In general, good manners are to be respected. But our dear friends in the business community are overdoing it. In the ongoing debate over municipal healthcare costs, there are now three competing proposals on the table, the Governor’s, the House, and the Senate. The Governor’s effort is largely a bunt — signaling a desire to get communities into GIC or give them control over plan design but pushing the details off onto the regulatory process. The House is much clearer — communities can adjust plan design up to the equivalent of the biggest plan for state workers or enter GIC, so long as 10% of first year savings is returned to workers. The Senate takes a different approach — communities […]

[WARNING: Hard-core transportation nerdiness ahead. Consider yourself warned.] As a user of the MBTA and a fan of transit (no, really), there’s no better place to learn about the minutiae of the system than the T’s Blue Book. It tells you everything (well, almost) you could want to know about the system. Within its pages, you find stuff like: • Most heavily used subway line? Red Line at 74.45m trips per year, which narrowly edges out the Green Line. And the Blue Line lags way behind at 17.88m trips per year. • Most popular station? Downtown Crossing, with 22,880 entries and transfers on a typical weekday. Least popular? Suffolk Downs, with only 794. • Who’s on the bus? The T […]

If you talk with business leaders, you hear stories about the hidden costs of doing business in Massachusetts – huge building projects idled by recalcitrant local building inspectors, regulators blithely ignoring legitimate concerns raised by companies, and a general lack of understanding of how businesses work. I’ve always wanted to quantify these ‘soft costs’ to see if they amounted to much, or were just so much complaining. As I compiled information for my last post on business rankings, one pattern in the data caught my eye. If you look at Massachusetts strictly by the taxation and business cost numbers, we come out in the mid-30s. This year, we were ranked 32nd for tax climate by the Tax Foundation and 39th […]

During last year’s gubernatorial campaign, CNBC ranked Massachusetts #5 as one of the best places to do business. The ranking (and some of the subindexes that weren’t quite so positive) got bandied around by the campaigns as evidence and counterevidence of the state of our business climate. (Even some of my fellow bloggers have referenced it.) If you look at the subindexes for that ranking, you can quickly figure out our strengths and weaknesses – on productivity/quality of life measures, we are very strong; and on business cost/tax policy issues, we are pretty weak. And that gets replicated in lots of similar surveys – depending on which measures are chosen, Massachusetts does very well or quite poorly. So what matters? […]