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Teacher pensions: Answering Your Questions
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byLast week, I blogged on teacher pensions and the piece drew agreement and criticism. In response to critics, I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. Today, I wanted to continue the conversation by following up on the good questions raised by commenters. How much do teachers’ salaries go up on average? Berkman34 and ChuckinMedford asked about the assumption of a 4.69 percent annual increase in salaries that underpins my average salary number for 2011. There are a few things to say on this which can be helpful. First, the 4.69 percent increase is simply what empirically happened between 2004 and 2009, which were also difficult fiscal years, and years in which municipal aid from the state was not seeing the […]
FactCheck.org: ‘RomneyCare’ Facts and Falsehoods
/0 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Healthcare, Healthcare, News /byA reporter from FactCheck.org visited Pioneer’s office a couple of weeks ago to learn more about the Massachusetts health reform law. Without a doubt this will be a big issue in the 2012 presidential campaign. I give the Annenberg Public Policy Center at UPenn and their FactCheck.org project credit for attempting to get ahead of the curve here. A few thoughts on the article: More Research Needed: There are still a lot of unknowns in Massachusetts. The data in the state is improving but much is still unclear. Pioneer has attempted to capture key metric in its Report Card Series. Interim Report Cards on Massachusetts Health Care Reform A) Increasing Access B) Equitable and Sustainable Financing C) Administrative Efficiency D) […]
Relearning the Lesson
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byIts been painful to watch the situation with Transportation Secretary Mullan play out over the past two weeks. As an observer of transportation in this state, I have had the opportunity to interact with him and he’s been gracious enough to appear at one of our events. I’ve found him to be smart, knowledgeable, and dedicated. Further, given two false starts at the position and the importance of managing major structural reforms, the administration could ill-afford another transition at the Secretary level. So its been painful to watch as we review the same painful lesson once again: its not the ‘crime’, its the coverup. The inability to get a story straight on a hot button issue related to the Big […]
Obamacare superstar sales team goes missing
/0 Comments/in Blog, Healthcare /byHere’s yet more evidence that, in the year since Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid presided over the ramming of Obamacare through Congress, the dust has yet to settle – the Democratic superstars who were supposed to be trumpeting its virtues are in hiding. Jennifer Haberkorn has a piece on Politico noting that the Health Information Campaign, launched with great fanfare last June, is all but defunct. Wal-Mart Watch founder Andrew Grossman unveiled the Health Information Campaign with great fanfare last June. Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy’s widow, Vicki, were expected to lead the effort. They’d have help from former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn. They’d have an office in Washington with 10 or 15 operatives backing the Affordable Care Act […]
No answers from the Know Nothings
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byBoston 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 […]