Behind-the-Scenes Budget

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Today we discuss  what's happening with the budget, how the budget process is not meeting our needs, how different it is from what we voted for it to be. And then we dig in to talk about a number of specific topics, including inflation, earmarks, taxes and more.

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 48. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state that really fills the needs of the vast majority of our residents. And that's what we hope to do today.
We are in the season to talk about the budget season, and we are going to talk about what's happening with the budget. Part of the process it's in how much it has not, is not meeting our needs, how different it is from what we voted for it to be. And really we're going to kind of dig in and talk a little bit about a number of other things, including inflation, earmarks, taxes and all that good stuff.
But before we do, I would love for my illustrious co host to introduce themselves today. I will start with Jordan. Jordan Berg Powers.
He him and I have several years working in progressive politics in Massachusetts. Jonathan, also, I'm Jonathan Cohn. He him his joining from Boston, been working for a decade on issuing electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts.
And I'm Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford have really done a lot of work in local electoral politics around the country for a number of years. State politics more recently.
I am also a city councilor in Medford. And Jonathan, if you can give us a broad overview, where are we in the budget process? And then just talk a little bit about this particular budget. Yeah, I can give an overview.
So for the people that aren't familiar with the way a budget cycle works in Massachusetts, what ends up happening is at the beginning of the year before the end of January, the governor introduces a budget proposal to the legislature. They can use it as a baseline. They can throw it out the window.
They can do whatever they want with it. But that starts the discussion. And then you'll have the House and Senate will hold hearings about the budget, kind of bringing in different people to talk about, but needs advocates.
And then they make all their decisions behind closed doors about what actually gets in it. And then theMassachusetts House will vote on a budget in April with legislators being able to put forth different amendments to it, none of them really getting debate on the floor for the most part. And then the Senate Votes on a budget in May.
That's going to be coming up the week subsequent to when we're taping that. I'm going to write now. And Then the two chambers then have to negotiate a final budget between them and a conference committee with the theoretical goal of passing a budget by June 30.
Although in recent years we've had the latest budget in the country despite having a democratic House and democratic Senate. So no actual like inter partisan conflict, just the fact that they can't, that they can't seem to do basic governance on something like that. That has led us to get like budgets passed in August Already into the new fiscal year.
But that sets the stage for where we are, where the House just kind of a couple of weeks ago passed the budget for the fiscal year 2025, that we exist as well in terms of the budget, the cycle in the framework with the legislature having both, both having additional money because of the fair share amendment with them spending $1.3 billion in money designated for education and transportation. The fact that we now have some reduction in money because of the tax cut package last year, which legislators never seem to fully want to acknowledge was a loss of revenue.
It is always this kind of weird type of numeracy where people don't like to acknowledge that if you cut taxes, you are also reducing, you're necessitating spending cuts because it's same pot of money as well as some periods of general revenue decline in the state budget that has, rather than seeking solutions for how to increase revenue overall, has led to legislators wanting to be stingier. I always point out with this is thatMassachusetts is one of the richest states in the country, and there is literally never an excuse for us to say we don't have enough money as a reason not to do something as long as we have a booming industry in this state. And both we're a state filled with old money and we're a state filled with new money that all different kinds that we do have the resources, if we wanted to actually use them, to do what we need to do in the state, rather than cry poor every budget cycle.
But I'll use that as my open wonderful. And I just want to point out to listeners and viewers that we have done podcasts on the budget before. And one of my favorites, one of my many favorites is the one that we did on amendments.
So I highly recommend, because we're not really going to talk about amendments today, I highly recommend that you seek out our podcast previously that we did on amendments so you can understand that part because it really is a very fascinating viewpoint of the budget process and how it all fits together,or doesn't in Massachusetts. And Jordan, I would love to get your sort of overview of what you think of the budget that we are currently seeing coming out of the governor, of the House, of the Senate. Yeah, I'll just, I'll Echo what Jonathan said and say you know, it's really sad that our state continues to level fund us.
What does it mean to level fund? It means that the costs go up for things, but we aren't increasing the spending on things. This is something that happens in conservative states. This is something that traditionally republicans do to harm government, to fort, to, as conservative thinkers once said, like to shrink it so you can strangle it.
Government in a bathtub. Right. Like that sort of like terrible idea about how government should and could work is the idea that, like we can, you know, we can, it should just, it can just, it doesn't have to grow, but it does have to grow because our state's growing and our needs are growing.
And I think the other piece that I want to really highlight for people is that a lot of the way that the media and the elected officials talk about this is that this is them being fiscally prudent. But it's not actually fiscally prudent to constantly use gimmicks to try to fund things. Right.
So they're not doing basic things like saying we have to spend this money and we have these priorities. Sowe're going to tax people in thoughtful ways to get at that money, which is all the things we're calling for.Right.
Like, they get, they make it sound like there's these wild things, but like, our opponents are bonkers town.They don't believe in any taxation or any government. They don't believe in any funding.
They believe in programming. They don't, I guess they think that state is magic because they're never fortaxing anything to pay for those programs. But, you know, our opponents don't.
They're not serious people and they're not involved in serious thinking. And I think that the way the media talks about progressives is they often talk about us as, oh, we're just like not realistic. But like, it's not realistic to constantly not pay for the things that need, like the T is on fire and not pay for it.
That's a not logical thing. You wouldn't, you wouldn't, your house wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't, like have a leak in your roof and then have it on fire and then like, and then give, you know, spend money on like a new tv. Like, you just fix the roof.
Like, it just doesn't, like, nothing that they're doing makes sense, but it's also not logical or tethered to good fiscal management. So instead of doing things like forging the portion of deposit to the rainy day funds,which is actually something they should do. But is a gimmick that you do one time or, you know, moving money around or hoping the federal government will increase its, will increase its funding, which is actually the way that the budget is in a total cat is catastrophic disaster, is that there was more money coming in from the federal government than originally planned.
Like, that sort of gimmickry is, is not good fiscal management. It's not good fiscal management. It's digging your heels in like children when you made the absolute worst mistake, which is to go along with a really bad package of taxation that we can't afford and don't need to.
We. There's no reason we have to afford it, right? Like, there is nothing about. There was nothing that was happening in Massachusetts that signaled to people, except that rich people are greedy and you can never make, you can never satiate their greed.
Right. That day traders needed a tax cut. Day traders were day trading in Massachusetts.
They weren't leaving our state. There was nothing that required you to cut their taxes. But doing so comesat a real cost to you and me.
Dead billionaires are not the reason we can't afford housing in Massachusetts. Dead billionaires, by definition, are not leaving Massachusetts unless for some really creepy reason, they've already left. They'renot constituents.
Right. And so their families wanting, being greedy is not a reason to cut that tax. As I always say.
There used to be universal belief. The founding fathers did not agree on just about anything. But the one thing they actually agreed on is inheritance was evil, and it undermined the, undermined the underpinnings of democracy.
It didn't. If you were Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine. Right.
They are ideologically, ultimately opposed to lots of different things. There was universal belief about inheritance being a problem. And so it's just not the case that we needed to cut this tax.
We are now. We were in line with other progressive democratic states that people want to live in because we have good things to, we have functioning schools, good roads, good, you know, stability. We were in line with those states, and now we're in line with right wing states.
And that doesn't make any sense. We didn't need to do that. You know, like, I don't.
We just, it just did not. We do not, we're not competing for people with Georgia, and we don't need our taxes to compete with people with Mississippi. Like, that's just not the way we should do taxation.
So I think I'm just really frustrated because the way in which it gets talked about is like somehow what we are asking, like, they try to pretend they're in suits, they try to pretend they're serious, but they're children who've made a mistake in digging their tails in and they're making fiscally irresponsible decisions. Yeah, Iwant to jump in on this because, um, like, I do want people to understand this fiscal irresponsibility. Um,and, you know, sitting on a city council, I can just give one story.
And I love your thing about the roof is leaking because, you know, when, when your roof leaks, it destroys the rest of your house. So you have to fix that. If you don't fix it, you're not being fiscally responsible by not spending that money.
It is fiscally irresponsible. And like, for example, in Medford, we are now being told that our water, our entire water pipe systems are 120 years old and they will all fail very soon because you can't wait 100. They don't last for, it's longer than 120 years.
They're between 100 and 120 years old. And for many decades, instead of using the money that comes in via the water bills, which part of that money is designed to pay to replace these water mains, instead of doing that, what did city councils and mostly what did mayors mostly do? They returned that money to the taxpayer. Now, that is fiscally irresponsible because we now have like half a billion dollars of water main repair that needs to be done and we can't afford to do it.
So this idea of, like, if you own a house and the roof starts leaking, it is not fiscally responsible for you to not pay to repair that roof because it will destroy the rest of your house. So I really love that analogy you brought up. And I just want to put something in there to get in terms of analogies.
One thing that I always appreciate that might like that my dad will often comment about, particularly when watching any of the latest spot of Republicans in DC wanting to cut taxes for things, is that like, compares it to somebody lobbying their boss to cut their pay. That, like, nobody does. Like, nobody does that because it's irrational to be like, please, can you claim me less? And that's effectively what you, what it's like whenever a kind of legislative trying to actually harm their ability to actually spend on any programs.
Can we, can we talk a little bit about the fact that voters, you know, through the millionaire's tax, we, we just voted to increase the budget by a billion dollars. We just voted for that. And then the legislature, we've said this before, the legislature voted to cut taxes by a billion dollars.
I mean basic maths. Basic math. Basic math.
You're doing exactly the opposite of what we demanded and voted for democratically. Yeah. And, you know,I understand the impulse of many people listening to this to try to say like it was worth it.
And here's all the things it's paying for. And I want to agree with that. As somebody who spent literally 13 years working on taxing rich people, I, it is always worth it.
It is always worth it. Rich people are paying far too little of their fair share for how much they take from the society and take from us individually. So I, it is worth it to have done that.
And it is the only thing propping up this terrible, quote unquote, democratic, very corporate legislature is the fact that we passed that billion dollars and the revenue from that is better than we expected, mostly because, again, rich people are siphoning all our money from us and this is the only fall safe from that. So they're getting even richer than any of us could have ever predicted while the rest of us are being squeezed and thinned out in the middle. And so like, yes, that is something that should have happened and it is something that's really important and it is just a mathematical truth that we are siphoning money away that voters said that they wanted to spend to invest in the tea in education.
And what are the two things, the two things that are suffering the most under the House ways and means budget, under the governor's budget, and will definitely suffer under the Senate's budget, the ticket ineducation, the two things that were singled out as the things voters decided they wanted to invest a billion dollars in, they are not getting what was promised to them. The, the legislature has undermined the democratic will of the people to again give billionaires and day traders tax breaks. To underscore that with the MBTA, there was an excellent article from the Boston Globe a few days ago about kind of disinvestment from the MBTA and how we often hear it say, Governor Healy, as well as Democrats in the legislature talkabout how that's like kind of a thing of the past.
And they all kind of, they often rhetorically acknowledge the need to invest more in the MBTA. But that rhetoric doesn't exist in practice, as the kind of, the article had noted that the MBTA says that its operating budget needs like $600 million more other than what it has to cover the next fiscal year, covering the day today operations, including wages, benefits, fuel contracts, kind of debt repayment. And compared to that $600 million that they need.
Healy proposed just 172 million, the House 257 million, more than Healy, but still less than half, and theSenate only $157.5 million. So less than either of the other two, which leads to them doing kind of doing time budget checks, like, as you noted before, taking money from a rainy day fund, which is something you can do on a.
You can do it. That's not, that's not ideal, but you shouldn't have to do it when we have. We have the resources in the state already fund what we need to fund.
And in terms of short changing those priorities, and I'm sure, Jordan, you can elaborate on this more thanI'll just do, is to open it, is. We also see that from the legislature on education, where despite the fact that the legislature made a promise when passing the Student Opportunity act several years ago to increase funding to local school districts, that we're not going to see the full promised funding due to the high rate of inflation we've seen in recent years. Because when they decided to phase in of what kind of the additional funding for school districts would be, they assumed a certain level of inflation.
And so even though inflation has been much higher in recent years, meaning that the cost of everything involved in running a school will be higher, they're not planning to meet that with the additional funding,which effectively wipes away a good chunk, if not the entirety, of promised increases, meaning that if the legislature doesn't actually fix that, then that money's never actually coming back. Yep. Well, let's.
Let's talk a little bit. I want to put some numbers on that because I think it's really important. So the, this, youknow, because of federal funding shortfalls for the MBTA, there's estimated $230 million shortfall this year in the.
But in the MBTA, you know, the Healy administration proposed about 100 million, so that's less than what's needed. And overall, there's a $560 million million dollar shortfall needed to. For year over year for the t. So 560,000, 562,000.
This year, they spent about 100,000. The response from the Senate ways and means person was that the T is–has–too much.
It's. We can't insatiate the T. It's got too much people.
You know, it wants too much. As if wanting too much. Public transportation is the problem.
People using public transportation is the problem, according to Senator Michael Rodericks. And that's wrong. We want people.
It should be insatiable. It should be something that is constantly growing because people are using it and we're improving it. And this is just to hit what it's currently doing.
This isn't to make the sort of investments we need to make, to make it the sort of system we all deserve and would use over cars. And so just to put a number. So five, 60.
Right. $513 million went to dead billionaires and capital gains estimated for 2025. 513.
So that's the budget shortfall. Like, when we're saying this, it's not like, oh, these are out of whack numbers. Like, they are almost one to one.
Right. The $513 million. Let's say you didn't care about the tea.
Let's say you only cared. Let's. You didn't care about the tea at all.
You cared about education. I don't listen, I don't take the tea. I'm gonna think, I don't have education.
For less than $500 million, we could give tuition free higher education to every. To people wanting to go to public education in Massachusetts. So instead, a few, just a couple people, couple families are going to get$513 million every year so that the money that they didn't earn but somebody else earned, that they themselves can keep, so that they can keep that money, they were already keeping it.
But to keep more of it, we could send people to public education, higher education for free inMassachusetts, lead the country, set a real clear thing that we're a state. The higher education, if you care about business, you care about closing the gaps that we have, you care about making us profitable for 50 years from now. Having dead billionaires, money doesn't do that.
Making sure everybody can go to higher education does. Right. So just again, right, like, you want to make.
You want to keep young people here, make the tea available. Don't give $513 million every single year ingrowing to people who did not earn the money. And I think that that's the thing we're talking about.
So it's almost a one to one. I just remind people of those exact numbers. So when we're talking about education, the other thing that's happening.
So in 2019, you know, so basically they're funding for the student Opportunity act was something that we had to beg the legislature to do, which was simply to follow the law that they passed saying that they had to review the budget and what thing and how we spend it. And it turns out we were not, educe were not funding public education equitably or in a way that makes sense. Right? We all knew that.
And so, and so they passed a bill and it turned out we were underfunding public education by about a billion dollars a year. And they earmarked spending to meet to close that gap over seven years. But to close.
But that was the gap from seven years ago. We have had major inflation since then, as Jonathan said. And so what we're, so what you're seeing is across the commonwealth, what's happening is every single school district is firing people, which is, again, bad for the economy.
So we are firing people. 163 people in Massachusetts. In 163 legislators in Worcester alone have been let go of positions not filled because of a $22 million shortfall which could have been made up.
You said legislators, educators, sorry, educators and support staff have been like, will be let go. That could have been paid for by the billion dollars. Voters decided, or at least half of it, 500 million, that voters decided they wanted to go to a public education.
It would easily have gotten inflation and been okay. But instead, legislators gave this money again to daytraders, to debt billionaires. So that's why we keep harping on it, because it's a decision that they made that they could undo.
They have super majorities. They could undo it immediately. They cut nine c cuts.
Nine c cuts are money to people so poor that they can't afford anything. They cut those people's benefits as opposed to inheritance. Just think about how wild that is.
And Maura Healey goes on tv defending it, saying that that's the right thing to have done. I just, I like morally can't sit in that. I can't imagine it.
And you and your democratic legislator did that, voted for it, did not oppose it, did not step up, did not say no, did not raise concerns, did not come to the floor to say this is not right, did not say that this is a problem,did not say after all of this happened, hey, we can't afford it, maybe we should revisit this. The Progressivecaucus hasn't called for just a look at a revisit of these tax cuts we can't afford. None of your legislators have spoken up despite all of them, nearly all of them saying that they wanted to tax billionaires more and that that was something that they're willing to do.
None of them have gone back and say that they're going to today. It is frustrating. Can we talk a little bit about earmarks? Jonathan, give us the, yeah.
So I can also highlight on this. There's an excellent. So first of all, what is an earmark? So earmarks are parts of a budget that are dedicated to a specific organization or program.
So if it's going to, let's say, the, the dog park in somebody's district or the community center in somebody's district, that it is taking a part of a pool of money for a topic and saying it goes to here specifically, like kind of designating those specifics sums of money and earmarks are often what legislators priorities in the budget are. Rather than focusing on, let's say, can we increase the pool of money? A lot of legislators ask will be, how can I get money for this specific item in my district? And it creates a way of, it's a way of building buy in for a budget, because you're tying everybody's individual district related asks together. Butas is no surprise, the people who get the bulk of the funding are those at the top when it comes to getting things through your district.
And they also do it without a degree of transparency. No at all. There's another in terms of recent articles in the Boston Globe that covered this well, noted that some of the top ranking members in the legislature, like the House ways and means chair, vice chair, like the majority leader, kind of like the speaker, never filed amendments about things connected to their district, but all of them ended up in the budget anyway.
Of specific, kind of earmarked funding for things in their districts. Because what the legislature does, as we've talked about in some past, is that the House does what's called a consolidated amendment, where they will group together budget amendments that have a shared, shared theme or topic and then toss out all of the content and then replace them with a collection of earmarks from high ranking legislators and typically other favorite legislators. And what this does is it takes out the awarding of funds outside of any assessment of need and puts it up based on an assessment of power, which is, which maybe in some cases, need and power can align.
But there's no but that's not going to happen often, and there's no reason why it ever, why it ever would. So That you'll have, and it's like kind of an obscene kind of differential and how some of the districts of the highest ranking legislators will get compared to districts that actually would be very high need,comparatively. Trying to pull up the exact numbers where, for instance, note quoting the piece.
Yeah, like where the ways and means share additions for his district totaled nearly $1.9 million, more than any single city or town outside of Boston got indirect earmarks. And with like similarly high numbers coming for Quincy, where the speaker's from, where the House ways and means vice chair and Gloucester Kind of got a lot.
It's a fundamentally undemocratic process and goes against how most people would like. And you're like schoolhouse rock version of what a budget would be like where you think people are assessing need and kind of allocating funding to meet need. It's basically just whoever has the most power can get some perks for their district that they can then use to help cement their own power.
Right. And importantly, it's a corrupting influence. So it's not like they have power, therefore they get the money.
It's like they have fealty to power. They, they promise, you know, they align with the, with the speaker who does these out. Exactly.
It also reinforces. Exactly. Exactly.
So it's not just those who are at the top who have it and take, and like, he, with those who power get all the spoils. It's getting those power get the spoils and can dole out the spoils accordingly, which then creates an incentive structure that if you want to get specific things for your district, then you decide that you want to play nice, because when it comes time to have your meeting with the ways and means to pitch from the House side to pitch why x, y or z program in your district desperately needs some earmarked funding.
If you've never done anything to piss them off, you feel like you have better standing to make those asks.And it's a way of also reinforcing that, that you can give favored legislators more funding as a way of saying this person is doing what we like, be more like them, and we'll reward you and we're gonna not reward those that we think are not playing well with. Playing nicely with others.
Playing nicely with the speaker, specifically. Exactly. Meaning the speaker.
Meaning the speaker. Exactly. Yeah.
I just wanted. I don't have anything else to add to that. I think that's exactly right.
And just like, it's just a really, again, it's just I want to highlight for people all the ways that the speaker, so that you get an extra person, you get more money, you get earmarks, you also get to park in the thing because apparently, because the tea's on fire, you're not going to fund it. And so if you do what the speaker wants. Right.
If you do what the speakers. This is what happens. If you do what the speaker wants, these are all the things you get.
And it's, and it's just, and like, these are all the corrupting forces to get to the place which is the thing we, we all say, which is, which is, you know, we, the reps work for the speaker. They don't work for, he does, they don't work for us. You know, and, um, I'll just say really quickly because I want to.
Well, let's, um, we can sort of segue to the housing. It's just like, um, you know, so the housing bill came up and, uh, the house, there's a, sorry, the, not, um, the, the health care bill came up and the end, I was, I was talking about this on Twitter that I thought it was really interesting that the globe said that the, how the house ways and mean, the healthcare finance has a bill that came out, 92 page bill about health care finance and the speaker supports it. And so then it says, so the next step is the Senate.
They don't even, that's how little they, that's how much no one believes that the House has oversight. Like,they're not like your state rep is going to have a say. So make sure to contact them on this health care finance bill.
They're like, well, the speaker supports it, so it's onto the Senate. It passed one committee. Right.
But we all, but that's it. Right. They don't even, it's so, it's so a part of the system that they don't even bother to pretend that the person you vote for will have a say in the process.
They don't even pretend that they're going to read it. They won't. There's no reason they're going to vote for it anyway, let alone that media outlet questioning the, whether that is the right thing that we should be doing.
Right. Not only do they not, you know, question and say, hey, like, this is not how it should be. There should be some sort of democratic process, but they literally just don't even, they're like, oh, yeah, speaker, the speaker approves, therefore, on it goes, yeah, I want to just touch a little bit on the question of inflation because I want people to understand that, you know, a lot of the sort of level funding and the ideas around how we got here have to do with predictions about inflation that they had in the past.
So if one of you guys wants to go into the details about that, that'd be great. I'll just say really quickly, it's like, you know, people assumed because we had pretty stable inflation, that'd be two to 3%. Things just costmore.
They just do, everything costs more. And when they raise more than, when they, when costs go up more than expected, you have to raise the spending. You're doing more than expected.
And I think this is really important because for some reason, political reporters at the Globe and master list and Beacon, CW, Beacon, Commonwealth magazine don't seem to understand that inflation exists. And so they always do this thing where they're just like, oh, they're spending more money, but I'm like, but it's less than inflation. So they're not spending more.
It's just basic, it's just basic math. It's just like, and just a little bit really simple for people. If eggs used to cost $3 and you think they're going to cost $4 next year and they cost $9 and you get a raise, that makes, that gives you a four dollar raise, you now can't afford those eggs.
Even though you got a raise, you still can't afford them because you thought they'd be $4, but now they're $9. That's what happened in education. That's what happening across the state.
Everything costs now, those $9. They're raising it to $4. They're, they're putting out press releases saying,look, we raised it to $4 and the media is like, look, they raised it to $4 and I'm just like, but that's not how it works because things cost more.
It's just basic understanding of the economy and math and inflation. It's very frustrating, but it's just basic.You have to note that they're missing the punchline, right? They're telling the joke, but they're not telling the punchline of the joke, which is like, no, it is not an increase.
Great final words about the budget this year, the budget process and everything else. Before we close, I just want to say again that they're not addressing housing and they address health care. They addressed sort of like poverty and other issues all the same way, which is that they throw money at people who are at the absolute margins, which is the absolute right thing to do.
We need people at the margins to have more money in their pockets to be able to withstand the fact that they aren't doing the things they should be doing, which is fixing these fundamentals. Right. Rather than giving people dollar 50 in their pocket for more rent, you need to address the fact that rent is rising thousands of dollars every year.
And so this is, again, the problem is that they are not addressing the underlining issues to all of those things. They have a healthcare fine. They have a health care bill which won't address the problems with health care but will maybe stop a steward from going bankrupt and ruining, like, hospital care in an area which is not nothing, but it's next to nothing.
And so, like, this is, again, there's a housing bill that will address people who need, who need housing whoare at the exact margins. Right. And, you know, it will help fund the housing.
The public housing stock we have now is sorely in need of updating. And it will do real money updates to that, which is not nothing, but is not. Is not actually addressing, despite what the, what the governor and theSenate and the, and the, and the speaker says.
It's not actually addressing the fundamentals of housing. They're not actually addressing the reasons that it's unaffordable to live here. And they're not giving anybody the tools they need to address those, those,um, the.
The structural problems around housing. They're not giving people tools to a direct. To make it, you know,to make it, you know, there, there's a little bit with, um.
With, with a tax, with a transfer fee tax, but that is not the full transfer t tax. And it's not as ambitious as it needs to be. And the transfer t tax by itself would not fix it.
It's just one very small tool in the thing they're not doing. They're not allowing municipalities to curb, um,raising rents above inflation. They're not allowing municipalities to make it easier to, you know, they are making it a bit easier to have, um, accessory units.
That's fantastic. But they're not easing zoning restrictions. They're not pushing further things.
The minimal thing they did around the MBTA, which is, again, not, nothing, is being pushed back from people locally to you. So you need to care about your local municipalities and your zoning boards where they're trying to stop basic things like multifamily housing.
So there's just a lot of work around the fundamentals to housing that this budget won't address despite the press releases. Yeah. And the way I think of it is like, when we talk about fiscally responsible, not like being pennywise and pound foolish, this is being socially responsible.
You know that if you don't fix any of the underlying problems, these problems, they don't stay the same. They get worse. So we're allowing these problems, we're allowing more people to become homeless.
We're having more people who are having health care, debt and healthcare issues, more people who are not able to get the education that they need. And these have long term effects in our society that are detrimental. They cause things to get worse.
They cause our economy to become worse if we don't have people who have the right education to be trained to do the right things and compete, you know, with folks in other countries and abroad. So, youknow, it is, it is irresponsible for our government to be making these decisions. Jonathan, your, your final thoughts? Yeah, my, my final thoughts is that when assessing a budget, legislators often like to talk about how a budget compares to the prior year's budget.
And though, as Jordan noted, that can often lead to some funny math because of not accounting for differences of inflation, et cetera. But even if they did look at real numbers compared this year compared to last, that's still not how you should look at a budget. We should be looking at what are the needs that we have in the Commonwealth and how are we using our collective resources to meet them.
And on many cases, we continue to fall short on that. And that's how people should always view that work,of passing a state budget, of given the need that exists across the commonwealth, what we need for everybody to be able to thrive and for everything to work. Everything to work that needs to work and to run smoothly.
That needs to run smoothly and be able to get what they need to live here. Is it doing that? And if it's not,what are the gaps and how to fill them? Thank you so much to everyone listening. Let us remind you that we are one of the rare outlets that covers these topics in detail and the analysis.
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