Robert David Sullivan 2

"Pork" on Capitol Hill, perks on Beacon Hill

Cross-posted on CW Unbound.

Both the federal government and the Massachusetts government are facing huge budget shortfalls, but they apparently offer radically different examples of supposedly wasteful spending. In Washington, the devil is in "earmarks"; in Massachusetts, generous pensions for state employees elicit the loudest catcalls. 

Conservative opponents of President Obama's stimulus bill and proposed federal budget have focused almost exclusively on earmarked programs, particularly those with a scientific bent. (Well, the Manhattan Institute is floating the idea of scrapping Head Start, but it's an outlier.) Most of the outrages seem quite defensible upon closer inspection, which makes Republicans such as Sen. John McCain seem indistinguishable from the Bay State's own Carla "Small Government Is Beautiful" Howell. In McCain's Twitter remarks from the floor of the Senate, he repeatedly admits that he doesn't know or care what a program does -- as in "$650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi - how does one manage a beaver?" The logic is that if government does it, it's inherently wasteful, so the details don't matter.

(BTW, it seems like an eternity ago that Bill Weld, running as a Republican for governor of Massachusetts mocked his Democratic opponent as insufficiently interventionist in the preservation of open space: ''Would you tell us what plans, if any, you have for the preservation of open space in Massachusetts other than leave it to beavers?'')

What if there were no Congress, income tax... or couch springs?!?

Can German Expressionist dream sequences save the state income tax? The Thicket, a blog at the National Conference of State Legislatures, has unearthed a short film from 1947 depicted what happens when an ordinary taxpayer wishes away the US Congress. Perhaps opponents of the upcoming referendum to abolish the state income tax could get some pointers. Imagine a commercial in which playgrounds, bus stops,  health clinics, and police officers standing next to holes in sidewalks all disappeared. (Well, maybe there won't be enough time for that last one.)

I have to say, though, that while The Powers of Congress has its moments, it's no Case of Spring Fever.

UPDATE: A reader points us to a "what if?" video that's already out there:

You mention a German film for tips on an ad on the destructive effects of eliminating the state income tax. In fact there already is a web ad that shows something of the sort: a disappearing teacher. See: http://votenoquestion1.com/

No doubt the fans of cutting the income tax will claim that the ad is just using scare tactics, but it is a certainty that eliminating the income tax would in fact result in enormous layoffs of teachers, social workers, and public safety personnel unless communities and possibly the state hiked property taxes to stratospheric levels.

This proposed measure has generated a torrent of attacks against public employees and claims that the state is squandering vast amounts of money, but none of the items mentioned as waste (such as police details) account for anything more than a tiny fraction of the 12 billion dollars in revenue that the state would lose. This is a profoundly irresponsible measure unlike any ever passed in any state, and it is time that state leaders and op ion makers lose their air of detachment about this matter and get serious about telling voters the truth. It is possible that a tiny fraction of Libertarians really do believe that the state would be better off without public schools or Mass Health, but the ordinary voter may not want to gut public education, health care, social services, and public safety.

Ben Lieberman
Maynard Massachusetts