In The News

Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, said no saving is too small, but regionalizing municipal services won't conserve a substantial amount of money. "This is a good primer and set of recommendations," Widmer said of the report. "It won't have any significant impact on municipal finances in the short term and maybe in the longer term."

Massachusetts Taxpayer Foundation president Michael Widmer called the tab "outrageous." "I don't fault the city," Widmer said, "but the fact that the city had to pay $400,000 to get a ruling . . . is salt in the wound for the taxpayer."

"I don't believe (they) will have any difficulty recruiting superintendents," said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. "We're still talking about a very generous benefit."

On an annualized basis, the sales tax reduction would allow consumers to be spared of $2.5 billion in sales taxes in fiscal 2012 and $110 million in alcohol taxes, according to the estimates outlined Tuesday, which are similar to projections offered earlier this year by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

Baker said that his proposed budget reforms would save the state roughly a billion dollars, but the Massachusetts Taxpayers' Foundation estimated a total savings at half that number.

Non-governmental organizations are trying to help citizens sort through this morass of information, including the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation and the Massachusetts Budget and Polity Center, make it easier to compare various budget proposals.

Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, said such programs tend to become rife for abuse. Asked about the e-mail, he said, "I would think with this level of specificity that there was undoubtedly some abuses."

This one-time money is likely to dry up much faster than tax revenues recover; the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation is predicting a $2.5 billion shortfall in fiscal 2012. That's bad enough. But voters will likely be confronted in November with ballot initiatives to cut the state sales tax from 6.25 cents to 3 cents and to repeal the sales tax on alcohol purchases altogether. Should those measures pass, billions of dollars in expected revenues would vanish.

Though Baker slams Patrick for "spending our state into oblivion,'' state expenditures during the years Baker oversaw the budget grew by an annualized rate of just shy of 5 percent, according to an analysis by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a nonpartisan, business-funded watchdog group. Since Patrick presented his first budget, for fiscal year 2008, state spending has increased an average of 2.4 percent, according to the group.

"The private-sector benefits have eroded and public-sector benefits have been largely untouched," Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation told The Patriot Ledger earlier this month.