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CUNY’s Carl Rollyson on William Faulkner & Southern LiteratureNovember 20, 2024 - 10:36 am
Pioneer Institute Study Finds Massachusetts Saw Four-Fold Loss of Income to Net OutmigrationNovember 19, 2024 - 11:25 am
Massachusetts Job Market Bears WatchingNovember 18, 2024 - 2:10 pm
NH Gov. Chris Sununu on School ChoiceNovember 13, 2024 - 2:02 pm
Five Reasons Why Project Labor Agreements Are Bad Public PolicyNovember 12, 2024 - 9:27 am
Statement of Pioneer Institute on MCAS Ballot Failure and State of Education in MassachusettsNovember 6, 2024 - 2:01 pm
Dr. Helen Baxendale on Great Hearts Classical Liberal Arts Charter SchoolsNovember 6, 2024 - 12:08 pm
Jeffrey Meyers on Edgar Allan Poe, Gothic Horror, & HalloweenOctober 30, 2024 - 11:44 am
Mountain State Modifications: Tiffany Uses ESA Flexibility to Pivot Quickly For Her Son’s EducationOctober 24, 2024 - 12:11 pm
Study Published by Pioneer Institute Shows Massachusetts Learning Loss Among Nation’s WorstOctober 24, 2024 - 10:31 am
Boston vs. Buffalo
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /by Liam DayThe Patriots rolled to victory again last night. The victim this week – the Buffalo Bills. Football, however, is not the only field in which we appear to have a distinct advantage. It seems, at least according to msn.com, that Boston and Buffalo will be the most and second most expensive cities in which to heat your home this winter. Msn.com surmises that Buffalo comes in at no. 2 on the list because, well, because it’s quite simply a godforsakenly frigid city. Boston, however, is a different story. We top the list because we rely much more on heating oil than natural gas, whose price has inflated only 72% in the last decade compared to oil’s 234% increase. This obviously […]
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 /by Scott W. Graves and Micaela DawsonThe 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, […]