The Case Against Mitt Romney: What He Did to Massachusetts

This is the first of four posts covering:

• (THIS POST) What Mitt Romney did to Massachusetts while he was Bay State governor.
• What he did to the nation while he was governor.
• His risky associations and entanglements. This one has a “surprise.”
• What he did to the nation, the Republican Party, and John McCain during his GOP primary run.

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WHAT MITT ROMNEY DID TO MASSACHUSETTS

This post will focus on four items that for the most part “only” affected Massachusetts. Clearly there are national implications in each, but they are not as direct as the one I will save for the next post. There are other failures under Romney’s watch that merit attention, specifically judges, adoptions, and parental rights; but there is only so much time and space.

He championed a state-run healthcare system that is coming apart.

A May 21, 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial (backup link) noted how CommonwealthCare aka RomneyCare is working in the real world:

Mitt Romney’s presidential run is history, but it looks as if the taxpayers of Massachusetts will be paying for it for years to come. The former Governor had hoped to ride his grand state “universal” health-care reform of 2006 to the White House, but his state’s residents are now having to live with what he and the state’s Democratic Legislature passed. As the Boston press likes to say, it’s “the new Big Dig.”

….. the plan isn’t “universal” at all: About 350,000 more people are now insured in Massachusetts since the reform passed. Federal estimates put the prior number of uninsured at more than 657,000, so there was a reduction. But it was not secured through the market reforms that Governor Romney promised. Instead, Massachusetts also created a new state entitlement that is already trembling on the verge of bankruptcy inside of a year.

….. This year’s appropriation for Commonwealth Care was $472 million, but officials have asked for an add-on that will bring it to $625 million. For 2009, Governor Deval Patrick requested $869 million but has already conceded that even that huge figure is too low. Over the coming decade, the expected overruns float in as much as $4 billion over budget. It’s too early to tell how much is new coverage or if state programs are displacing private insurance.

….. Hailed at first as a new national model, the Massachusetts nonmiracle ought to be a warning to Washington. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both proposing versions of RomneyCare on a national scale …..

So let me get this straight: Establishment Republicans, prominent talk-radio types and many pundits, some of whom made their careers opposing HillaryCare in 1994, are feverishly (pun intended) lobbying John McCain, who says that “Families should be in charge of their health care dollars and have more control over care,” to choose as his running mate the guy who created a government-controlled healthcare disaster. Because, “obviously” (/sarc), he’s an “economic conservative.”

Nonsense. Any advantage John McCain might have as the guy who won’t foist HillaryCare/ObamaCare 2008 on us evaporates. Though he may try (and he has), Mitt Romney cannot renounce his handiwork.

Mitt Romney raised taxes and fees.

The Center for Small Government, which is behind the initiative to repeal the income tax in Massachusetts, says that:

In each of the four years Romney served as governor, he raised taxes - while pretending he didn’t. He claims he only raised mandatory government “fees.” But government mandatory fees are nothing but taxes, and taxes are nothing but mandatory government fees. Romney’s new tax-fees raised hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenue for the state government every year.

He also increased several taxes by “closing loopholes” to enable collection of a new Internet sales tax and by passing legislation that enables local governments to raise business property taxes. This, he claims, is not raising taxes.

McCain’s credibility on refusing to raise taxes, and keeping the Bush tax structure that has been in effect since 2003 in place, will take a huge hit if he chooses tax-raising Romney as his running mate.

Romney allowed/encouraged large increases in government spending.

Again, from the Center for Small Government:

…. not only did Mitt Romney refuse to cut the overall Massachusetts budget, he expanded it. Dramatically.

The Massachusetts state budget was $22.7 billion a year when he took office in January of 2003.

When he left office four years later, it was over $25.7 billion – plus another $2.2 billion in spending that the legislature took “off budget.” (Romney never reminds us of this fact.)

The net effect of budgets proposed and signed into law by Mitt Romney? An additional $5.2 billion in state spending – and a similar increase in new taxes.

….. when it comes to tax and spend policies, he’s not only in lockstep with the Democrats. He leads the way.

Each of the four years Romney served as governor, he started budget negotiations by proposing an increase of about $1 billion. Before the legislature even named a budget figure.

Romney initiated massive new spending - without any prodding.

Under Mitt Romney’s “stewardship,” state spending in Massachusetts increased 23% ($5.2 billion in increases divided by the original $22.7 billion budget) in four years. That’s roughly twice the rate of inflation during that period.

John “No Earmarks” McCain (about 1/3 of the way through McCain’s text at link) undermines his message of toughness on spending by choosing Romney.

Mitt Romney introduced statutorily sanctioned state-subsidized abortions in Massachusetts for the first time.

I’m getting a bit ahead of the core of the next post, but an appetite-whetter on the proper role of the separate branches of government will be helpful here.

Twice, Massachusetts’s court system “ruled” that poor residents are entitled to state-subsidized abortion services. As you will learn later, if you didn’t know already, a court ruling is not a law. Legislatures pass laws. Previous administrations in Massachusetts apparently imposed state-subsidized abortions on the health care system without bothering to demand that the Legislature pass a law enabling them.

There’s a word for this: “illegal” (if you find that hard to handle, go to the link, or wait for a fuller discussion tonight).

But, as I noted way back in November, the Legislature-passed RomneyCare’s package of services includes ….. state-subsidized abortions, which now have a legal underpinning in the Bay State for the first time:

Mitt Romney claimed to have experienced a prolife “epiphany” before signing CommonwealthCare and its state-sanctioned, state-subsidized abortions into law. Some “epiphany.”

John McCain claims to support “Human Dignity and the Sanctity of Life.” As with the previous three items, if the Arizona senator selects Mitt Romney as his running mate, he undermines the strength of yet another core message.

Mitt Romney, at least domestically (I’ll look at the foreign matters in a later post), undermines most of John McCain’s key differences with Barack Obama. The Obama campaign and the Democratic Party will have endless fun pointing out the myriad flaws in Romney’s record, and how that record is at odds with McCain’s core principles. No amount of money from Romney’s own stash of cash, or that of his friends and benefactors, can hope to make up for that.

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UPDATE, July 23: Massachusetts resident John Haskins told me in an e-mail that Romney starved local and county governments:

In your analysis of Romney’s economic impact in MA, I didn’t notice a mention of the fact that the sole result of his redirecting some state spending that was funding local government services (so that he could market himself as a “fiscal wizard” when running for president!) was that our property taxes more or less doubled. (I have no figure, but they are far higher as a direct result.) That has made the burden of home ownership unbearable for many. This is fueling defaults and foreclosures, which devastate families with children, and deflate the housing market and eventually bankrupt mortgage lenders (layoffs in the financial sector), crush the residential construction industry, cause construction layoffs, then more mortgage defaults by those laid off… and then other financial dominoes fall.

We are now paying property taxes based on market values that are far higher than anyone could imagine selling their home for. Longer term, property taxes tend not to drop when the justification for their increase is no longer valid. So we undoubtedly have a permanent annual increase of thousands of dollars being paid by each family (homeowners).

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Previous Related July Posts:
- July 20 — Mary Katharine Ham Should Trust Her Instincts (As Should We)
- July 19 — K-Lo Demonstrates the Delusion
- July 17 — Paul Weyrich Lays the Foundation
- July 16 — Introduction