Fasten your seatbelts: details of Governor Patrick’s first budget have been leaked to the Globe, and there’s no doubt more to come at the big unveiling on Tuesday night (which, by the way, will take place at a public meeting in Melrose and will be broadcast live on NECN starting at 7 pm — if you want to attend the meeting yourself, here’s how).
The bottom line appears to be this: lots of new money for municipalities and for public safety (especially community policing). Not much for anyone else [though see UPDATE below].
That strikes me as very smart, and as probably the best way to make lemonade out of the billion or so dollars worth of lemons that Romney/Healey left lying about. Bumping up local aid pays off in all kinds of productive ways: helps the schools, helps local police and fire departments, helps avoid Prop. 2-1/2 overrides, and (along with the other initiatives already announced) helps improve the environment for property tax cuts — or at least for avoiding more increases. And getting community policing moving again is desperately needed around the state. Also, the 1,000 new cops was an important campaign pledge that this should help fulfill (at least, as I understand it).
So here’s hoping that the Sal & Trav show can get behind what sounds like a pretty sensible agenda. In particular, DiMasi needs to get over his newly-developed revenue phobia. For God’s sake, he was the one who was pushing the payroll tax in the new health care bill, only to lose out to Romney and Trav. Why is he so skittish about closing corporate tax loopholes and about local option meals taxes? Because those weren’t his ideas, but rather came from someone else? Nah — that couldn’t be it.
Could it?
UPDATE: Turns out there are some significant health-related increases in the budget as well. Specifically:
- $24.8 million for an expansion in the Universal Immunization Program — this includes access to three new vaccines (rotavirus, meningococcal conjugate, and HPV).
- $21.6 million for expanding and reconfiguring the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Program, which includes screening programs for various cancers and other diseases, and the largest increase to the smoking prevention and cessation program since FY 1999.
- $3.8 million to expand Early Intervention.
Discuss
18 Comments . Leave a comment below.As Geoff Beckwith of Mass Municipal Assn notes, it's comparitively a small increase (will the state pay more in increased health care costs this year than local aid, bet they will ...), which makes it essential that the various pieces of the municipal assistance package also be enacted.
Good piece by Mike Jonas today in City Weekly (which those of you outside of Boston don't see), getting Trav to note that the local option tax has been adopted by the Senate before, (once during his tenure as President and once before, when it went to Gov Swift's desk). The speaker has voted once in favor of the meals tax, and once against it. About 60-70 current members of the House have voted for a meals tax at one time or another, so the task of adding 10-15 votes in the House should be doable.
What is needed now is a strong effort to engage people, particularly outside of Boston, to support the municipal package. Business leaders, labor, teachers should all be enlisted to support the legislation and get the necessary votes. Ironically, the piece that clearly helps every community, the elimination of the telecom tax break, will be the toughest to achieve due to the opposition from these companies. Also, someone asked about "whatever happened to civic engagement"? Well, engage guys, and get your supporters to back this legislation (I got an e-mail invite from the DP Committee for the Melrose speech, why didn't I get Talking Points, or even better, Action Points, on the muni package? It's ok though, it's still early.)
Kudos, by the way, to Tim Murray, who came back at House Taxation Chair Binienda for casually dismissing these proposals to help our communities. Tim has been a strong fighter for these provisions as a mayor and it's good to see him stand up for fight for what should be an Administration priority.
Well, I'm certainly impressed.
From boston.com
Context:
BMG Diary: Texas Republican uses common sense, promotes cancer-free sex. Hooray! BMG Comment: Speaking of responsive government...
There's "available" if you take your child to a specific clinic or health center and wait on line. There's "available" if you take your kid to her pediatrician for her usual check up. There's "available" at the school's nurse's office.
Which "available" are we talking about. The nuance is that most parents will be indifferent and defer judgment to public policy -- if its being done at the schools and the parents are notified and given adequate explanation, many will have their child immunized. However, if there's hoops to jump through, it just won't get done.
Do eradicate disease, you typically need about 90% immunization. The only way to get those kinds of numbers is to do what Tejas is doing. This is a good step in the right direction, and reducing the rates of HPV is an admirable goal in terms of humanity and health financial policy.
I just hope the implementation is designed to maximize the number of parents who take the state up on the offer -- and not to merely provide lip service.
...which were actually administered at the public schools (and maybe be private and parochial schools) in the 1950s and early 1960s). That substantially if not completely eradicated polio in the US.
Remember the sugar cube--regarding, IIRC, the Sabin vaccine, not the earlier Salk vaccine? It was administered to every student, subject to a parent's right to opt out. A right that, in my not so humble opinion, if exercised should be considered child abuse.
It isn't really all that complicated.
Quite frankly, male students should receive the vaccine, too, since it is probably they who are likely to transmit the virus to the females, unless the vaccine can be shown to injure them.
although I disagree with your
(a) "child abuse" claims, and (b) administering to male students.
As for (a), I had a high school math teacher who refused to allow his kids to get the "standard" shots, and therefore they weren't allowed in public schools. He "did the math" and discovered that they were orders of magnitude more likely to develop the disease* from the shot itself than from developing it from someone else. So, it made sense (to him) to maximize his children's chance of survival by not having them get the shot. Is that strange and anti-social? Probably. Child abuse? I don't think so.
Is HPV in the same situation? Nope. But, I could imagine a parent with a scientific background determining that it's not the right time for his or her own children to get the shot.
Regarding (b), my understanding is that it's not available for men yet, either because it doesn't exist or because it hasn't made it through the testing. Once it's given the green light by the CDC, then I'm all for it. Until then, obviously, it's a no-go.
* I forget which one; it's not really important in this discussion.
...the HPV vaccine is effective for males.
...but, if a vaccine is effective against a virus in females in suppressing the virus (which is what a vaccine essentially does), it strains credulity to believe that the same vaccine would not be effective against the same virus in males. And that's regardless of whether males might be affected by the virus in the same way as females.
I suppose that it might not be as effective, but it really does strain credulity. But, then again, I'm not a biologist.
Boys and girls have different sex organs, different hormones, different chemicals, different puberty phases, etc. It's not at all unreasonable to suspect that the vaccine may effect the two sexes differently.
The concern isn't just about effectiveness -- it's also about side-effectiveness.
there is an ethical distinction here. We may deem the risks acceptable when we inject foreign matter into the body of a 12-year-old girl for her protection. But we currently have no expectation that a boy will derive any benefit from the vaccination whatsoever. That makes a difference, especially when there is currently no postmarketing data to determine the incidence of ADEs.
I'm aware that Wikipedia is not authoritative, but, if the pages here and here are to be believed, the vaccine is already licensed for use with young males, not just females.
Apparently some strains of HPV that seem to be targeted by the vaccine are also involved in anal and penile cancer, as well as genital warts that would also cause problems in males so it isn't just females who would benefit from being vaccinated.
Gardasil and Cervarix are preventive (rather than therapeutic) vaccines, recommended for women who are 9 to 25 years old and have not contacted HPV. However, since it is unlikely that a woman will have already contracted all four viruses, and because HPV is primarily sexually transmitted, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended vaccination for women as old as 26.
Although HPV types 6 and 11 do not cause cervical cancer, they can cause genital warts. "Warts cause considerable discomfort and psycho-social trauma, so this makes the vaccine more attractive and also provides a reason other than altruism for men to be immunized," explains John Schiller of the National Cancer Institute.[4] HPV also causes anal and penile cancer. As the drug is licensed for girls and boys aged 9 to 15 and for women aged 16 to 26, the drug has to be administered to men "off licence", although many doctors are happy to oblige.[5]
Off license != licensed.
, the FDA approved Gardasil, a prophylactic HPV vaccine which is marketed by Merck. The vaccine trial,[1] conducted in adult women with a mean age of 23, showed protection against initial infection with HPV types 16 and 18, which together cause 70 percent of cervical cancers. ... Women aged nine through twenty-six can be vaccinated, though the trial did not test minors.
women != men.
The vaccine has only approved by the FDA for use on women, so far as I can tell.
...The issue that I raised was whether the vaccine was licensed for use in males. According to Wiki, it is.
on a central theme of his campaign.
Backed up with some new funds for cities and towns to fight fires, educate kids, operate libraries, catch crooks, help seniors, and all the other essential things they do.
I'll leave for another post the reasons why I wish the tax cut were broader and the new funds more. Nonetheless this keeps faith with the promise of his campaign. I hope it survives the legislature's ingrained hostility to all things not done on Beacon Hill.
From this post it sounds as though the only relevant observation of the governor's budget is all the "new money" for local aid, and public health initiatives. What I want to know is, where are the cuts? My understanding is that revenue is set to increase at about the rate of inflation, while many costs, particularly large pieces of the HHS' budget are set to increase at 3 times or so the inflationary rate. Given that scenario, level funding across the board will be a huge challenge and yet so far, I've heard only of modest increases, and no mention of cuts. David remarks on new money for local aid and "not much for anyone else." But I would imagine the budget must be more severe than "not much" in the way of increases for any one else, but rather "painful cuts" and the like for SOMEONE else.
Am I missing something here?
is a seat on board the Happy Talk Express. Service cuts make people upset. And as you know, we can't engage people by talking about things that make them upset.
But then the cost of government bums people out, too. So kindly don't bring that up, either.
Now would you please take your critical thinking elsewhere? You're making our brains hurt.
Thank you, The Patrick-Murray Love-In
Good editorial in the Globe today on the budget and tax proposals: http://www.boston.co...
To me, it sounded like the editors were nostaglic for the middle-minded muddlings of Cathy Young, a remarkably thick woman on a lifetime mission to find a compromise between the fire brigade and the fire. Never sure whether to move foward or backward, her intellectual compass typically split the difference, taking a sharp right into the guardrail.
This editorial was much the same. For one thing, it's amusing how studiously they overlooked the obvious in these two statements:
and
Hmmmm....
In any case, the editorial was rife with on-the-other-handism--reducing every policy debate to he-said she-said, with no effort to validate claims or put them into context.
For instance:
Is there any evidence at all that businesses who have benefitted from these loopholes have created more jobs than those who have not? Seems like that's essential to the argument, no?
Well, not to the Globe.
I was surprised at Michael Widmer's comments as quoted in the Globe. I thought he was an old TEAM guy who would have no problem with closing the loopholes mentioned. Especially in the light that it would be a fair way to increase revenue.
I guess Mass Taxpayers Foundation are paying the bills now so closing a loophole amounts to a tax on the poor business sector. Pity that poor property tax payer trying to make ends meet and wonder why he or she always votes against overides.
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