Boston.com and the fine folks at MBPC have collaborated on a spiffy tool that lets you decide how you’d manage the $12.6 billion revenue hit that would result from the passage of Question 1. Check it out, and report back your results. Can you find a sensible way to do it? Or do we just need to remove $12.6 billion of “waste, fraud and abuse” from the budget? (Does anyone actually believe that?)
Please share widely!
Abolish all authorities (so called)
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p>Enact laws that no one is to be employed by the state, in any capacity, that has a blood relative in the legislature and five years after leaving office.
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p>Pare down the state workforce where applicable.
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p>(for folks who are unaware—it is virtually impossible to fire a state employee for anything—-the least cause of action is failure to do your job)!
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p>There are certain areas of the state which are bloated beyond comprehension: the department of public safety—for one. Take 20% of the state police and put them to work in corrections/prisons where they need warm bodies!
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p>Reduce the size of the state motor vehicle fleet by 25%
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p> Chop 30% of social services. Illegal aliens warrant zero public assisatance. They got their butts here—they can get their butts home. Zero monies for non profits. Zero expnditure for trade and tourism—-use the internet!
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p>Return 100% of lottery money to cities and towns.
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p>Get suffolk County cleaned up. Mennino is a laughinstock and likely one of the poorest and fiscally responsible mayors in history. What an embarrassment.
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p>Cut the state legislatures reimbursement by 75%.
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p> People are wringing their hands and wailing. Necessity is the mother of invention. Money is like fossil fuels—you had better get used to living with less.
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p>Managers without spines shouldn’t blame incompetent employees for their continued presence on the payroll. By definition, that manager has become incompetent themselves.
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p>There’s never been a collective bargaining agreement that didn’t include provisions for discipline and termination. Just because you can’t point on a whim and say “terminated” doesn’t mean you’re powerless. But it’s easier to pretend that’s the way, isn’t it?
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p>”Blood relative” I guess does not mean by marriage. So a second cousin is unemployable, but the wife can still get a plum job. Nice. Of course, that would mean thousands of people now can’t teach at public colleges, but whichever.
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Uh-huh…and if the Q1 side had any grapes, they’d tell us where applicable This is merely a re-phrasing of the “cut waste” canard.
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Cut the budget by deliriously overpaying prison guards, and putting people without that training in the position. Oh, and take cops off the streets.
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30% of social assistance goes to illegal aliens? Really? And we’re going to chop state motor vehicles just because. Should be fun when it comes time to plow. Nothing for non-profits, but we’ll preserve state subsidies for profit-making companies. The last thing we want is the state supporting any outfit that wants to help people.
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p>Zero for trade and tourism. Okay..
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Yes, people will love to play the lottery if none of the revenue goes to prizes.
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Perhaps Mennino is a relative of Tom Menino, the mayor of Boston and not in charge of Suffolk County. We’re back to the usual — “pare down” “clean up” “cut waste”. My strategy for success in Afghanistan? “Kill more” and “die less”.
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Only the idle rich should be in the state legislature.
Oh whoops – still $7 billion to go!
By perusing the June expenditures for departments. This is when departments rush to spend their remaining Fiscal Year budgets to avoid having their budget cut.
Eliminate the department of revenue, Child Support Enforcement Unit (DOR/CSEU). Their error rate is by their own admission 10%. Then build a new one.
Eliminate the Alcolic Beverage Control Commission (ABCC). A useless department existing only for friends and relatives of our democratic state legislators.
It’s a start.
Lots of tiny things which almost certainly don’t come close to the shortfall
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p> * Increase gas tax $0.05/gal, then tie the tax to month-on-month barrel of oil inflation. That’s worth $250 million now, and more as time goes on
* Tolls on E-W highways unfair? I agree. Let’s do ’em on the N-S highways too, and use congestion pricing to help shape traffic so that jams aren’t as bad and we encourage some time-shifting of downtown working. That’s got to be worth $10s of millions a year, right? Especially after I gut the MTA executives to save even more in salary and pensions.
* Adding a nickel to the $0.05 bottle deposit and expanding it to water, juice, tea, etc. a la Maine, and throw in a $0.25 deposit on 500mL+ alcohol containers. Good for $5-$10 million in revenue, and some local savings on litter control and tipping fees.
* Hunting and fishing licenses? Increase the rate. Peanuts, but hey man, tough times.
* Cut the per diem for the legislators, and if you’re district has an MBTA subway stop you lose your parking spot at the state house. Lease the spots to the highest bidder. Reps encouraged to bid if they choose. More peanuts, but legislators riding the T might help them choose to help the T. Some might even cycle to work [ha!].
* Figure out some magic program to make drug treatment cheaper than incarceration, and start moving the drug users and addicts from prisons to rehab centers to job training centers to the workforce. It’s got to be cheaper than paying for the 6’x8′ cell and three squares a day for years upon years…
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p>No way that makes up the $1.5 billion gap, but it’s a shot anyway.
in exchange for a requirement that every member of the legislature cycle to work! 😀
I suspect we could convince the legislators to do what would become the single largest charity fund raising ride of all time.
I don’t think they’d do it, even for $12.6 billion.
That would be the result, after all 😉
my brain had $1.5 billion — that’s the gap. The income tax cut would be roughly 10 times that size. Ugh.
Boston.com hosts Flash program that predicts end of Masaschusetts & kittens
I remember back in 96 there was a Doonesbury presidential election game for the computer. You had to move all resources–money, people, surrogates–around the country. You had to set a campaign schedule. You had to decide on messages to emphasize and how strongly to present them. You had to react to breaking news and events. And as the game went on, your poll numbers in different states moved up or down, based on what you did.
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p>The Globe should set it up a similar game. Cut the budget for something, news comes out the next day, constituencies protest or celebrate. And your poll numbers move. And property values rise or fall.
Speaking of games:
The basic math never adds up for the Question 1 backers.
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p>After you have laid off every single state employee and, in doing so, shut down prisons, closed the state police, eliminated the courts, eliminated UMass, eliminated DMR et how many tends of thousands of municipal employees (teachers, police, firefigters, first responders0 do you then lay off to get the needed cuts in state aid?
How many hundreds of thousasnd of Massachusetts residents do you kick out of Mass Health?
“Boston.com hosts Flash program that predicts end of Masaschusetts & kittens” … I dared my friend who posted this diary on RMG to post the exact same thing on Blue Mass Group and he said “I think there is a mutual respect between RMG & BMG to not do things like that … that is a dick thing to do. It is trolling. I am not a troll.”
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p>It is an unfortunate circumstance that the left-leaning MBPC has to fend off attacks for being a partisan “non-partisan” think tank, but it is nice to have a counterweight to the right-leaning Pioneer Institute. It makes me wonder how a think tank is supposed to get respect from a majority of people in the first place.