Just as good at twice the price?

By Liam Day
July 11th, 2008

Limited, but interesting post on Red Mass Group. (I’ve plugged Blue Mass Group on here in the past and figure, as a non-profit, we should also be non-partisan.)

It seems that, despite a population roughly half of Pennsylvania’s and a geographic area less than a quarter of our fellow Commonwealth’s, our state budgets are almost identical in size – $28.3b as opposed to our $28.2b – which means Governor Patrick’s government will spend just about twice as much per capita in fiscal year 2009 as Governor Ed Rendell’s government.

Now, without having seen any breakdowns, I assume Massachusetts spends significantly more as a state for public education, which is just one of the reasons why we have the best public schools in the country, and the costs associated with health care reform were much higher than most people anticipated.

We can and should debate the state’s appropriate role in both education and health care – particularly whether it should be the purview of the state to guarantee access to health insurance; even more particularly, whether the state should be mandating insurance coverage. We should also be asking ourselves whether the slew of recent legislation passed and proposals floated is worth the various price tags.

Maybe, as voters, we do decide that universal proficiency, universal health care, expanded commuter rail service, targeted tax credits for biotech and film companies, infrastructure repair and everything else on offer by the Governor and Legislature are what we want. But we should be having a public and spirited debate over spending priorities.

And a simple, but stark statistic such as this one might be a good place to start.