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
2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009

General Comments on the Commonwealth ( your wealth is their wealth ) of Massachusetts Expenditures
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.     Everett Dirksen 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? Top twenty 2009 budget line items Expense Code Description Amount 7061-0008 Chapter 70 school aid $ 3.725 billion 4000-0500 Health and Human Services $ 3.117 billion 4000-0600 Elderly Affairs $ 2.164 billion 0699-0015 Debt Service: interest $ 1.815 billion 4000-0700 Elder Affairs: medical assistance $ 1.535 billion 0000-0003 Pension Transfer [off budget] $ 1.465 billion 1108-5200 Group Insurance payment $ 782 million 0000-0002 MBTA Transfer [off budget] $ 768 million 0000-0001 SBAB Transfer [off budget] $ 702 million 5920-2000 Mental Retardation: residential services $ 569 million 8900-0001 State Corrections: operations $ 531 million 7100-0200 UMass: operations $ 493 million 0611-5500 Treasurer and Receiver: to cities/towns $ 380 million 5046-0000 Mental Health: adult mental health $ 321 million 4800-0038 Social services: foster care services $ 314 million 4000-1405 Elderly Affairs: chronically unemployed $ 305 million 4403-2000 Transitional assistance $ 303 million 4000-0640 Elder Affairs: nursing facility Medicaid $ 289 million 7043-7001 Special education grants $ 269 million 8100-0000 State Police: operations $ 257 million Total top twenty $20.104 billion 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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