Massachusetts’s miracle or mirage?

The no-tax crowd is still gushing over the recent appearance in North Carolina by Massachusetts Governor and possible Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Romney came to Raleigh and Charlotte at the invitation of The Foundation for North Carolina’s Future, a political group headed by State Senator Robert Pittenger. 

Romney is the held up as a hero by Pittenger and the rest of the anti-government crowd for turning a $3 billion deficit in his state into a budget surplus without raising taxes. The News and Observer quoted State Representative Russell Capps asking Romney to move to North Carolina and run for governor. The head of one of the think thanks in town hailed him as a leading candidate for president based on his leadership of Massachusetts.

If Romney’s record sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. Missing from the both the worshipful accounts of his appearance by the right-wing pundits and the media reports of his visit are the numbers behind Romney’s record, how he managed to turn the deficit into a surplus and how Massachusetts ended up in a $3 billion hole in the first place.

The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center has those numbers and stories behind them, like Romney’s cut by veto in the 2006 budget of $110 million from programs that serve the poor and the disabled. Romney also vetoed a plan to provide healthcare for elderly legal immigrants and a rental assistance program that would help people stay in their homes and off the streets.  He wants to give corporations subsidies to hire people, something generally opposed by Capps and other worshippers of the free market.

And that is just this year. In the last four years, funding for education was cut by 21 percent, money for job search and training for welfare recipients was cut by $20 million, and day care subsidies were reduced by $31 million. 

Successful programs to reduce smoking and teen pregnancy were devastated. Medicaid recipients no longer receive services like dental care and eyeglasses. The list of cuts to programs that serve the poor and educate kids is long. The effects of the reductions on people’s lives is always far less reported that the number of dollars the cuts save. 

Also missing from the description of the Romney miracle is the cause of Massachusetts’ budget problems, 42 separate tax cuts in the 1990s that cost the state almost $4 billion in revenue.

Sound familiar? Cut taxes, primarily on wealthy folks, and then cut services to programs that serve the poor to pay for them.  North Carolina could follow Romney’s lead and solve the state’s structural budget problem in a heartbeat by simply slashing education funding and cutting services to hundreds of thousands of people who need them.

But that’s not leadership, or at least it’s not the kind we need. It is a plan geared for short-term political gain that causes long-term human suffering. It’s demagoguery too, which helps explain why Romney is so popular with the Neanderthal no-new-tax-pledging crowd.