long term, yes, we do need to replenish that fund, but our recovery is still rather shaky and the money might be better spend reversing some of the cuts for the time being.
This is a wise and prudent suggestion.
Shorts or overs. If we’re short the Commonwealth charges us taxes and fees. If we have an over, the pols overspend it and we get charged with taxes and fees.
But, I see so many good ideas here on how to spend $2 Billion. I expect that it will go to install a monorail between Hatfield and Whitinsville. Or to finance the Intergalactic Bio-science Compu-Know-All Save-The-World Corporation that guarantees a gazillion percent return on investment.
“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.” –Samuel Taylor Coleridge
oops! tried that didn’t we?