In The News

Colin Jones, senior policy analyst at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, said their analysis showed that if lawmakers based the Chapter 70 …

Marie-Frances Rivera, MassBudget president, at the time warned it sets the state up for a “short-sighted recovery.” Baker’s budget relies on drawing …

Marie-Frances Rivera, MassBudget president, at the time warned it sets the state up for a “short-sighted recovery.” Baker’s budget relies on drawing …

Marie-Frances Rivera, MassBudget president, at the time warned it sets the state up for a “short-sighted recovery.” “The combination of action at the …

Marie-Frances Rivera, MassBudget president, at the time warned it sets the state up for a “short-sighted recovery.” “The combination of action at the …

The Senate and House chairmen of their respective chambers’ budget committees, Michael J. Rodrigues and Aaron Michlewitz, prepared to host a virtual roundtable with experts to determine how dire Massachusetts’ financial picture is.

“There’s a budgetary crisis happening,” said Marie-Frances Rivera, president of … Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.

The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center decided not to prepare a revenue estimate number for this hearing, said its president, Marie-Frances Rivera, citing “all the uncertainty and variables.” In April, MassBudget said that if patterns from prior recessions hold and there is some limited growth, fiscal 2021 collections could land between $5 billion and $5.7 billion shy of the estimates budget writers agreed to in January.

“We think that there’s a budgetary crisis that’s happening and we all have to be just fully aware and eyes-open about that,” Rivera said Wednesday. “There’s danger because all of the public goods that we’re relying on to guide us through this public health economic crisis, whether it’s health care, whether it’s housing people, whether it’s educating our young people, a lot of these are in jeopardy and the needs are growing.”

According to the News Service, Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a state finance think tank, says its time for lawmakers to consider other ways to fill budget gaps, other than borrowing money.

Translation: raising taxes.

The original unemployment system was limited in various ways and covered only about half of the actual American workforce, according to Phineas Baxandall, a social insurance expert at the Mass. Budget and Policy Center. The expansion Congress passed during the shutdown made payments last longer, made them much more generous, and allowed more workers to qualify, including part-time workers, independent contractors, and the self-employed.

“The Commonwealth should pair limited use of borrowing and withdrawals from the Rainy Day Fund with new policies to increase revenue, thus avoiding budget cuts which would deepen and prolong the recession,” says the report, which came out today. It specifically argues against relying mostly on borrowing to plug holes in the budget, and cites a 2015 study by the Congressional Budget Office looking at the Great Recession, which found that “for every additional dollar of revenue raised from taxes (which are used to support public spending during a recession), economy activity drops by less than a dollar.”

In other words, MassBudget contends, raising taxes in the last economic downturn proved to have a net positive impact on the economy. Of course, that idea is sure to meet resistance from the state’s wealthier residents who will likely shoulder the burden of those taxes, and it will be up to lawmakers to decide both who will benefit from the recovery from the pandemic, and who will have to pay for it.