What heartless conservatives would balance a $1.9 billion state budget shortfall by service cuts to the needy, without any effort to take back the tax favors so long showered upon the rich and well-connected?  Was it the Tea Party extremists?  The right-wing fringe of the Republican Party?  No.  “No new taxes” was this year’s pledge by Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo, leader of the  dominant Democratic Party. And DeLeo’s stance was supported by other Democratic legislators -- and by newly reelected Democratic Governor Deval Patrick.  

The 2012 state budget as passed was a disaster for children, students, seniors, the disabled; for families, schools, communities;  for anyone dependent upon state services.   But not everyone is feeling the pain.  There was no cutback in the corporate welfare budget, a $2.2 billion “black box,” as Auditor Suzanne Bump called it.  Despite ample evidence that business subsidies are ineffective in creating jobs, these so-called “tax expenditures” have, in the last five years, been growing at twice the rate of the service budget, with virtually no oversight or accountability.  A bill attempting to establish some basic disclosure of who is getting this money and what the impacts might be is languishing in the Joint Revenue Committee.  Legislators busy cutting health care and education don’t seem to even want to know what’s being done with the money they’re giving to their business friends.

Clear alternatives to the DeLeo/Patrick approach were on the table.  The Act to Invest in Our Communities, a bill sponsored by sixteen legislators, would have filled the purported budget gap by raising taxes on high-income (half-million per year or more) earners while modestly reducing taxes for the bottom sixty percent.  Supported at a packed State House hearing by respected economists and hundreds of community advocates, this bill was entirely ignored in the voting, even by its sponsors. 

Nor was any consideration given to the Green-Rainbow Party’s proposal to halve the corporate tax-break budget, saving $1 billion annually, and to establish a single-payer health insurance system, reducing health costs by $1.5 billion annually.  Indeed, rather than crippling our economic future with massive job-killing cuts, the state could save billions and invest in long-term growth by implementing long-standing recommendations, from the Green Party and from recognized economists, for a more visionary economic and social policy program. Such a program would embrace sustainable energy at fair prices, localized agriculture and manufacturing, green-economy education and job creation, demilitarization, and ending the costly, cruel and futile drug wars.

The DeLeo/Patrick cuts are falling especially hard on the poor and on those who are being pushed from the middle class into poverty.  The Mass Budget and Policy Center (http://www.massbudget.org/documentsearch/findDocument?doc_id=141) identifies the following FY12 cuts from FY11 levels – and these compound three previous years of service reductions that have pushed many state agencies to the brink of collapse:

• Early Education and Care: cut by $14 million
• Higher Education: cut by $64 million
• K-12 Chapter 70: cut by $82 million
• Environment & Recreation: cut by $5 million
• Health care: cut by $318 million
• Human services (children, youth, families, elders, disability): cut by $12 million
• Infrastructure, Housing, Economic Development: cut by $102 million
• Law & Public Safety: cut by $136 million
• Local aid: cut bu $65 million (may be restored -- but will still be 33% below FY09’s original budget)

Further, in an alarming sign of things to come, the budget discussions have adopted a tone that scapegoats public sector workers and their unions.  Collective bargaining for health care is already being curbed, and teachers’ rights are under attack by the government-funded charter-school movement.

But most important: None of this slashing was necessary. 

In what should be a major scandal, the Boston Globe - after the budget was settled -- released the state news that tax revenues for this year rose by $2 billion – more than enough to close the whole “budget gap” with no service cuts.  This windfall was not a surprise.  It had been had been accumulating for months before the budget vote, as reported for April by the  Department of Revenue and the State House News.  As the Globe reported, the numbers were already way up in June; indeed, the Department of Revenue, releasing the figures, cited “a state economy that grew noticeably stronger over the past 12 months.” 

Yet, Patrick’s administration quickly downplayed this revenue bonanza, saying it might not come again next year and the money should be squirreled away in the “rainy day” fund – which would fill it to its highest level of the decade.  Obviously, it’s not raining for the administration and the Legislature.  But it’s raining hard on millions of people who are struggling in a high-unemployment economy to make up for the failure of the Commonwealth to maintain its services.

Why is the Democratic Party leadership enacting cuts beyond those any Republican has yet achieved?  It is NOT because there’s a shortage of money.  Money is available, and it is flowing freely to the wealthy and well-connected in nepotism, tax breaks, regulatory indulgences, contract favors and other forms of corruption.  What we have is neither a “taxing problem” nor a “spending problem,” to cite the current false dichotomy bandied about by politicians.  It is a problem of values. 

We have a single-party government that has two heads but one heart. Across the country,  Democratic politicians are striving  -- ever more successfully -- to prove they are better servants of the rich and the corporations than the Republicans could ever hope to be.  The ethics, economic theories and social goals of both major parties are shaped by the same campaign donations and lobbying pressures from corporations and a small but powerful cadre of super-rich individuals.  Democrat strategists feel that they can take the entire progressive electorate for granted, because betrayed progressives have no place to turn.  Democratic Party unity is achieved by bogeyman politics, scaring people to vote for the lesser of two evils.   And the Republicans play their role to perfection, always announcing a more outrageous right-wing proposal as soon as the Democrats accept a compromise on their previous proposal.  Both parties have engendered popular distrust, and have taken to the subterfuge of labeling their candidates as “outsiders.” 

It has taken years of betrayal and disillusionment, but people are beginning to see that its time for a third – or really, a second – political party.  Nothing will come of progressives’ yammering at their elected officials to pass this or that piece of legislation, however meritorious a particular bill might be.  No significant changes are being achieved, that way, and any small victories are drowned in the massive tide of social and economic havoc wrought by the best candidates money can buy.  Democrats still talk – occasionally -- about taking care of working people; but in their actions they stand on the side of privilege.  All but 6 legislators voted to approve this year’s disastrous budget, with Democrats and Republicans standing arm-in-arm, putting a victorious face on it for their constituents and praising each other’s bipartisan spirit.

After years of Clintonian “triangulation” and other ideological surrenders to the Republicans in the name of “bi-partisanship” and “reinventing government” and “tough love” for the poor,  Democrats have forgotten why they exist.  They stopped “feeling your pain” a long time ago.

The budget fiasco is part of a bigger picture: We are losing our hard-won democracy as big money becomes ever more powerful and democratic institutions are undermined to empower business interests. People who have been working in good faith within the system, and for years dutifully voting for the “lesser of two evils,” are realizing that the system has abandoned them, and they are turning away from it. We need to plant the seeds for a democratic and social revival, with a new generation of candidates, elected with public campaign financing, beholden to no one but the voters.

Independent candidates appeal to those frustrated with the mainstream parties, but as “lone wolves” their effectiveness is limited and their platforms often idiosyncratic. The Tea Party is a popular mobilization, but a phony one, corporately funded and manipulated.   The Republicrats have created immense barriers to third parties. However, the Green-Rainbow Party, (the Massachusetts affiliate of the Green Party of the United States), now eligible for ballot status, is a legitimate progressive flag-bearer; its principles (see the “Ten Key Values,” at http://www.green-rainbow.org/10key_values) commit  to social equity, economic justice and environmental protections, and to government that is, in former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s words, “unbought and unbossed.” As the two party duopoly self-destructs, Greens can and should step forth, bringing the leadership toward a sustainable social compact that Democrats have proven they cannot provide. 

July 30, 2011

Shirley Kressel, a Boston resident, is an urban design professional. She has been working with the Green-Rainbow Party's Better Budget Initiative.