Excuses/Excuses and Mass is Below Average on fiscal condition.........and it's not due to having to pay much of the bill of "leech states"
Enjoy looking stupid
What makes you think it's not due to having to pay the bill for leech states? Keep in mind that while some of our worst states (e.g., the wretched South Carolina) gets back nearly $8 from the federal government for every dollar they contribute, there are a handful of states, including Massachusetts, that experience a net drain from the federal government. If Massachusetts were getting back several bucks for each contributed, don't you expect achieving a good fiscal balance would be easier?
As for the Meratus Center's stats purporting to show fiscal trouble in states like Massachusetts, there's a reason there's such a huge divide between what their listings say and what the smart-money thinks, in terms of the risk the free market is attributing to each state by way of bond rates: the Meratus center uses per capita numbers. Thus, for example, Massachusetts looks bad in terms of deficit per capita and long-term liabilities per capita. Yet, by the same "reasoning," most rich people in this country would look worse off than most poor people.
For example, consider two families. One earns $300,000 per year, has three family members, and owes $30,000. The second earns $20,000 per year, has ten family members, and owes $10,000.
Well, any reasonable analysis would tell you the first family is better off. That level of debt is trivial for them -- just 10% of income, compared to 50% for the second. Lenders would spot it in the minute -- charging far higher rates on loans to the latter family. But what if you looked at it in terms of debt per capita? Well then, the first family would be $10,000 per person, and the second would be only $1,000 per person, so that destitute family would come out looking like it was in better shape, fiscally, using a per-capita analysis.
That's why you wind up with many of the richest states in America (Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Jersey,) perennially at the bottom of the fiscal responsibility rankings, using the Mercatus method, while the top states tend to be poorer.
Even when Mercatus uses ratios, they use them in a weird way. For example, consider the current ratio, which is a ratio of assets to liabilities. A ratio over 1 means you have more assets than liabilities and could thus pay all your liabilities even if they came due today. Massachusetts is at 1.11, which is part of why actual lenders don't regard Massachusetts as a credit risk -- they know the state has the ability to pay. Unless the ratio fell under 1, they're not going to worry. But Mercatus puts everyone on a distribution and converts it to a negative number for those below the median, even though they're in an absolute position considered acceptable by traditional financial analysis. Thus, even though Massachusetts has an excess of assets relative to liabilities, it still gets penalized because that excess is smaller than in most states. Yet the hallmark of efficient cash management is to have a ratio above, but close to, one. Huge cash reserves are financially inefficient... you'd do better to put that money to work than to sit on it just to get an excessive ratio.