Jeff Jacoby hits his stride

One of Jeff Jacoby's best columns.

Column after column could be filled with the ways the Massachusetts political class and its hangers-on play taxpayers for suckers - the gold-plated tax breaks for moviemakers, the insanely lucrative sick-time buybacks, the indefensible police details, the public-sector-only paid holidays, the "temporary" tax hikes that last forever, the state budgets that keep growing even as family budgets shrink.

It will never end - not until the suckers get riled up enough to fight back. Not until they start throwing incumbents out of office, instead of blindly reelecting them. Not until they stop letting themselves be treated as ATMs for politicians and doormats for public-employee unions. Not until they force their public "servants" to defer to them, instead of the other way around.

Are you angry yet?

Now that didn't take long, did it?

It certainly didn't take long for Governor Patrick to hedge his bets on property tax cuts. But we knew he'd pull something like this, didn't we?

Governor Deval Patrick, faced with a surprisingly tight budget situation, is tempering some of his campaign promises, saying yesterday that he may have to stretch his much touted plan for 1,000 new police officers over several years and stabilize, rather than cut, property taxes.

"We can definitely start, and we will start down the path of adding more cops on the beat, because I think that's critical," Patrick said yesterday.

Last month, he said on a radio station that "we may not need 1,000 cops" all at once.

He also made it clear that property tax cuts, a recurring campaign theme, are not going to be implemented anytime soon.

"What we can do is stabilize property taxes to be sure," he said yesterday. "We've got to start there."

Last week he also told a radio interviewer that investments in transportation might have to be deferred, though he did not name specific projects.

Patrick has said a budget deficit could exceed $1 billion in the fiscal year that starts July 1. Despite that prediction, he restored $383 million in budget cuts last week made by former governor Mitt Romney in November.