budget

Matt Murphy in the State House News Service reports here on the message from the Admininstration -- delivered on Thanksgiving Eve.

THE STATE HOUSE — Heavily into planning for next year’s state budget, Administration Finance Secretary Jay Gonzalez on Tuesday said the Patrick administration plans no new broad-based tax increases in fiscal 2013, and will have to find ways to cover surging demand for social services that is expected to outpace revenue growth.

“Even though tax revenues are growing modestly, and we may have more resources next year, the demands in our safety net programs and health care costs generally, the rate of growth in those areas exceeds the growth in resources,” Gonzalez told the News Service during a 20-minute sit-down interview in his office.

Through mid-November, tax collections of just over $7 billion since the start of the new fiscal year in are up 5.8 percent over the same period in fiscal 2011 indicating that the Massachusetts economy continues to rebound from the recession that began in 2008 and forced rounds of budget cuts.

“Tax revenues have been growing and we expect them based on economic forecasts to continue to grow so I think next year’s budget will be bigger than this year’s budget, but probably only modestly,” Gonzalez said.

Warren Buffet raised the profile of the discussion of taxing higher incomes ($1 million and above) at higher rates.  He also focused the discussion on the type of income and the tax rates - wages versus investment income where investment income (including hedge fund managers income) currently carries a lower tax rate. 

So, what do some of  the wealthy in Mass. think about Mr. Buffet's revenue/tax/budget proposals?

“It serves to set an example that some people who can well afford to pay more are paying more,’’ said Cummings, a local developer and founder of the Cummings Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organizations in Massachusetts...Jack Manning, chief executive of the real estate finance company Boston Capital Corp.,  "If more tax revenue is needed to tame the deficit, he said, it should come only from those with deep resources."...Others are less enthusiastic or put caveats on their comments.  [Full Article:  The Boston Globe]

What would it take for us to come together as a community and discuss how to fund all the services and programs that we need.  Things like this shouldnt happen for us to understand that we need more revenue to properly fund programs such as these ones: 

Great article talking about what taxes pay for which sometimes we might get as granted:

For example, a few miles from my house I can ramp onto Interstate Highway 35. To the south lie Austin and San Antonio; to the north are Dallas and connections that will take me virtually anywhere in the U.S. via a series of carefully engineered, safe superhighways and secondary roads. This system, perhaps the best in the world, cost many billions of dollars to build and much more to maintain. Yet we use it as often and as much as we want - for free! Of course, it's not really free; we pay for it with taxes. Still, our fine highways are such a significant part of the ordinary psychological infrastructure of our lives that it's easy to forget that they exist because we decided to combine our money to build something that would benefit everyone, which is, I guess, one of the most basic definitions of civilization. [Full Article: Wicked Local - Northborough - Southborough Villager]

Good news for Massachusetts if our economy only relied on state finances. Unfortunately, the federal financial crisis affects us all. 

Grossman says as a precaution, the state will stop borrowing this month and, if needed, until October, when the new federal budget kicks in. Despite the uncertainty, he says the state’s debt status and revenue are in good enough shape to receive what the U.S. Treasury didn’t — a higher Standard and Poor’s credit rating. [Full Article: WBUR]

Massachusetts gained this time at the expense of other states, sometimes it doesn't. Hopefully we could have a budget structure that make all states winners in fields such as health care:

Hospitals in Massachusetts will reap an annual windfall of $275 million due to a loophole enshrined in the new health care law. Hospitals in most other states will get less money as a result. [Full Article: MassLive]

The 2009 repeal of a state law that exempted telephone companies from paying property taxes on telephone poles and wires over public ways continues to reap financial rewards for cities and towns across the state. But while the extra revenue is helping to offset a recent round of cuts in state aid, the money isn’t enough to completely alleviate municipalities’ ongoing monetary headaches, say officials in cities and towns across the western suburbs “I suppose it’s not much, but when the town is struggling, that’s an employee or two, so that’s good,’’ said Stow's Assessor Dorothy Wilbur. [Full Article: Boston Globe]