Every tax is a pay cut. Every tax cut is a pay raise.
Citizens for Limited Taxation |
Commonwealth of Massachusetts Expenditures
Source of Financial information | |||||||||
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2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 |
General Comments on the Commonwealth ( your wealth is their wealth ) of Massachusetts Expenditures | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The fiscal year ends on June 30th and is always designated by the year
it ends on. Thus, fiscal 2005 ends on June 30th, 2005.
The 2007 General Fund for the state of Montana was $1.8 billion, Rhode Island was $3.1 billion and Wyoming was $3.8 billion. Keep these numbers in mind as you examine Massachusetts numbers. After 300 years of budgeting, the Commonwealth still obfuscates their spending of our tax monies. I was able to round up this information only because I can write software to round up this data more easily than most people. Beyond these expenditures, there are those items that are off budget. An item off budget is merely a large expenditure that the state does not want reduced and is basically taken off the table. These three off budget items are subtracted from our tax revenues and never show up under state expenses. I placed them there myself. Beyond the $32 billion General Fund of the state, there are the major quasis as they are sometimes called that add about $2 billion. Given Massachusetts population of 6.4 million legal residents, this comes to nearly $5,400 per capita (for every man woman and child).
A billion here, a billion there and soon we're talking about serious money.
Providing a 10 year history of Massachusetts expenditures provides you with a view of the metastasis that occurs in state government. When money becomes available, new programs are started and seemingly funded forever more (long past your death). They become cancerous financial tumors on the body politic. Some expenditures are repeated year after year even though there are no known metrics on their success or failure. A classic expenditure I kept running into was drug use prevention programs. Do they work? How do we know? What metrics are used to support continued funding?
Clearly, some of the larger expenses in health, elderly affairs and mental retardation should be broken down further. All amounts over $10 million should be broken down. Any department that feels that it is not worth documenting such expenditures should simply not be so funded. It is after all, our collective monies, not theirs. You can use your browser to search for entries. On Firefox, CTRL-F will open a small Find line at the bottom of the browser window. On Internet Explorer (IE), a CTRL-F will pop up a small search window to do the same. |
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