Pre-election special: the state budget

People up on the state ballot initiatives have probably noticed that there's an item on the Massachusetts ballot to end the state income tax. Ignoring details of whether this will actually happen if the measure passes, where does the money come from and where does it go?

At the state level there's a good summary of FY09 spending, totaling $23.2 billion. Almost half of state outlays go to "health and human services", with a huge chunk of that being state-funded health insurance programs. About $1.8 billion supports debt service, about $1 billion goes to the lottery. $6.2 billion goes to "education", of that $4.6 billion is primary and secondary education, $0.6 billion pre-primary, and most of the rest college-level. I can't find a specific line item for "assistance to cities and towns" but there are a number of things in the itemized listing that support that -- $3.9 billion for schools, $0.9 billion from the lottery, and a couple of smaller things. (I cannot immediately find the T in here.)

Information on the revenue side is harder to find, but this report has more comprehensive numbers. This talks about a lot of things, including money the state spends that's not in the budget proper. For FY2008 total revenue was $41.5 billion, of which $22.5 billion is "taxes" (pp. 32-33). (There's some scary-looking discussion of interest rate swaps on pages 65-66.) The table on page 314 finally gets down to the number I'm after: in FY2008 $12.4 billion of state revenue was from income taxes, vs. $4.1 billion from sales and use taxes and $1.5 billion for corporate taxes. At the end of the day, then, this is almost exactly 30% of state revenue.

Trains, horses, guns, and those wacky Canadians

The cover article from this month's Trains magazine is about snow-clearing efforts in eastern British Columbia by the Canadian Pacific. That's fine, every couple of months there's an article about some rail line crossing the Rockies or Sierras or Appalachians, and it's a 2% grade for 50 miles, and a third of that is in tunnels and a third in snow sheds, and it snows, and they clear it, except when they don't. Sure. This was reading like a pretty typical Trains article, complete with narrative about a cab ride, until I got to:

Since the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway through Rogers Pass in the 1960s, the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery has aimed 105 mm cannons at developing avalanches....

Not exactly the usual subject matter.