Blue Mass Group

For your viewing pleasure.  This is really a very good speech — it ties together the prose of bond bills and unemployment insurance rates with the poetry of “having a stake in your neighbor’s future” and other themes that will sound familiar to those who followed the 2006 campaign closely.  He should do this more often!

The speech is rather long, so I cut it up into 4 parts.  Here’s part 1 — parts 2-4 are after the flip.

The New York Times reports that small business owners are up in arms about the Bush Administration’s proposals to attempt to close the tax gap, which according to the IRS has three components, nonfiling, underreporting, and underpayment, and which the IRS estimated to be more than $300 billion in 2001. The IRS’s analysis (see the link above) shows that the largest component of the tax gap is underreporting, which includes unreported income, improperly claimed deductions and credits, and overstated expenses. Now those of us working for the Man can’t really underreport our earned income, since the Man provides the government with a copy of our W2s. And while big public companies undoubtedly engage in what I charitably might call tax minimization, they use various complex legal strategies–Microsoft isn’t the kind of business that, say, sells its products for cash only. So who is responsible for the tax gap? Again the IRS data show that it is individual filers, not corporations, who are responsible, and that their biggest sin is failure to report income. We’re talking about small business owners here–the contractor who gets paid under the table, the illegal alien who works off the books, etc. For once, the Bush [...]

A machine from WBZ-TV phoned me this evening and asked me a minute’s worth of questions for a story to run soon, keyed apparently to Gov. Patrick’s big speech on the economy.  The questions and my answers, apart from demographics: Do you approve of DP’s job so far? Yes Is the MA economy doing well, badly, or in between? In between Will the economy be better or worse a year from now?  Worse Is DP doing enough to help the economy? Yes My demographics: Registered in MA, male, 48, Dem, liberal. A pretty straightforward, honest poll, I thought.  How would you have answered?  (my poll after the jump)

Hello! Some truly outstanding volunteers have put together a terrific web site to help raise $100,000 by April 15th for our END the Income Tax campaign. They call it the Tax Day Money Bomb! Check it out:     http://www.TaxDayMoneyBomb.com They also created an incredible video starring Kamal Jain, long time supporter of tax cuts and small government, to announce it. It’s currently posted on the above web page and also on some popular websites such as YouTube. Here’s the link!     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v… Now the Tax Day Money Bomb just needs YOU to help promote the heck out of it! Post the web page and video on every blog / forum you know. Tell Meet- ups. Digg it. StumbleUpon. Add it to your MySpace or Facebook page. Email the link to friends. And any and every other means you know for getting the word out. And most importantly, as John Garrett reminds us, please make a pledge yourself! The more who participate, the more who will join in! Many thanks to John Garrett, Kamal, Andy Jacobs and Rich Aucoin for making this happen.

Sweet. America’s mortgage crisis has spiralled into “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression” and there is now a one-in-four chance of a full-blown global recession over the next 12 months, the International Monetary Fund warned today. But the IMF predicts the pending US recession will only be “mild”, whatever that means.  

Straight from the Press Office:

Talking Points – Governor Patrick’s Economic Plan – “A Culture of Opportunity”:

• In today’s speech, the Governor presented a comprehensive proposal to address the short term and long term needs of the Massachusetts economy.

• The Governor’s plan shows that he’s ready to make tough decisions and work collaboratively with the legislature, the business community and labor to help create jobs and grow the Massachusetts economy.

• Overview: Government has its limitations, but it has its responsibilities as well. The Governor’s plan takes a balanced, yet bold approach to stimulating the Massachusetts economy at a time when the country and region is gripped by economic uncertainty. By investing in individual communities and in the state’s human and capital infrastructure, state government can help to create a culture of opportunity that helps secure the state’s immediate fiscal health and our long-term economic prosperity.  

We met for about an hour yesterday morning with the Governor to talk about the economy, politics, and the blogosphere. Here’s what went down. Our Chief Executive was impressively informed, focused, and creatively proactive on a huge range of issues. We may not agree with Patrick every time, but he is a quantum improvement over the Three Nonentities who preceded him Cellucci, Swift and Willard. An Excellency worthy of the title. The economy. Patrick is making a major economic policy address right now at MIT. We’ll post video coverage if we can get it (one of our suggestions at the meeting was that all major policy addresses be YouTubed so we can link to them here and you can comment). Our conversation in brief: The Gov. proposes an intelligent business-minded restructuring of state debt that will free around $3.8 billion over the next four to five years for infrastructure renewal across the state: a platform for growth, and good jobs when we need them most. His Life Sciences and Clean Energy plans, each of which will act as a substantial motor for growth in areas that play to our strengths as a state [assuming the legislature can look to the [...]

From today’s Globe Governor Deval Patrick plans today to unveil a $3.8 billion bond proposal to repair 411 deteriorating bridges throughout the state over the next eight years, a project he will argue not only improves road safety but also pumps cash into the economy to buffer Massachusetts from a recession. The massive repair and reconstruction of bridges in virtually every corner of the state would create 23,000 direct construction jobs, according to a preliminary draft of the governor’s plan, which is significantly higher than the 5,000 employed at the height of the Big Dig. I think if there is a time to deficit-finance, it is now. I just hope that some money will go toward  UMass Amherst infrastructure- we’re still living in East Berlin circa 1969 here.