Senate Didn't Just Enact a Sales Tax

The Senate didn't just enact a sales tax last night.  Instead, in their redrafted amendment #46, they also took care of 93 line-items in what was, in effect, a consolidated amendment.  You can see the full text of the sales tax amendment in the frame below.  It's substantial.  Not only does it raise the sales tax and add 93 line-item increases, it also enacts an entirely new chapter, a state sales tax on meals (Chapter 64L of the General Laws).

The Sales Tax was a Foregone Concolusion

It seems that it was a foregone conclusion that the Senate was determined to follow the House's lead in raising the sales tax to 6.25%.  Any other tax ideas were off the table, and although freshmen Senators Sonia Chang-Diaz and Jamie Eldridge made a nice run at the income tax -- even lowering their sights from 6.3% to 5.9% -- that one wasn't going to happen.  The Governor's 19¢ gas tax idea was obviously a dead letter from the start.  So the sales tax it is.

Is this a good idea?  I'm not so sure.  Somehow I see an initiative and referendum sales tax rollback (if not an outright sales tax repeal) in our future.

Thoughts anyone?

Tax Proposals going Down (if not the Taxes themselves)

Well, the income tax went down, as expected, and so did an 11¢ increase on the sales tax.  On the other hand, the Senate voted down a proposal to freeze the corporate tax rate, which was scheduled to go down via legislation passed last year.  That proposal was also soundly defeated, along with the provisions that would have repealed combined corporate reporting of state income taxes.  Guess we're heading for a sales tax increase before too long.

Starting off with the Income Tax

Well, it's just past noon on the 1st day of the Senate floor debate, and we're already debating an increase in the income tax.  It doesn't seem likely that this is going to have much in the way of legs. It may be less regressive than the proposed sales tax increase, but it's unlikely to get traction given the recent history of income tax referendums.

Second set of Senate Amendments

For those of you who were watching, it seemed like the Senate had posted the amendments it was going to debate this weekend.  The final tally was 647 amendments.  And for those of us who spend time processing amendments, we were busy this weekend and today sorting and anlyzing amendents, so that we would know the scope of the upcoming Senate floor debate.

Then, around 4:00 p.m. this afternoon, the Senate suddenly posted an additional 47 amendments. The same trick, by the way, that the House had turned just a few weeks earlier.

I'm sorry, but how hard is it to get a complete set of amendments and post it on the website?  It's not like they aren't going to have withdrawn amendments, redrafted amendments, or in the case of the House, completely new amendments that suddenly appear in the bundles.  This is an exasperating way to do business for those of us who are depending on reasonably complete information to do our analyses.

Click here to see the initial list of Senate floor amendments.

Click here to see the additional list of Senate floor amendments.

How Many Amendments did Senators File?

Curious about how many amendments the Senators filed?  It turns out quite a few.  First of all, as most of you know there are only 40 Senators, while there are 160 Representatives. This year the house filed about a thousand floor amendments -- just shy of a thousand at first, then a few more in the end -- which works out to be a little more than six amendments per representative.

On the other hand, the Senators filed 647 amendments -- before the additional 47 that were posted on the Senate website late this afternoon -- which works out to be a little over 16 amendments per Senator.

Still, some were greedier than others.  The table below sets forth the number of amendments per Senator, including those filed jointly by combinations of Senators.

As you can see, John Hart leads the pack with 56 followed closely by Tisei at 51.  McGee, Creem and Tarr are in the thirties, with Spilka and Tolman following close behind.

Senate Amendments Posted

The Senate posted their amendments this weekend.  The Senate has a bit of an awkward way of doing this. Instead of publishing an entire list of amendments which links to the individual amendments -- as the House does -- the Senate publishes their amendments bundled into thirteen topic areas.  This might be seen like the consolidated amendments acted on in the House during floor debate, only that the Senate doesn't do multiple consolidated amendments the way the House does. The Senate allows much more debate on individual amendments, and usually bundles the remaining amendments together in one big bundle at the end of the session.  At least that's what they did last year.  So what is the purpose of the bundles?

In order to get a list of the Senate amendments, you have to agglomerate each of the bundles together and then try to sort them on amendment number.  It's a lot more work than it should be, frankly, to get a clean picture of what's going on.

Senate Ways & Means Budget Appropriations

The Senate came out with it's budget today, and it seems to have been the first body to take the budget crunch seriously.  As you can see from the table below, the Senate's numbers are significantly lower than those of the Governor and House, and last year's enacted budget.

FY09 as Enacted .........................$29,666,643,801
Governor's House 1 ......................$30,870,720,678
House Ways & Means ......................$29,351,895,971
House Engroseed .........................$29,826,325,083
Senate Ways & Means .....................$27,415,399,490

The chart below demonstrates this graphically,  including the portions devoted to direct appropriations, chargebacks, retained revenue and federal grants respectively:

That means that what the Senate has proposed is:

• $2,251,244,311 less than last year's enacted budget
  
• $3,455,321,188 less than what the Governor proposed in House 1
  
• $1,936,496,481 less than House Ways & Means
  
• $2,410,925,593 less than the House Engrossed budget
  

Click here to see the entire spreadsheet of SW&M appropriations and how they compare to previous versions of budgets.

What's with all the Secrecy?

On Tuesday we all were waiting for the Senate Ways & Means budget to come out, as it had been rumored it would.  What happened?  Nothing, nothing at all.  Although I refreshed my browser every hour, nothing happened all day long.  One of my colleagues even called the committee, but they refused to divlulge the time or even date the budget would be released.

What's the big secrecy?  I thought we were now in the era of budget transparency?  In my day, when I was at the Committee -- which admittedly was a while ago -- we had a grand unveiling of the budget.  We would schedule an executive committee hearing, print up charts and graphs, invite the press, and actually present the budget.  The Ways & Means committee would actually taken questions from the press.

How about that as an idea?

Who had the most Amendments Adopted?

Now that the voting and debating is over, let's see who scored well in terms of getting amendments passed and additions made to the budget.

First of all, with respect to the number of amendments that were adopted, the runaway winner was Charlie Murphy himself, although that statistic is deceptive.  Murphy, who barely filed any amendements himself, was listed as the lead sponsor on thirteen of the items in the "consolidated" floor amendments.

Next in line were John Scibak, Liz Malia, Harold Naughton and Alice Wolf, who each managed to have eight of their amendments adopted, albeit in modified form.  The table below only lists Representatives who had at least three amendments adopted.

Action  Sponsor                Count
------------------------------------
Adopted Murphy et al              13
Adopted Scibak, John               8
Adopted Malia, Liz                 7
Adopted Naughton, Harold           7
Adopted Wolf, Alice                7
Adopted O'Flaherty, Gene           6
Adopted Smizik, Frank              5
Adopted Costello, Michael          5
Adopted Jones, Bradley             5
Adopted Guyer, Denis               4
Adopted Webster, Daniel            4
Adopted O'Day, James               4           
Adopted Reinstein, Kathi Anne      4
Adopted Peisch, Alice              3
Adopted Khan, Kay                  3
Adopted Rodrigues, Michael         3
Adopted Pedone, Vincent            3
Adopted Walsh, Martin              3
Adopted Spellane, Robert           3
Adopted Scaccia, Angelo            3

Final House Floor Amendments

Now that the numbers are in, it appears that the House was unusually restrained in it's floor debate. Speaker DeLeo had said in his closing remarks that he doesn't know anybody who "enjoys saying no" more than new House Ways & Means Chairman Charles Murphy. Well that's a good thing because the House needed to be restrained and it looks like they actually succeeded. Our numbers indicate as follows:

• The House adopted only 172 amendments
• Of these only a paltry 44 amendment were earmarks
• The total number of earmarks adopted is around $137.9 million
• The total increase in the budget appears to be around $475 million

Click here to bring up  a spreadsheet with the complete list of adopted amendments from last week's house floor activity.

Which Amendments made it into the Bundles?

If you're like the rest of us, you might think it would be useful to know which of the 1003 odd House floor amendments -- not counting the half-dozen or so brand new ones that were adopted on the House floor -- actually made it into one of the 23 bundles (or "consolidated" amendments).  Damn if you would know by looking at the House website, however.  Here's what you can see from the House website:

Notice that the first House amendment, Puppolo's "Springfield Business Improvement District" earmark is indicated as having been "Consolidated "V" Economic Development".  The unsuspecting reader might believe this meant that was adopted.  Not so, my friends.

If you want to know which amendments really were adopted (and which were excluded through the "non-action" of having been "disposed" of in one of the consolidated amendments without any of the language from the amendment showing up in the amendment, you'd have to go to a different source, like ours.

Click here if you want to see a complete list of what happened to all the House floor amendments, and which ones actually made it into one of the bundles.

How do we do this? The old fashioned way: we know which subject matter each amendment was assigned to, and we can get the consolidated amendment in PDF format when it's posted on the web.  The House is good enough to post these, usually within half an hour of voting on them.  And you can find them youself here, by clicking on this link.

The house does list the withdrawn amendment, as well as supplying links to each of the consolidated amendments, and the "further amended" amendments that were eventually adopted.