Left In Lowell

This is pretty incredible. Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker made a pretty gianormous pull-it-out-of-your-butt assertion about Romney leaving office with a mythological 5 BILLION dollar surplus (which he claims Patrick squandered). From Adrian Walker (bold mine):

When I reached him yesterday, Baker basically said he had misspoken. He meant to call it a “budget fund balance’’ and claimed the difference is essentially one of semantics.

“I tried to come up with a term that a Joe Q. Citizen could recognize,’’ he said. “I may have called it a surplus yesterday. I didn’t call it a surplus today.’’

The problem is, they aren’t the same thing. A surplus is what it sounds like, the amount of money left over after the operating budget is accounted for. Romney has claimed that he left the state with a $1 billion surplus, and even that is a stretch.

Hey voters, Baker is calling you dumb! How do you like them apples? (By the way, Walker also takes down the myth that past Republican governors were all that fiscally conservative in the first place.)

Apparently, Baker is using the same math that the Bush administration did, for instance when Bush kept all of the costs for his wars in a separate bill from the budget and therefore claiming, hey, look, our budgets aren’t THAT unbalanced. Uh huh. That worked out real good for the country; seems like Baker wants to do the same to Massachusetts. No thanks.

Joan Vennochi also tackles this gross misrepresentation of the truth. Oh, and she also reminds us,

When the Big Dig was short on cash, state officials found a way to fund it. They borrowed $1.5 billion against future highway aid, a debt that left various transportation agencies in economic shambles and a public transit system in dire straits.

Baker was top financial adviser to Cellucci at the time, but he refuses to accept any responsibility for Big Dig decisions made on his watch. They don’t fit the fiscal genius myth he cultivates.

Baker had a large roll in the punt-it-down-the-road decisions made over the Big Dig back then, but now he’s trying to run on being all fiscally smart and stuff. I hope that Massachusetts voters aren’t going to fall for it.

(Links via BMG.)