What's your philosophy about the state government's role in providing human services? You don't talk much about that much on the trail.
Did you go to the forum? The human services forum [in Boston, sponsored by the Providers Council]?
I was not there. What is your philosophy about that?
My biggest philosophy about health and human services, as I said it that day, is the system is too complex, and it gets in the way of itself, and it underperforms. It doesn't do what it could do with the resources that it has on behalf of the people that it serves. It needs to be a lot simpler, a lot less complicated, and it needs to get far less complicated. I mean, 25 percent of the personnel budget now gets spent on administration. You've got hundreds of offices all over the commonwealth. There aren't even, I mean, you don't even have contiguous areas around how the different departments and agencies are organized. They don't have a unified database. Everything about the way the thing is structured is designed to make it less effective than it should be at serving the people it's supposed to serve.
Is there any concern, when you have to make these budget cuts you talk about — and obviously once you get past the mandatory spending a lot of that is going to come out of human services — I know you talk about improving performance, but are there particular areas where you want to make sure, where you're concerned about the services that might be affected, whether it's homeless, or disabled . . .
I actually think the governor's approach, which is to cut programs instead of cutting bureaucracy, is exactly backward. I think he has way overemphasized the program cuts and way underemphasized cleaning up the way the place works, and making it simpler and less complicated. When I say that, everybody says, "Well, that means you're probably going to end up reducing the number of people who work for state government in health and human services," and the answer to that is yes. And I don't say that easily, because I like and admire people who work in state government. But the governor had the same choice and he cut programming for developmental disabilities, he cut programming for homeless families, he cut programming for the soldiers' homes. He didn't go after the bureaucracy. I'm going after the bureaucracy. And, by the way, I think if we went after the bureaucracy we would create a health and human services system that would perform at a much higher level on behalf of the people it's supposed to serve.
The state's jobs have grown since last December, the numbers do say, as Deval Patrick says, fastest growth with 65,000 new jobs. I take your point about still being in the middle of the pack as far as unemployment, but if he doesn't deserve credit for that job growth, what is the reason for it?
The people of Massachusetts. Look, every survey that's out there says the same thing, the ones where the state performs horribly and where the state does well, they all say the same thing: really educated workforce, really smart population, very creative, tons of sort of built-in infrastructure in technology, life sciences, all these other areas, but really high tax, really complicated, terrible regulatory environment, very expensive business costs, not competitive. So my view on this is the people of Massachusetts are overperforming on this stuff, and state government is underperforming. And state government is basically being dragged along by the people of Massachusetts. That's why I say the people of Massachusetts deserve a state government that plays at the same level they do, that's what I mean. If we had a state government that was affordable, and competitive, this state would rock. I just can't even imagine the way we could perform economically and culturally and every other way.
