The Commonwealth’s Fiscal Year 2009 budget will be the first one for which there has been enough information made publicly available for everyone to see and understand the priorities within the budget, and for everyone to evaluate how each budget proposal is balanced.
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Starting with the Governor’s budget proposal in January, and continuing through the proposals made by both the House and Senate, there has been significant progress in the “transparency” of information, implementing many of the recommendations made in
Creating a Transparent Budget for Massachusetts2, a report by the Massachusetts Budget Transparency Project.
This
MassBudget Brief takes the information provided by the House and the Senate, and creates a complete “Sources and Uses” statement, comparing the two proposals, and identifying the differences between them. Because the “Sources and Uses” lists all proposed state spending and all sources of revenue, the reader can compare how the budgets balance (i.e. whether there are sufficient revenues to pay for all of the expenses), and can compare whether the two budget proposals are structurally balanced – whether ongoing spending is supported by permanent, rather than temporary or one-time revenues.
Although neither the Governor nor either the House or Senate included a Sources and Uses statement within the budget documents made available to the public, for the first time they both provided most of the information needed to construct such a statement.
The following chart summarizes the budgets as passed by the House and Senate. A detailed explanation of each line follows.
Click here to view this chart full size in a new window.
Staff
