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Wet, Wetter, Wettest

Jack Butterworth reported in the Daily Item on a recent town hall meeting with the Governor and Secretary of Education S. Paul Reville in the library of Marblehead High School. Among some good proposals such as pension reform for public employees, the speakers also called for “a graduated income tax which will take four years to achieve” and “MCAS testing reform.” Longtime tax foe Barbara Anderson of Marblehead spoke against the graduated income tax after seeing hands go up in support of it, calling the proposal a plan “to pick us off, one tax bracket at a time.” “The harder you work the more they steal from you. That’s why the voters defeated it at the ballot,” she said. Butterworth […]

Interesting Wrinkles in New GIC Study

A new study, published by the Rappaport Institute and Collins Center, examines Springfield’s experience with the transition to GIC. The author, Bob Carey, provides a lot of interesting details. My observations: 1) High Out-of-Pocket — one of the typical objections to the GIC is their (deliberately) high out-of-pocket costs. It turns out that Springfield had moved to a new health insurance plan two years earlier that had some of the highest out-of-pocket costs I have seen. That made GIC a lot more palatable to municipal workers. 2) Shedding 5% of Insureds Helps to Cut Costs — By tightening criteria (e.g. no more coverage for the Symphony) and requiring documentation (thereby reducing fraud), Springfield reduced the number of subscribers by 5%. […]

Strategic Debate is Good for the Country

President Obama and former Vice President Cheney delivered competing speeches yesterday, addressing the broad issue of national security, with specific reference to the issues surrounding Guantanamo, indefinite detention of suspected terrorists and the use of waterboarding. Whatever one thinks of either our current President or former Vice President, they are both serious men and, wherever one stands on these issues, publicly debating them is only good for the country. As our executive director Jim Stergios wrote in an op-ed that ran this past weekend in both the MetroWest and Milford Daily News, we seem to have proved ourselves incapable of engaging in serious, strategic debates. At the federal level, passing an appropriations bill now amounts to action. Money is great. […]

Can He Say That?

Treasurer Tim Cahill went down to New Bedford and told them: the chances that Massachusetts will build [South Coast] commuter rail by 2016 are “bleak” and that “it is virtually going to be impossible” for the state to build it in the foreseeable future. Wow, that’s quite a mouthful, considering that our current Governor publicly threw his then-Secretary of Transportation under the bus for even suggesting that the South Coast rail line wouldn’t be paid for by revenues created by new jobs.

An absolute must read

Again, I have to give Michael Graham his props. As a colleague of mine wrote in an e-mail this morning, Mike absolutely nails it. I would go so far as to defy anyone to find a better summation anywhere of the parochial, retchingly chummy nature of Boston’s politics. Actually, check that. It is possible that Kyle Cheney’s coverage of the special commission on pensions on the State House News Service (subscription required) is in the running. Watching the commission in action Monday, or lack of action I should write, I was reminded of a high school cafeteria and its division between the nerds and the cool kids, in this case the unions and their legislative representatives on the commission, who […]