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$75 Million Reasons to Move?

We picked on Curt Schilling a few months back for considering a move to Rhode Island. And we maintain our position that firm relocation, in the aggregate, is not an important creator of jobs across the entire MA economy. That said, Schilling’s firm has been offered a $75 million loan guarantee (note the difference — a guarantee on a private loan, not a direct loan) by Rhode Island, according to the Providence Business News.

James Carroll Time-Saver: America is Rotten

The Globe’s James Carroll regularly writes op-ed columns* that utilize available newspegs to hammer home one of his key themes: the utter rottenness at the core of “America” and its rapidly approaching collapse. A tour through his back catalog yields lots of examples — disparate items like Christmas, soccer, and the Somali pirates all provide important insight into this theme. So, to save the reader of today’s Globe the trouble of plowing through his whole column, just take your newspegs as the oil spill in the Gulf and General Petreus’ collapse during his testimony last week, then add the usual theme: …..The two Washington hearings captured the widespread American mood of exhaustion and dread. The nation has been drastically confronted […]

Fact-checking The Angle on education reform

In Tuesday’s The Angle video on Boston.com, Globe columnist Scot Lehigh and cartoonist Dan Wasserman slug it out over how to reform our schools. It’s great when people debate education with passion, because we need to keep business, community and neighborhood leaders focused on this issue. Is anything more worthy of debate than how to ensure that our next generation is better prepared than the past and current ones. But great debates need quiet facts. And that’s true as much for Wasserman and Lehigh as it is for Patrick, Baker, Cahill and Stein. So here is a friendly fact-check for the Lehigh-Wasserman smackdown. For example, what to make of Dan Wasserman’s suggestion that charters have pockets of excellence but for […]

Losing the Relocation Lottery: Massachusetts Struggles to Attract and Retain Good Jobs

Losing the Relocation Lottery: Massachusetts Struggles to Attract and Retain Good Jobs Contact Samantha Levine at 617-723-2277 ext. 211, or slevine@pioneerinst.wpengine.com Playing the Lottery: The Impact of Interstate Relocation on Massachusetts Jobs BOSTON – Massachusetts jobs are relocating to states with lower taxes and business costs. Pioneer’s new study in its year-long series on jobs and the economy, Playing the Lottery, shows that Massachusetts has been losing companies and jobs to states that are more receptive to business. The study concludes that policy makers should focus their efforts on improving the general business climate in Massachusetts, not just targeted incentives. Otherwise, Massachusetts will get a few big wins, but lose out over the long term, just like playing the lottery. […]

Memo to Mitchell — Improve Boston About Results

To: Mitchell Weiss CC: Lisa Signori, Chris Osgood Boston About Results should be the centerpiece of the Mayor’s plan for “making over basic city services”. Here’s some key steps to fixing it: 1) Bring the data to life: Don’t break the data up into scores of static PDFs. Provide the data in multiple, user-friendly formats, like Excel, so it can be easily analyzed. 2) Make data comparable: Right now, it shows year-to-date data for this year and full year data for previous years. Provide apples-to-apples data so users can see how this year’s performance stacks up against previous years. 3) Open up the process: Other cities have formal ‘citistat’ meetings and some release the detailed analyses used in these meetings. […]