Reason #3 to Vote No on Question 1

[asterroc]

I've been telling everyone that should the income tax be repealed, that we'd lose critical services like police and firefighters, as well as massive K-12 teacher layoffs. I'm kinda surprised and disappointed that no one has challenged me on it. Surprised b/c the state doesn't directly pay for any of these, the towns/cities/districts do, and disappointed b/c I now have a perfect comeback.

This interactive map, created by the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) shows the predicted result of a 37% statewide budget cut on all the towns in the state, both the overall state budget, and the school budgets. The state legislature won't be able to just make a 37% cut across the board with all the line items in the state budget, since some items are mandatory, and it wouldn't even make sense to do so, since some items receive federal matching funds reducing those would be shooting yourself in the foot twice. Well that map takes all that into account.

Most towns would actually lose 65% of their state funding, not the mere 37% of the income tax cut. And school districts will lose anywhere from 10% (New Ashford) to 91% (Middletown). Yikes. Hover over the map to see how much your town would lose, and click on your town for more details.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

isn't a mandatory budget item mandatory-according-to-law? are some of thsse laws state laws? does the state legislature maybe have the power to change some of those, in a pinch?

i'm sorry, i don't mean to undermine your generally very good argument, but ‘we should leave this out of the picture because it's mandatory spending’ is one of the things i'm always especially suspicious of.

of course, it could be mandatory at the federal level or according to the state constitution, in which case you'd be more screwed.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Good point. It's possible that if they're state laws that it may be more difficult to change them than to set a budget, I don't know the process of either in sufficient detail to know for certain.

It's also possible that there are budget items without which the state government itself would not function. For example, many collective bargaining agreements (contracts with state employees) mandate both amounts of pay, and a layoff process. It may be the case that it's against the contract to say, reduce the pay of janitors in the State House, and against the contract to lay off just one person in a department (as is the case with UMass faculty), so the only way they could reduce the budget for State House janitor services would be to axe the entire department. And without janitors, I bet the legislators would soon find bathroom breaks to be more difficult. While I bet such a hypothetical situation could be worked around, I bet it would cost more in lawyers' fees than the janitors would have been paid.

[caprising.livejournal.com]

Ohmygosh it's a real honest-to-goodness four-color map coloring. Ok, I know that wasn't the point of the post, but I don't live in Massachusetts and I don't think I've ever seen a large map colored using only four colors.

Possible financial chaos - what else is new?
Four color maps - cool.