THE PIONEER BLOG

Jim Stergios

No answers from the Know Nothings

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Boston and Massachusetts as a whole have made some strides toward racial harmony in the past few decades. But we still face what some politicians like to refer to as the “civil rights issue of the 21st century”: education. Fact is from the time of Brown v. the Board of Education, education has always been the civil rights issue. Our history with tolerance has, as we know too well, high points and some really low points. At the same time that we nested some of the early abolitionists, we became a stronghold of vituperative anti-Catholicism. The picture above shows one of the brutal emanations of that intolerance: the Plug Uglies. The Plug Uglies’name was fitting, indeed; commissioned by the Know […]

Jim Stergios

What’s a retiring teacher’s pension worth?

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TRAIN CRASH – Watch more Funny Videos Well, that’s an easy one to answer. It depends on how much a retiring teacher earns at the end of his or her career. So let’s start there. According to the state’s department of education, in 2009 the average teacher in the Commonwealth earned $67,577 in 2009. That’s the last year for which we have complete data. If you apply a reasonable algorithm, based on the lowest assumption for salary increases (just over 4.5% annually) made by the pension system itself, you get an average teacher salary in 2011 of about $74,000. Retiring teachers, of course, reach salaries that are far beyond the average salaries. You put 30, even 35 years into a […]

Jim Stergios

The New Monopoly and the Ballot Initiative

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Here is testimony I submitted today to the Election Laws Committee on the attempt by big public labor to undermine the ballot initiative process. James Stergios, Pioneer Institute Testimony ~ Wednesday, March 23, 2011 ~ 10:30 AM ~ Room B-1 HEARING BEFORE ELECTION LAWS COMMITTEE Senate Chair Barry R. Finegold, Senate Vice Chair Sal N. DiDomenico, Senator Kenneth J. Donnelly, Senator James T. Welch, Senator Thomas P. Kennedy, Senator Michael R. Knapik, House Chair Michael J. Moran, House Vice Chair Sean Garballey, Representative Cory Atkins, Representative Stephen Stat Smith, Representative Brian M. Ashe, Representative Dennis A. Rosa, Representative Denise Andrews, Representative Jerald A. Parisella, Representative Daniel K. Webster, Representative Marc T. Lombardo Thank you for the opportunity to testify here […]

Taylor Armerding

Public pension tension is warranted

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Interesting juxtaposition in the Globe recently on public pensions. First came columnist Renee Loth, carrying water for the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, formerly the Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts. The rumor, when they changed their name, was that the group did it because the nickname Barbara Anderson’s group Citizens for Limited Taxation had given them – “Tax Everything And More” – had gained some serious traction. Loth rehashed the favored talking point of the past couple of years from public employee unions. “Independent” studies by groups like MBPC find that public employees actually make less than those in the private sector, when compared with those with similar education. The “penalty” for those with college degrees working in the public […]

Taylor Armerding

It’s not where the gov is, it’s the business climate

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The timing was lousy. Gov. Deval Patrick was on his big “trade mission” to Israel and England when the giant sucking sound came from Marlborough – Fidelity announced it was essentially shuttering its operation there, moving 1,100 jobs to Merrimack, N.H. and Rhode Island. It tended to take the wind out of the governor’s announcement that this 10-day junket might bring all of 50 jobs to Massachusetts. Patrick didn’t help his cause much, declaring from London that he was “deeply frustrated” that the company had blindsided him, and later demanding that they “tell me to my face” that the decision is final. What does he expect – that CEOs are going to check with him first, or ask his permission […]

Jim Stergios

Bill Gates doesn’t like liberal arts, Steve Jobs does

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So Bill Gates lets us all know what he really has in mind on standards and the liberal arts. In a speech to the National Governors Association in late February, he suggests that higher education spending be devoted largely to job-producing disciplines. In his view we should drop funding at the higher ed level for the liberal arts, because there is not much economic impact/job creation impact from the liberal arts. Compare that to Steve Jobs, who during his release of the iPad 2 (admittedly not the most successful launch I’ve seen of an Apple product), trumpeted the liberal arts. It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that […]

Jim Stergios

Hollowing out our cities

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So today we learn that Massachusetts’ cities continue to “hollow out.” Secretary of State William Galvin may want to sharpen his calculator a bit, and I am sure that Boston is relieved to know that its population has increased. But Boston is an exception. “Hollowing out” was the term used in the 1990s to describe the trend among Japanese investors to transfer manufacturing assets to China and other low-cost centers for doing business. We’ve seen a similar phenomenon in our New England and Rust Belt cities, where manufacturing jobs have flown off to greener pastures in the South and of course to other countries. In the 1950s alone the South’s Gulf coast there was 10 times the industrial growth experienced […]

Steve Poftak

Finding Money for the Convention Center

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The Convention Center Authority convened a panel of the city’s great and the good some months ago to determine if it should go forward with an expansion plan that included a publicly subsidized 1,000 room hotel. It floated a trial balloon over the weekend regarding that hotel and the response has not been great. The BBJ’s Craig Douglas does a back-of-the-envelope calculation and comes up with 1,350 privately-supplied hotel rooms in various states of planning and development. He notes that these projects, all under the leadership of various well-connected developers, are experiencing some sort of delay and questions how an additional 1,000 rooms (all benefiting from a public subsidy) improves the situation. I take a different tack in examining the […]

Jim Stergios

Some thoughts on parochial schools

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March 17th marked St. Patrick’s Day. Today, Glen Johnson of the Globe live-blogged this morning during the annual breakfast that featured this year U.S. Senator Scott Brown, Governor Deval Patrick, and a number of our other political leaders. Celebrations including parades were held across the state in places like Abington, Boston, Holyoke, and Scituate. On this day of belated celebration of the patron saint of Ireland, it is only right to kick off a handful of blogs on parochial schools. We know the challenges. After marked growth in the number of schools and of students prior to 1940, the enrollment numbers for the Archdiocese of Boston’s schools has dropped from 151,000 to 42,000 since 1965, the majority of the decline […]

Jim Stergios

On radiation in Japan

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Decidedly not a Pioneer topic, but one that is on the minds of so many. What are the major pathways for the radiation released from the Fukushima nuclear reactors? See for yourself, with ranges of radioactivity color-coded by region. This map is updated regularly.

Stephen Lisauskas

Evolution in Performance Management

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StatNet – a performance management system of government performance management programs – is helping to improve the effectiveness of local government. This evolution – from managing performance locally to sharing data to establish industry benchmarks – has the potential to revolutionize municipal management.

Jim Stergios

Asleep at the wheel – mid-race

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Everyone outside of the Dome knows that Massachusetts is in a race for jobs. When you are in a race, you run the whole race. You don’t just show up for the flag waving. If you listen to Governor Patrick talk about how Fidelity did not give the state an opportunity to “compete for jobs,” I am sorry. Fidelity has been competing all along, trying to beat its competition. It’s the state that has for the longest time turned a blind eye toward financial services, one of its largest sectors, and more specifically toward one of its largest employers. State House News [subscription required] reports that: Back from his 10-day trade mission to Israel and Great Britain, Gov. Deval Patrick […]

Joshua Archambault

VIDEO DEBATE: Obamacare One Year Out

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With the one year anniversary of the passage and signing of the Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare” next week, there will be many op-eds and articles trying to capture how things have changed over the last 12 months. Pioneer Institute decided the best way to do a “check-up” was to put two of the nation’s preeminent minds on health policy: Dr. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former adviser to McCain for President, and Dr. Jonathan Gruber, former adviser to President Obama– in one room for a debate. The event naturally built on last year’s Hewitt Lecture delivered by the Dean of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Jeffrey Flier, in which he gave his pessimistic assessment of the newly passed law days after it passed […]

Steve Poftak

Boston School Lottery and the Globe

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The Globe is doing a full ‘package’ on the Boston school lottery (a subject near and dear to my heart, see here and here). They’ve done a nice job explaining the very complex lottery and selecting a number of different families to profile (although the West Roxbury family seems like a reach — the pastor of a start-up Evangelical church?). It appears that this series will continue over the next two weeks as lottery results go out to each of the families. A few observations: 1) How many receive their top 3 choices? The introductory Globe piece has graphic (apparently unavailable on-line) that emphasizes the how the vast majority of applicants get one of their choices (but those who don’t […]

Elizabeth Prasse

The Compensation Conundrum

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While the public and the media have been quick to criticize the “golden parachute” payments by Blue Cross Blue Shield to its former CEO as clearly improper, the broader questions raised regarding compensation paid by tax-exempt organizations—and in particular, when such compensation should be deemed inappropriately excessive—are far from straightforward. The Internal Revenue Code provides for so-called intermediate sanctions in the form of an excise tax when tax-exempt organizations are deemed to have provided an excess benefit to disqualified people (meaning those people in a position to exercise substantial influence over the organization’s affairs, such as its officers and directors). An organization can seek to avoid intermediate sanctions by following prescribed procedures to create a rebuttable presumption that a compensation […]