A closer look at governor's boasts

In announcing his decision not to seek reelection, Governor Mitt Romney said he was satisfied with what he described as ''the whirlwind of accomplishment of the last three years." But some of Romney's assertions were misleading.

Romney said that when he ran for governor ''our finances were a mess, unemployment was high, and we were losing jobs every month."

He and the Legislature closed the budget gap without raising income taxes or borrowing money. But his boast that ''employers have added 35,000 jobs since the bottom of the recession" ignores the fact that the state lost more than 200,000 jobs during the downturn, and that it has been shedding them recently.

Romney also said that, ''taxes have been lowered, most recently for our seniors." But other than a recently approved property tax break for older residents, there hasn't been another significant tax reduction.

The governor recently persuaded the Legislature to grant about $275 million in refunds to 157,000 investors who paid capital gains taxes in 2002, but that is designed to correct a mistake lawmakers made, and is not a long-term tax cut.

The Legislature has ignored the governor's call to roll back income taxes, and he has collected more, not less, tax revenue from corporations by closing what he calls tax ''loopholes."

On education, Romney said, ''we've made big strides, defending MCAS and adding science as a graduation requirement."

But the Legislature was firmly supportive of the MCAS by the time Romney took office, and the state's Education Reform Act of 1993 stipulated that science eventually would be a graduation requirement.