What was Wrong with the Debate on Question 1?

So what was wrong with the debate about question 1 anyway? After all, Question 1 is yesterday's news. The voters of the Commonwealth made a choice, in this case, I believe, the right choice. What was wrong for me was the disingenuity of the arguments and the lack of clear information. So for example:

• The backers of Question 1 indicated that the budget of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is about $43 billion without indicating that about $14 billion of that $43 billion is trust fund spending. Trust fund spending is spending that is governed by Trust agreements and includes, among other things, most of the University of Massachusetts system and the entire State and Teacher's Pension systems. These are not "appropriated" funds; the revenues for these expenses are dedicated revenues. So, unless the backers of Question 1 were planning to close the University of Massachusetts and dismantle the entire state pension system, to include these funds in their calculation is disingenuous.


• No one in the discussion seemed to explain the role of federal matching funds. So, for example, when it comes to a program like Medicaid, the state receives a match from the federal government, so long as the state operates a program that meets with federal requirements. These funds are essentially off-limits, unless the state wants to forego the massive contribution they receive from the federal government. And to date, there is no state in the union that has declined participation in the Medicaid program.


• The backers of Question 1 made completely unsupported claims, such as that 41% of state government is waste. What was their source for that argument? An April 2008 poll that asked 500 voters to speculate on the share of every tax dollar that state government wastes. The backers seem to forget that the Commonwealth had sixteen uninterrupted years of Republican Governors, including Mitt Romney, the great reformer, who single-handedly saved the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Romney did, in fact, reorganize functions of government -- for example, he centralized many human resources functions from individual agencies into their supervising secretariats -- yet he wasn't able to squeeze even a single percent of savings from his reforms.


• Little or no mention was made of the fact that some of state spending is not discretionary. Debt service, for example, is not discretionary spending. The Commonwealth must pay it's bondholders or risk junk bond status and credit default.
  


• The backers of Question 1 claimed that the income tax repeal would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. This claim is equally unsupported, unless the backers of Question 1 were intending to privatize, for example, the entire corrections and transportation systems in the Commonwealth. That way, we could have tolls not only on the Turnpike, but on any road or bridge that had been privatized.

The reason that anybody would buy this malarkey is a symptom of the fact that the budget is complicated and poorly understood. Some of the blame for that goes to the Legislature and Administration for not doing a better job of explaining how the budget works (although the Patrick administration is improving matters on that score). Some of the blame goes to us for not doing more to educate ourselves.