MORE ARTICLES

Stay Connected!

Receive the latest updates in your inbox.

LATEST ARTICLES

I am about to toss my cookies

/0 Comments/in , /by

That was my dad’s self-edited way of expressing his disregard for stupidity. Granted my dad was a marine and therefore knew other ways to express his disgust. He was also a Greek immigrant and, because he went to war as a young guy, largely self-educated. He understood how essential it was to know math and English and U.S. History to succeed in a country where the haves have a red carpet out for them. Well, when a friend passed on this morsel — a video with Cookie Monster peddling 21st-century skills — there is little else I could say… especially in a blog post where I cannot employ spicier words for these donkeys. The lack of critical thought and faddishness […]

Wet, Wetter, Wettest

/0 Comments/in , , /by

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

/2 Comments/in , , /by

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

/0 Comments/in , , /by Liam Day

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?

/0 Comments/in , , /by

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.