MORE ARTICLES
Annual Massachusetts Outmigration Hits 39,000, Up 1,100% Over The Last Decade: BU StudyApril 24, 2024 - 1:00 pm
Hoover at Stanford’s Stephen Kotkin on Stalin’s Tyranny, WWII, & the Cold WarApril 24, 2024 - 12:33 pm
Superior Court Judge Invalidates “Equity Theft” Law as UnconstitutionalApril 23, 2024 - 1:04 pm
Tax Man Confounded: Why High Rates Haven’t Yielded Higher RevenueApril 23, 2024 - 12:58 pm
Massachusetts’ Workforce Growing Older and More Diverse, Remains Highly EducatedApril 18, 2024 - 9:26 am
Johns Hopkins’ Ashley Berner on Educational Pluralism & DemocracyApril 17, 2024 - 2:53 pm
Why the secrecy? Pioneer Calls for Open Meetings Dealing with Steward’s Impact on Patient Care.April 16, 2024 - 1:59 pm
Industrial Policy Reimaged: Can Government Improve Free MarketsApril 16, 2024 - 12:34 pm
39th U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky for National Poetry MonthApril 10, 2024 - 12:16 pm
A Practically 100% Guaranteed Free RideApril 9, 2024 - 1:21 pm
Stopping the Drip, Drip, Drip
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Blog: Better Government /byI posted a few weeks ago, regarding the quiet, unchecked potential expansion of legislation that would greatly increase pension costs. So, its only fair that I give credit to the Joint Committee on Public Service for putting a severe limit on this type of behavior. They are requiring that all ‘reclassification requests’ (the practice of changing the classification level of an employee or class of employees, thereby increasing their pensions through statutory action; one of the many gaming techniques detailed here) come with an estimate of the cost and a written opinion from the Retirement Board that actually has to pay out the money. Its apparently angered at least one of their colleagues, but we salute their common sense request […]
Ummm, ahhh, the number is 617-723-2277
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Blog: Better Government /byHeh, heh, still waiting for the Patrick Administration to call. Did you feel a palpable shift in the oversight of state government last month? Sure you did. October 18th marked the expiration of my term on the Commonwealth’s Finance Advisory Board. Still waiting for that reappointment phone call from my friends in the Administration.
Or you could just give the money back to ratepayers
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Blog: Better Government /byTuesday’s Globe had a story on the tug of war going on regarding the Renewable Energy Trust with some legislators seeking to move it out of the quasi-autonomous Mass Technology Collaborative (with its… ahem… own loyalties) and into the Environmental Affairs Secretariat. The Trust, like many well-meaning programs, suffers from the Ginsu Knife effect (remember – it slices, it dices, but wait, there’s more….). It offers grants, rebates, technical assistance, equity investments, debt financing, and marriage counseling. (OK, I made that last one up.) The net effect being that its almost impossible to figure out if the program is doing any good. I’m all for clean energy, but taxing our utility bills then shuffling the money off to a quasi-state […]
Some ugly numbers on deficient bridges
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Economic Opportunity, News /byThe Reason Foundation has posted up some data on the number of deficient bridges across the nation. The feds track this stuff for obvious reasons (mobility across states, an understanding as to how states are doing and what they are doing with fed money, and also because bridges that are rated ‘deficient’ become eligible for federal funding for repair. Overall, Reason notes that The condition of the nation’s highway bridges continued to improve from 2004 to 2005. Of the 596,980 highway bridges in the current National Bridge Inventory, 147,913—about 24.52 percent—were reported deficient for 2005 (see table), a slight improvement from 2004. In 1998 about 29.0 percent were rated deficient. However, progress is slow; at the current rate of improvement, […]
Thoreau, he most certainly is not
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /by Liam DayThis is priceless. David Wasserman, a Madison, Wisconsin middle-school teacher, recently refused to administer the state assessment to his students. It appears he was protesting No Child Left Behind’s mandatory testing requirements. As the controversial law’s first “conscientious objector” he received a fair amount of press coverage. In fact, he recently gave Newsweek Web an interview in which, when asked why he took his stand, he responded: I feel that the tests assess academic achievement in biased ways, with a challenging and confusing format of questions and answers. Shoot. I just hate that confusing question and answer format.