2007 (the middle of fiscal year 2007), Romney argued that he had left the state with a large budget surplus, after he cut hundreds of millions of dollars of programs. However, upon taking office, successor Governor Deval Patrick said there would be a $1 billion deficit for fiscal 2008 if existing service levels were carried over into the next year's budget. At the same time, Patrick restored $384 million in the emergency budgetary authority spending cuts for fiscal 2007 that Romney had made. The budget for fiscal 2008 that Patrick submitted in February 2007 included $515 million in spending cuts and $295 million in new corporate taxes. As it happened, fiscal 2007 ended with a $307.1 million deficit and fiscal 2008 ended with a $495.2 million deficit. Romney later said, while campaigning for the presidency, "we didn't just slow the rate of growth of our government, we actually cut it." However, by most measures, state government spending increased in Massachusetts during Romney's governorship. For his fiscal policies, Romney received a C in 2004 and a C in 2006 from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, in their biennial Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors. Unemployment and new jobs creation Romney's term as governor fell during a respite between two nationwide economic recessions. When he took office in early 2003, the nation as a whole was still suffering the effects of the early 2000s recession. Massachusetts was losing manufacturing jobs, and, with an economy heavily dependent on the technology sector, had been badly shaken by the dot-com bubble collapse. When the national economy eventually began to improve, the state lagged behind the rest of the nation in job growth and employment. Job growth in Massachusetts rose at a rate of 1.5 percent (compared to the national average of 5.3 percent), placing Massachusetts 47th of the 50 states in new job creation over the course of Romney's term. The annual rate of job growth was improving by his last year in office, moving Massachusetts up from last place nationally to 28th. Economists note that governors generally have relatively little impact on their states' employment numbers, good or bad, as these are dominated by forces beyond their control. The statewide health care reforms that Romney helped enact, and signed into law in April 2006, exemplified the state's national leadership role in that industry; overall, there was a 7.6 percent increase in