Massachusetts was left in great shape after Deval Patrick left office, with ten straight months of job growth, high reserves and historic credit ratings due to the Patrick-Murray Administration’s investments in education, innovation and infrastructure.
And now that the end of the fiscal year numbers are in from the state Department of Revenue, we know that the Baker administration never had to reckon with a $1 billion deficit, as was predicted by the Mass Taxpayers Foundation; but rather they benefitted from hundreds of millions in surplus revenues when all was said and done.
Bruce Mohl debunks the big budget deficit myth in an excellent piece in Commonwealth Magazine.
Even the Mass Taxpayers have backed away from their deficit projections. “In 20-20 hindsight, 2015 ended up doing better than we thought,” their spokesman tells Commonwealth Mag. “They were lucky and ended up with a surplus.”
… $391 million in surplus revenues at the close of the Fiscal Year, to be exact.
Of course, Governor Patrick addressed a budget gap before leaving office through some tough and fiscally responsible 9C cuts.
And the sound condition of Massachusetts at the change of administration reflects the solid investments and strong stewardship of the Patrick-Murray Administration over the past eight years.
The Mass Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development reported that June marked the tenth consecutive month of job gains. At 4.6 percent, the unemployment rate is now the lowest it’s been in the state since 2007, and nearly a full percent lower than the national rate.
During Deval Patrick’s Administration, a strong rainy day fund was maintained and the Commonwealth’s bond rating was increased by Wall Street rating agencies to the highest rates in the history of Massachusetts, including in the same year they downgraded the rating of the United States.
International travel, tourism and business was boosted by billions of dollars during the past several years, thanks to new flights and business relationships cultivated during Governor Patrick’s trade missions.
Massachusetts is now the undisputed national leader in life sciences and biotech, and other more traditional industries are booming as well.
The Sunday Globe’s business section contained a map showing well over 1,000 bridge, highway and tunnel projects underway this summer thanks to billions of dollars of investments made over the past eight years.
Massachusetts weathered the worst fiscal downturn since the Great Depression better than the rest of the country and these facts show we’re still growing fast and strong thanks to the Patrick-Murray Administration’s record of investments.
(**Disclosure: I served as a press secretary in the Patrick-Murray Administration.)
will trump the truth.
I just think it is too bad that no one was stumping for the facts on this.
And as for the grudging “they were lucky” from the classy snow jobbers at Mass Taxpayers, pahTOOEY.
..who first reported the deficit. The only dispute was to the size of it. So it wasn’t a myth.
He then made the 9-c cuts, but Baker could not know until he was in office if they were sufficient or sustainable.
… It was Governor Patrick who identified and addressed a $300K deficit with targeted cuts.
Gov Baker, and/or members of his administration, has made claims to the affect that Patrick both failed to address the deficit and underestimated it’s size. Both of these claims have proven to be completely false.
This also means Baker should not have made the claim that they were neither sufficient nor sustainable.
and we ended fiscal year 2015 with a $391 million dollar surplus.
“Whatever your particular problem the Republican candidates have no interest in solving it. The Republican candidates are concerned with two things, and two things only — making you afraid of it and telling you who to blame for it.” President Andrew Shepherd,
“The American President”
Fred Rich LaRiccia
elected Governor and immediately found a giant deficit that didn’t previously exist, which was just large enough to ‘force’ him to take the drastic step of instituting his #1 priority proposal from the first time he ran for governor — but that the state quite rightly judged a horribly dumb idea: eliminating 5000 positions from state government for kicks and giggles.
And just in time for him to get his desired policy goal that he knew enough not to talk about over the last 4 years, we find out that we didn’t really have that deficit after all.
Shocker.
Meanwhile, some of our state’s best and brightest employees were let go years before they should have been, our public agencies are less able to keep up with demand and Baker just dumped thousands of years worth of free credited years onto the state pension system — which will no doubt come back to haunt us just soon enough for the next Republican to run for Governor, bitterly complaining about a broken, badly damaged pension system that needs to be slashed or eliminated.
There were many RIF packages under GOP governors – some offered extra years on age, some offered extra years of work, etc. Romney learned that while it was nice to be rid of the remaining Fifteen Percenters, in the long run it did not save money.
Then we had Gov. Patrick. The unions couldn’t attack a Democratic governor and Legislature, so some real reforms began. Larger contributions to pensions, insurance, etc. unless you left by a certain date, and new hires all had the higher contributions. The unions went berserk, but had all their eggs in one basket and there was nobody they could appeal to.
I took what was the last incentive buyout offered by Patrick – a cash parting gift for leaving quietly, with the ability to collect unemployment without having said gift count against it. 250 needed to go. I saw my boss later and asked her how it had gone – she laughed, and said only about 125 stepped forward. Then, when layoffs started, they asked where their gift was and were horrified to learn that they got nothing because they hadn’t volunteered.
I thought the days of carrots were over in favor of sticks.
But – we have a Republican governor again. The legislators can again whine about unfairness, so Baker had to offer the cost-ineffective incentives again, not just use punishments for not going like Patrick did.
Baker blinked. He should have referred to his predecessor, and stuck to the sticks.
a scheme to anger taxpayers and create a groundswell that would allow Governor Baker to push through Pioneer Institute favor spending cuts? Is this what he was holding back coming out with a strong position on the Olympic bid so he wouldn’t spend political capital and could save it for the tougher cuts he might want in the next budget?
good writeup from Tim Murray recently and the impact on the economy. With regards to counties in the gulf:
It’s no coincidence that Emirates, Qatar and Etihad airways have start to expand at Logan, they are refurbishing a section of Terminal E to fit an A380.
It seems that the single most significant reason the deficit was smaller than projected was the unanticipated spike in capital gains tax collections at the end of the fiscal year. That rescue was unknowable in the middle of the fiscal year when everyone agreed there was a deficit. Hence the uprate for porcupine.
Governor Baker did make the most of the deficit, so to speak, by using it to shrink state government through an early retirement incentive program of dubious long-term policy wisdom, hence the uprate for rye.
(One other note: the Commonwealth article mentions that the Baker administration plans to use some of the surplus to fund some new initiatives, including homelessness prevention, in a supplemental budget. The most significant request in that supplemental budget pertaining to homelessness is to change the eligibility criteria for accessing family emergency shelter so that more families will be denied access.)
There was no deficit. There was a projected deficit. One is an event. The other is a potentiality. These are two different things. Governor Patrick addressed the projected deficits, that is to say the potentiality, with cuts and, in combination with better than expected revenues from capital gains, this created a surplus. Had Governor Patrick not addressed the projected deficit with cuts, the better than expected revenues would have still left us with a deficit, but much smaller than that which was projected. Because of what Deval Patrick did, we ended with a surplus.
Budgeting, and economics, aren’t really science and precision is a function of luck more than anything. Which makes Baker’s pronouncements that much more suspect. He is, after all, the one who purports to understand data and numbers better than the rest of us.
Governor Patrick did the responsible thing and took steps to avert a deficit. Governor Baker did the irresponsible thing and claimed Governor Patrick failed do the responsible thing. Governor Baker than doubled down on irresponsible by guesstimating the size of the deficit as maximus from the gluteus from whence he pulled it…