From a mass emailing just received:
I believe the ideas we’ve put forth in the life sciences, clean energy, the proposal to close corporate loopholes, the various bond bills, the film tax credit and the effort at managed competition in auto insurance are good government solutions–examples of what we can do when we work together. But our best solutions on how to grow the economy, provide good jobs at good wages, and provide property tax relief for communities and residents are needed today.
That sounds like progress to me. What do you think are the, “best solutions on how to grow the economy, provide good jobs at good wages, and provide property tax relief for communities and residents?”
Perhaps some more wind farms in blustery parts of the state?
How about some support for small organic farmers in Massachusetts to help generate profits and jobs in the more rural parts of the state?
We’re so glad to see you check back. Fred Clarkson’s sagacious blogs are worth reading and paying heed. We care and we want to row in the same direction with you toward progress for a better, sustainable Massachusetts built on innovation that is respectful of our environment and heritage.
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p>As a follow up to Bob’s good ideas, I think what is needed is some of the good ‘ole fashioned community meetings, the type that worked in electing the bright Administrative leaders that we have. Meetings that not only generate ideas and enthusiasm but deliver toolboxes to communities to get these projects started. People want to help jump start the economy, see their community and their neighbors thrive and yet they/we need some help accessing resources and understanding how to implement favorable by-laws, community education campaigns (by local) and this is how good government can lead.
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p>Let’s see the state erect some wind generators on some public buildings or land and include local chambers/educators/municipal leaders/students in the process. Wouldn’t is be cool to see self-sustaining community colleges and school districts with wind/solar power?
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there could be more coordination between school districts and local farmers to provide local vegetables and fruits for school lunches… or for prison meals.
While it isn’t 100% on the mark, Patrick’s environmental bond bill includes some desperately needed support for local farmers.
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p>Even here in MA some farmers are closing up shop and selling the land to developers because they just can’t make ends meet. Giving farmers support and opportunities to generate power simultaneously (via wind) is in the bill.
… grow energy crops like native grasses. No need to refine them; just pelletize and burn for heat (in a pellet stove or furnace). The energy balance is incredible, and the only real environmental concern is particulates, which are manageable.
A point I was trying to get at on how you deal with economic clusters around the Commonwealth (using an example I know of) to strengthen economies at the street level and not at the Beacon Hill elevation , though there is much they could do to support this. It all adds up to sustainable tax bases and jobs, but not a concentration of jobs in one industry or one geographic area.
There was a report last year that warned of the slow growth in the “Gateway Cities” of Massachusetts. Concentrating growth near Boston was leading to unaffordable housing and traffic bottlenecks, while too many other areas were regressing. The commuter rail provides some opportunity to connect some of these cities to the primary hub, and Patrick seems to be trying to strike a deal to extend communication via high speed internet to the more separated locations. I’d like to see an Infrastructure Improvement bill to help these places to the next step to enable private growth distributed more evenly across the State.
isn’t progress. As far as I’ve read (no time to cite, but I think its clear) is that after three consecutive years of 10% decreases, particularly for drivers in urban areas, we’re expecting managed competition to give us a 20% spike in costs this year. Sounds like I wish Romney was back in charge when it comes to auto insurance.
Both of your suggestions, Bob, are spot on. In the South Coast, there’s already a second proposal for another major wind farm that’s just a little bit smaller than Cape Wind. From I’ve read, it’s an excellent proposal and takes a slightly different approach than Cape Wind. Instead of one huge amount of wind turbines, the wind turbines would be spread out over 3 nearby locations. Towns out to be investigating in their own wind turbines – and many of them are already doing that, thankfully. In many cases, just 2-3 wind turbines could power most of the town through most of the year. (Just ask Hull.)
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p>Furthermore, growing local businesses is essential. One of the points some people have made here, and elsewhere, is that the reason why big business in Massachusetts typically pays less than an average amount of state taxes compared to the rest of the country is because of the loopholes; small businesses don’t get the same loopholes, so they actually have to pay taxes that are often higher than the average state.
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p>I’m not going to say that’s a bad thing; I don’t think we can afford to have it any other way. But, they should be getting an excellent return on that investment: we need better public transportation and we need better and less expensive job training and public higher education. Both of those would do wonders to not only improving our economy, but actually generating more revenue over the long run (the more highly paid workers, the better, and the more taxes we collect).
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p>But there’s more we can invest in small businesses to see real job growth; and those are the kind of investments that grow jobs in every segment of the population, well educated or skilled workers, or service employees – wealthy suburbs and our struggling former mill cities.
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p>Most of all, we need to have a real conversation about moving toward a progressive income tax system. There’s no other way to get out of our structural deficits, at least no other way of doing it fairly and equitably. Through that, we could have the kind of education reform necessary to compete with public education from other countries, that do a much better job teaching their kids. From there, we could have true health care reform, and truly invest in our public higher ed and small business growth. I hope that we can start having that discussion in earnest, because we desperately need reform there.
…getting GOVERNMENT the hell out of it?
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p>Many, verging on most, legislators have only a glancing acquaintance with the private sector, but have no trouble superimposing faculty-club-like rules and regulations on it. From anti-smoking education to other minor zealotries, the Legislature thinks of small business as a social services laboratory instad of purveyors of goods and services.
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p>Here’s a practical suggestion. Our unemployment compensation laws allow people to collect for the longest period of time at the highest percentage after the shortest period of employment. Why don’t we take THAT burden off small business?
Where there appears to be no functioning government to speak of in most of the country, except for warlords and local gangs.
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p>But maybe you didn’t have THAT much laissez-faire in mind.
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p>Do you have any statistics to support your claim about unemployment insurance in our fair Commonwealth?
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p>PP is right that MA has somewhat more generous UI benefits than most states (e.g. workers can recieve benefits for 30 weeks, instead of 26), but I consider these greater benefits a good thing during a recession, and will help stimulate the economy and help individuals and families to a greater degree than the UI programs in other states will do. So while PP might be right that MA is more generous and UI costs are higher for businesses in MA than in other states, she is incorrect to suggest that this is a net negative, especially during poor economic times such as this.
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p>You a night owl too, Bob?
Working outside when the temp goes below forty degrees is against his religion—so he gets layed off, as do many of his cohorts. He then works under the table with an indoor jib. It seems you folks don’t know many in the “working class.”
…and that is something you want to brag about?
shouldn’t you be conducting a citizen’s arrest?
Citizen’s arrests are a myth, kind of like MCRD’s brother/neighbor/former co-worker, or whichever stock character he is employing to make himself seem right.
i was being sarcastic, given MCRD’s claims of a police and military career (among other things).
Big Dig (saw co-worker making off with thousands of dollars somehow)
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p>Health care (works in some major hospital with a bunch of leeching furriners who don’t speak no English)
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p>Landed in Tuzla under sniper fire … oh, sorry, that’s not him.
the problem is that buinesses are not charged for ui by how they use it. A seasonal company is charged or assessed the same rate as a regular company. There is an incentive for construction and other businesses to lay everyone off, let them collect and then have all the other non-seasonal companies subsidize it.
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p>The problem is not the length of UI payments but that we let people sit on their ass until they find a job, most don’t, but what if the ui payment was for not only replacing lost income but also worker training or classes?
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p>I think that is this is the way to reform UI.
I think you’re saying two separate things here. The first is in regards to the problem of over-regulation of small business in areas where regulation is too burdensome and inefficient. You are right on this point (though I’m not following your problem with anti-smoking education).
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p>The problem here is that certain state regulatory agencies are so unpredictable and capricious in their regulatory procedures that small businesses cannot adequately plan for and react to the vast array of nit-picky and (in many cases) ancient regulations on the books, some of which any make very little sense and do little to protect the public interest.
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p>On the other hand, I think you are on the wrong track as far as unemployment insurance goes. First of all, unlike regulatory reform, this has no chance of going through the legislature, and for good reason. At a time when individuals and families are facing record foreclosures, trouble making ends meet, and the prospect of losing their jobs, the last thing the commonwealth should be doing is cutting back on unemployment insurance, one of the most successful and necessary social safety nets available. Secondly, UI rates are more predictable and less capricious than certain regulations, as they are based upon statutory formulas rather than a regulator’s whims. This makes it a lot easier for small biz to accurately recoup any costs through product pricing.
You are kind to try to tweeze it out.
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p>The smoking thing is a pet peeve of mine. When we criminalized tobacco in business settings, after legging restaurants waste money on special extraction systems, I noticed an oddity in the law, and asked Health Care Comm. staff about it.
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p>Let us say an architect is a smoker. He is incorporated, so he is an employee of the corporation, and has his office in his home. All interaction with others is on various work sites – no other people come to said office. Is he banned from smoking there? Yes. Must he notify himself, in writing as the law demands, of his own no-smoking policy on an annual basis, and retain written records that he has notified himself as the law demands? Yes. May he smoke elsewhere in the house? No, as the business occupies part of the house and therefore there cannot be smoking anywhere in the building. The lame excuse offered was that nobody would find out – I wanted to know why he was liable under the law due to an overaching law in the first place.
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p>THAT is how these goofy laws are written – and they make scofflaws of us all. Do YOU have a current poster with your sexual harassment and minimum wage policy prominently displayed in your place of work? The fact that it’s your old dining room is irrelevant under the law.
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p>The UI thing was just the most common complaint I hear from actual business owners. Remember, if you employ somebody for six months and fire them, they will collect on YOUR UI surcharge for years, despite the fact you no longer have any control over how they file, costing you more money even though the rest of your workforce is stable – how do you quantify THAT exactly in ‘passing it on’?
The seasonal workers who have been seasonal workers around the commonwealth for decades and scores of years, move to warmer climes in the winter and COLLECT UNEMPLOYMENT.
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p>School bus drivers collect unemployment in the summer—evry summer.
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p>What a crock of steaming excrement!
While I’m all for organic farming & buying more local produce, these are silly marginal ideas which will have little affect on our economy.
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p>Nor will the one billion dollar biotech giveaway do much. It won’t jobs.
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p>(BTW, since when is it Beacon Hill’s responsibility to “provide good jobs at good wages?” Just using this phrase illustrates Deval is clueless about where jobs come from and how the state does not “create jobs.”)
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p>The big takeaway of the Reagan and Clinton eras is that job creation is the path to fiscal soundness.
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p>States like Texas, Nevada, and the Carolinas are creating jobs not through direct spending but by keeping taxes low on both individuals and corporations. More jobs = increase tax revenues.
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p>Where’s the MA paradigm shift? How about …
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p>(1) eliminating all corporate taxes
(2) eliminate our state capital gains tax, and
(3) deeply reform our unemployment insurance system
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p>Wow. I bet this would go a long way to attracting business and industry to the Commonwealth.
I’d agree that ideas about supporting local agriculture won’t massively transform the commonwealth, but I do think it’s a worthwhile pursuit of the government offices related to agriculture and commerce.
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p>But your big point was that drastically reducing taxes will result in higher revenues. And that is wrong. When Reagan first cut taxes in 1981, Federal revenues dropped and the deficit ballooned. When George W. Bush cut taxes in 2001, the revenues dropped and the deficit ballooned again. When Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993 (on the wealthy, with a millionaire surtax) the economy was not hurt at all. Job growth happened and Clinton started shrinking the deficit.
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p>Massachusetts has been cut taxes about 40 times under Republican governors, and it has not gotten us more revenues… it has gotten us a big structural deficit that prevents us from helping the schools that need help, from helping the cities that need more police, and from repairing the rusty bridges in our Commonwealth.
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p>We have had tax cut after tax cut, the state’s structural deficit has grown, and you think a massive tax is going to reverse direction of the deficit? Your thinking is like an 18th Century barber: after several small bloodlettings haven’t cured the fever, a massive bloodletting should do the trick.
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p>But, despite the ‘tax cut after cut’, the tax revenue in Massachusetts has increased and increased. Maybe the Laffer Curve isn’t dead after all.
The Laffer curve idea has been way oversold. You haven’t refuted that the Reagan and W tax cuts resulted in less revenue.
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p>Inflation has shrunk the gas tax revenue (21 cents in 1990 is like 33 cents today, but we’re still at 21 cents). Most of the revenues the state has been using to cover the deficit have been one-shot tricks that can’t be used forever. That’s why the structural deficit exists. It’s like pretending the Bush $600 checks are going to be distributed every year from now on.
eventually goes up because of economic growth and inflation. If you get lucky, and the economy grows after a tax cut, real revenue can stay level or go up after a tax cut.
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p>When Mass cut the income tax a few years ago, state revenue went down, and the basic result was that local funding was cut. Property taxes went up, or local services were cut. Some people prefer that choice being pushed to the local level; I don’t, because I prefer a more progressive tax code and a more equal distribution of government services.
In the current economy having locally produced foods is actually important. With rising gas prices as well as the cost of corn (used both for ethanol and food stocks) the cost of food in the grocery stores is rising dramatically. Locally produced food travels less distance, requiring less gasoline, and therefore provides some measure of economic security on the price of the items.
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p>I am not trying to pretend that having locally produced food is going to stave off economic crisis but it a valuable asset in keeping prices at least steadier, if not dramatically lower.
but as a resident of the Berkshires who works in the food industry with local farmers and distributors, I can say that a certain amount of stimulus is certainly worthy.
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p>Local niche production just makes sense. And the economic fact is that agri-tourism and “local” food is a big part of our region’s (Northern Berkshire County, specifially) economic viability. North Adams’ factories don’t make shoes or light switches anymore.
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p>Oh, and the local stuff usually tastes better too.
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p>Anyways, grants in 5 figure range are all we’re looking for. While we’d love to get our grubby little paws on some of the $1 Billion life sciences bill, (rumor has it that MCLA is getting a science building), just a few grand to help a farmer build his/her business helps too.
Economic stimulus funds won’t wriggle outside 128, unless a dollop goes to to Worcester for the Lt. Gov.