Blog

“Families won’t feel relief as long as state spending keeps growing at twice the pace of their paychecks. Massachusetts families listening to the Governor’s State of the Commonwealth are confronting rising housing, energy, and healthcare costs even as state government continues to expand. Real affordability starts with slowing state spending, cutting waste, strengthening oversight of government agencies, and redirecting savings to local...

Massachusetts taxpayers were told in 2022 that raising taxes and directing billions in new tax revenues to transportation would dramatically improve quality and reliability. Voters were told the surtax would fix the system. Barely three years later—here we go again.   The...

This edition of The House Call describes a legal complaint alleging that Cambridge’s inclusionary zoning ordinance, which requires set-asides for below-market-rate housing in new development, is a regulatory taking under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. It also describes a number of actions the Commonwealth...

Boston, Mass – A new report from the Cicero Institute and Pioneer Institute finds that while state legislatures remained active on telehealth policy in 2025, most states made only incremental progress toward modern, patient-centered telehealth systems. With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill and its $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, states now face growing pressure to modernize outdated telehealth laws or risk falling behind in access, affordability, and federal funding competitiveness.

Mayor Wu continues to push her effort to further raise Boston’s commercial property tax rate, even though as of 2022 the city already had the second highest ratio of commercial to residential effective tax rates among the largest cities in each state.  Wu claims that cutting Boston’s budget to...

MassOpportunity Alliance’s new economic modeling of the proposed ballot question to reduce the personal income tax from 5.0% to 4.0% confirms the findings of Pioneer Institute’s November report, Lessons from the 2000 Massachusetts Income-Tax Rollback, which analyzed what actually happened after Massachusetts cut the income tax from 5.95 percent...

Class action challenges city’s unlawful penalties against commercial taxpayers who exercised their right to appeal; seeks court intervention to end this retaliatory scheme in next fiscal year

This edition of The House Call explores the 2025 update to Massachusetts’ Subsidized Housing Inventory, showing a spike in the number of communities that have at least 10% of their housing stocks in the Inventory. It also explains the housing-related ballot questions that could...

BOSTON – A new book co-edited by national digital education leader Julie Young draws on best practices and multiple studies published by Pioneer Institute to recount three decades of advances in digital education and highlights the policies necessary for students to fully...

Requirement that 20 percent of a housing project remain permanently affordable places burden on developers that should be borne by the public as a whole Cambridge – Pioneer New England Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit in state Land Court against the City...