THE PIONEER BLOG

Steve Poftak

Overstimulated

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Ed Glaeser has an interesting and thoughtful piece in today’s Globe on the various stimulus ideas floating around. I am a bit concerned about the rush to spend billions of dollars willy-nilly. The stimulus package has turned into a Christmas Tree of sorts, with every group hanging their desired ornament on it. But I fear most people are not paying attention to the details. The State has cranked out its list. There are some worthy projects here, but there is also a lot that has not been fully vetted. $200 million for rebates for biomass pellet furnaces? $200 million buys you about 60,000 of those furnaces outright (against a housing stock base of around 2.5 million) and it increases as […]

Steve Poftak

Will they give the money back?

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As I was walking to work this AM, a cab (thanks hackney license #385!) ran a red light, stopping only to berate me for walking in a crosswalk with a walk signal. It got me to thinking about the fare increase of this summer. Back in August, in the throes of the gas crisis, the city of Boston raised rates after a series of complaints by cab drivers and their representatives. I advocated back then for a break in the artificial monopoly that supresses the number of cabs in the city (read the comments too). As gas prices have dropped from $4+ in August to less then half that (at least where I live), the new, higher rates remain in […]

Jim Stergios

If Kant had had a nose for public policy

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Passed on by a friend with a mathematical appreciation for symmetry, and for that balance of responsibility and opportunity, in public affairs is a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal: I read with interest the president-elect’s appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Mr. Duncan may in fact be the right man for the job, but if the president-elect and his new secretary really wish to fix public education, they need only push through one change: It is hereby illegal for any member of Congress to send his or her children to any nonpublic elementary, junior or senior high school. What do you think? My guess is the whole system would be fixed over the weekend. Our friendly […]

Steve Poftak

Cut the Income Tax! Raise the Sales Tax! Lower and Raise Property Taxes!

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Hey, its not my idea. It’s a proposal floated by a consultant to the the Readiness Project, tucked in an appendix to the Readiness Finance Commission, released on New Year’s Eve (see “Beware the Doldrums“). To quote from the appendix itself: 1. Increase the burdens of state-level general sales taxes by 25 percent and state-level selective sales taxes by 60 percent. 2. Create a local-level general sales tax with a burden of $2.00 per $1,000 of personal income. 3. Decrease state-level personal income taxes by 15 percent and state-level corporate income taxes by 10 percent. 4. Decrease local-level property taxes by 10 percent but create a state-level property tax with a burden of about $1.50 per $1,000 of personal income. […]

Steve Poftak

Parking garages are silly investments for the State

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Today’s Globe reports on a bond bill earmark that gives Salem funding to build a parking garage. The article focuses on environmental advocates objections. They (correctly) don’t want to see the bulk of Transit-Oriented Development funding going to a single project. And I’ll give you another reason to dislike the idea — parking garages should be able to support themselves. If there really is ‘demand’ for parking, then people will pay for it. And if parking generates a revenue stream, then it should be able to finance some portion of the garage, if not all of it. Perhaps a private developer could be given a 20 year lease to take any risk off of the community. Don’t believe me, take […]

Amy Dain

Zoning out or zoning in-clusionary

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Hot trends in local zoning include age-restricted villages, in-law abodes, and inclusionary zoning – a requirement or incentives to include affordable houses in market rate developments. Our 2004 survey revealed that 99 of the 187 communities within 50 miles of Boston have inclusionary bylaws on the books. Developers argue that some inclusionary laws drive up the cost of development (and ultimately the price of market rate housing), and can make some projects infeasible. Housing advocates argue that inclusionary policies are the best way to ensure that affordable housing is integrated throughout communities, and built in the first place. NYU just released a study comparing inclusionary laws in MA localities to San Francisco and DC regions. If you are considering inclusionary […]

Jim Stergios

Results in on Teach for America

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What kind of impact does the influx of young, motivated people (ahem, without formal training in our dear schools of education) have on student performance? A big thank you to the Urban Institute for looking into this question. From their press release (last week): Teach for America teachers may be new to the profession, but they are generally more effective than their experienced colleagues, finds a new Urban Institute analysis. On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers’ effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with […]

Jim Stergios

Patrick comes out for school choice!

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Your Excellency, We at Pioneer were feeling as double-crossed as perhaps Bobby Haynes.  We were feeling it on school choice, knowing that you benefited from the school choice opportunity provided by the “A Better Chance” foundation to attend Milton Academy.  Bobby felt it on being double-crossed by the Doubleday deal, when you double-booked on the day of the casino vote.  He stayed on the Hill and earned himself the Speaker’s ire.  As someone who respects the free-market, I hope you got a good deal. Now, I know that it is difficult to come right out and say you are for school choice, so I think the sophisticated way you did it is just great.  According to today’s Globe, “an unspecified portion of […]

Steve Poftak

One Last Word on the Film Tax Incentives

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Yesterday’s Globe had an article critical of the film tax credit offered by the Commonwealth. I will say that it has significantly improved the celebrity level of the gossip columns, minimizing the Globe’s Names & Faces section’s embarassing fascination with C-list celebrities eating chinese food at the Kowloon. Wow! John Waite? Pro wrestlers? Wasn’t exactly Page 6 material. However, the Department of Revenue’s report makes one fact clear — these are temporary jobs: …the 20 film productions for which tax credits were claimed in calendar year 2006 employed approximately 2,267 individuals, with an average employment duration of 3.2 months, with the employment duration ranging from one week to 12 months. Weighted for the number employed and the duration of employment […]

Steve Poftak

What’s Going on at Higher Education

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The Commonwealth released a mundane piece of annual debt disclosure a few days ago. One interesting section, on page 11, is the number of budgeted workers in the state’s workforce, which has grown by almost 6,000 employees (from a base of 62,000) since June 2004. Leading the charge? The Department of Higher Education, which has added almost 2,700 employees during that span, an increase of 22.5%. Yet, their enrollment levels have only increased by 6% at best during the span. What gives?

Jim Stergios

Benefit blowout

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You are constantly berated for not saving money, folks. You overspend. You should put the money in bank accounts and let the government do all the borrowing to pay for the promises it makes to you. From John Goodman (and health blog HERE) is a neat packaging of Social Security and Medicare liabilities we are racking up… As John suggested in his email, read and weep. On Good Friday (when most people were off, including most reporters) the Administration announced that the following Tuesday during Spring Break (when Congress was in recess and everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere) the Social Security/Medicare Trustees annual report would be released. Apparently someone isn’t anxious for you to pay close attention to this year’s […]

Steve Poftak

Lottery Questions

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Interested in how your town fares under the Lottery — take a look here: Lottery Workbook This spreadsheet tells you how much your town gets from the lottery relative to the sales of lottery tickets in the community. It also calculates how much people win from those tickets and adds it into the amount of aid to give another angle to the notion of return on investment. Feel free to comment on tweaks, mistakes, or observations from the data.

Jim Stergios

Hope is not a strategy

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The Great Beacon Hill Foodfight has now reached the Big Apple’s fishwrap paper of record. Big news in the New York Times is that Governor Patrick has lost steam, and that this may portend what an Obama presidency would be like. Discussing his loss on resort casinos, the Governor noted in an interview: “I don’t accept that we can’t get anything done because we lose one issue. Come on. People around here act like the only thing that happened last year was picking these drapes and buying a car. There’s a whole lot more.” Mr. Patrick noted the incresae in state spending on education (ho-hum), housing (did I miss something?) and 300,000 residents with health insurance under the health care […]

Jim Stergios

Teacher shortages

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I love the Education Intelligence Agency. Click HERE to enter the dimly lit cavernous corridors of the Agency and read the full version of what follows. The topic is teacher shortages, and it is a great concern; but Mike Antonucci (the Education Spymaster) scopes out a brief history of the teacher labor market to ensure that we are thinking about the current shortage without hysteria: One would think that with all the technological and statistical tools at their disposal, school districts and state agencies would be able to make reasonably accurate predictions of enrollment and, therefore, hiring needs. However, in state after state we are seeing layoffs and marked competition for the job openings that do exist. In Florida, for […]

Jim Stergios

Floor falls out in California housing

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On the LA Times blog today there is a distressing bit of news about the distressed California housing market. Home prices in the state, the blog notes, fell 26 percent (three times the national average) between February 07 and February 08! –Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed’s interest rate-cutting campaign “will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market.” –In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home. The L.A. Daily News: “During January and February, there were […]