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Collecting Taxes, Outlaw Style

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Most of us know what will happen if we don’t pay taxes lawfully assessed us: Penalties, interest, liens, attachments and by and by under certain circumstances, criminal complaints betide. We can complain all we like, but the tax-collector will win, because the law is on his side. But what if government tried to collect taxes not authorized by law — and used its coercive powers to extract payment? Preposterous? It is happening today — as communities, mainly Boston, try to get universities, hospitals and other non-profits to make much larger payments “in lieu of taxes” — payments never authorized by the legislature. In most cases these payments are not voluntary. They are vigorish (vygrash, a good Ukrainian & Yiddish word […]

A novel way to present your resume

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Jon Kingsdale, former executive director of the Commonwealth Connector, has a piece in tomorrow’s (it’s 11:05 pm Sunday) Globe, which is worthy of the Obama teleprompter. The basic point he wants to make is that “Americans are confused” about the federal law, and that MA’s health reform experience has been a rousing success. Uh, no. It’s neither been a flat-out success nor a failure. It’s a mixed bag, and some of the threads at the bottom of the bag are getting bare. Pioneer’s never come out for or against the MA reform. We first believe in state experimentation, and second that empirical data can sometimes surprise you. Given the mandates, credible coverage requirements, the uncompensated care pool, and the fact […]

And now VT takes a pass on Race to the Top

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So now we are at VA, MN, CA and TX all taking a pass on RttT. So is Indiana. Oh, gosh, golly, darn it, so is Kansas. An AP report had the following news (from the Globe) on VT: “When we look at it realistically with limited resources we have to make sure we put our energies and our efforts into places that we know we can be successful in and that fit what the direction of Vermont education is moving in,” Vilaseca [ed note: Commissioner of Education in VT] said. “Vermont has a highly successful educational system, when you look at our NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results when you look at how our students do across the […]

Eliminating the Competition?

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State regulations promulgated in December are going to close down church-based shelters for the homeless. The regulations’ given rationale is the state’s legitimate interest in safe and sanitary conditions in overnight shelters. But as written, the regulations would require churches to spend impossible sums to achieve compliance; and, perhaps tellingly, they would delimit a homeless person’s stays to 35 overnights per year, and would ban them altogether from June 15 to September 15. Such restrictions apparently will not apply to state-supported shelters — only to those run by churches and private organizations such as Salvation Army. One wonders if the hidden agenda isn’t to “eliminate the competition” provided by faith-based voluntary organizations in order to clear a path for much […]

Globe down 23%! Is it the price hike?

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Jon Chesto says it is in a WickedLocal report. I wonder, though. After all, if you look at the numbers in a USA Today report, you’d see that a comparable newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, is suffering the same kind of drubbing. The San Francisco Chronicle’s weekday circulation fell 23% to 241,330 The Washington Post’s average weekday circulation dropped 13.1%, 478,482. USA Today, which has the second largest circulation, declined 13.6% to 1.83 million. The New York Times’ weekday circulation dropped 8.5% to 951,063. Anybody see the Herald numbers?