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Questions abound about the resilience of the Massachusetts economy.  Pioneer Institute has documented that high-net-worth individuals are fleeing the state for states with friendlier tax environments.  There is also a question about whether small businesses in the state can sustain and thrive in a business environment increasingly characterized by high...

Elected officials in Massachusetts sure have a lot to say about “democracy” these days.   For those paying attention to goings on around here in recent years, hearing politicians trumpeting their state as a citadel defending democracy and the rule of law, you might be...

Massachusetts taxpayers were told in 2022 that raising taxes and directing billions in new tax revenues to transportation would dramatically improve quality and reliability. Voters were told the surtax would fix the system. Barely three years later—here we go again.   The...

School choice is sometimes sold as a cure-all for underperforming public schools, other times it is deemed ineffective and a siphon of public resources. Both can be true, but this debate misses the point: school choice is not a guarantor of student success, nor was it ever intended to be. Its purpose is to provide choices, and most agree that choice is good. Not all choices will be good, to be sure. Indeed, there are poor-performing charter and private schools, just as there are ineffective district schools. When systems with school choice features fail, we ought to blame and reform the choices—they are clearly of poor quality—not ban the freedom to choose. It is grossly undemocratic to suggest otherwise.

The Commonwealth’s enormous investments in its schools—over 100 billion dollars since MERA was enacted—have continued to this day, but basic accountability has not. It is time to honor the original bargain. Massachusetts must once again couple its record-high investments with the same uncompromising scrutiny that made our schools the envy of the nation. That means prying accountability out of the foxes’ paws and restoring it to a truly independent watchdog—an EQA reborn.

How has state government spending and revenue changed from 2017 to 2022? Changes in revenue and spending can be a key indicator of state priorities for the size and scope of government, as well as a state’s overall health and economic output....

In 2023, the United States Patent Office issued 159,880 patents for American inventors, according to US DataLabs. That number was roughly half of all U.S. patents granted. One sixth of the patents granted were filed by Japanese inventors; Chinese and Korean inventors...

Massachusetts is in an affordable housing crisis. The median home price across the state was $629,500 in December 2024, up 9.15 percent from $576,700 in December 2023. The median home price across the U.S. was $427,728 in December 2024.  

With Boston projected to lose about $1.4 billion in commercial property tax revenue over the next five years, the city's new budget is less about growth and more about long-term stability.

Public employee pensions contribute to national savings, representing 21 percent of retirement assets according to the Urban Institute. These pensions help public workers plan and live out retirement, especially the 97 percent of Massachusetts government employees who do not earn Social Security benefits through their current job.