Budgeting lawmakers

LURED BY THE siren song of election-year opportunity, lawmakers are straying from the course of fiscal discipline -- and the alarms are starting to sound.

Why should anyone care about budget issues in balmy July?

Well, recall one important lesson of the 1980s: If state spending increases regularly outstrip what's sustainable, chaos ensues when the economy turns down. Back then, it took big budget cuts plus large tax hikes to stabilize the state's finances.

So look at what's happening now.

By the Legislature's own reckoning, the $25.7 billion budget it just sent to the governor increases spending by 7.5 percent. That follows two successive fiscal years with total budgetary spending increases of 7.9 and 7.8 percent. By contrast, from fiscal years 1990 to 2000, only two years saw budgetary spending hikes of 6 percent or more, according to Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation figures.

Most years, the increase was 5 percent or less. And indeed, 5 percent annual spending increases are about what can be sustained over time based on long-term average revenue growth, according to an analysis by the Executive Office for Administration and Finance.

The new budget, of course, is hardly the only new spending the Legislature wants. It has also passed an economic stimulus package, as well as a supplemental budget for the fiscal year that just ended, for a combined $760 million.

A&F analysts estimate that, if the Legislature has its way, the total spending increase in the fiscal year that's just begun will actually hit 8.5 percent.

But whether the increase is 7.5 percent or 8.5 percent, ``it is an alarming rate of growth and truly unsustainable when you compare it to what the historic average growth in tax revenues is," says Thomas Trimarco, secretary of Administration and Finance.

The taxpayers foundation thinks the overall percentage increase will be somewhat lower. Still, Michael Widmer, president of the foundation, also sees a growing problem.

``The bottom line is clearly more than the state can afford in light of future obligations," he says.

Both A&F and the taxpayers foundation say the combined spending will mean a substantial tapping of the state's rainy-day fund. According to A&F estimates, which are lower than the foundation's figure, the Legislature's plans would probably require using about $340 million in rainy-day reserves.

Here, the key point is this: With the economy recovering, albeit slowly, and with revenues as strong as they have been in several years, the state shouldn't be financing spending by using reserves.

Now, the Legislature hopes that revenues will come in above current forecasts, as they did in the last fiscal year, thereby replenishing those reserves. But as Widmer notes, betting on higher revenues ``is not responsible budgeting."

No, it's not. Still, it's built into the DNA of most lawmakers to care more about increased spending and, particularly, district needs than about the state's overall fiscal health. And certainly with city and town budgets pinched, more local aid and education dollars are called for.

However, the state can't afford that new spending, plus all the other priorities in a budget that resolved most House-Senate differences by adopting the higher figures, plus a long, expensive list of district projects. Of course, the appeal of those projects is particularly hard for logrolling legislators to resist. If a lawmaker can claim credit for delivering new dollars for district needs, he or she wins accolades from grateful locals. A budget with a leaner bottom line, by contrast, returns little by way of political benefit.

``People want to see expansion or new spending, but not socking money away," laments one veteran legislator. ``That has no present-day constituency."

Yet that's precisely why the legislative leadership needs to insist that the state budget be kept within the bounds of the affordable. During his speakership, Thomas Finneran made fiscal prudence a principal concern. With him gone, the Legislature has lost its chief fiscal disciplinarian. Still, by upholding some of the vetoes that Governor Mitt Romney has cast -- and others expected shortly -- the legislative leadership can make a necessary course correction.

Here's a reason Democrats desperate to see one of their own in the corner office should be concerned. The supposed need to provide a check on the Democratic Legislature's spending habits is one of the strongest arguments in the Republican playbook. By offering up a banquet of election-year spending, the Legislature is reinforcing a damaging stereotype -- and leaning into a political punch.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.