For the second year in a row, Massachusetts is in the middle of a budget crisis and nobody wants to say why.
With an unemployment rate below the national average and a state economy that has been in a sustained period of consistent—if uneven—growth for years, Beacon Hill’s rallying cry has become, “let’s just get to next year.” Budgets have been patched together with a combination of one-time revenues and gimmicks that give the illusion of fiscal prudence on the part of Governor Baker.
Meanwhile, programs that help people are cut and solutions to the Commonwealth’s biggest problems get deferred.
Economic inequality is the challenge of our time. If Massachusetts is going to step up and lead the country in tackling this issue, we’re going to have to start telling the truth about why Beacon Hill is stuck in this cycle of crisis.
Part of the story is clear. While many on Beacon Hill, including many of my fellow Democrats, want to preserve important services and tackle big problems, too few are willing to say that we need new revenue. At the same time, there are many who say they want to cut taxes but are unwilling to take the blame for cutting the programs those tax dollars fund, programs their constituents want and need.
This year, we already know that our budget has fallen a staggering $439 million short, and it’s only June. Last year, the final shortfall estimates for this budget escalated to as high as $950 million dollars.
Beacon Hill keeps us in a perpetual state of budget crisis, which prevents us from having a serious discussion about how we tackle economic inequality, and it’s all made possible by a lack of transparency in the budget process that keeps the public from knowing what is going on.
Every year, leaders on Beacon Hill huddle in private to produce our state’s budget. Because public scrutiny is deliberately limited, appropriators can offer up rosy assumptions about projected spending and revenue collection. These accounting gimmicks lead to real pain in the future, like the 9C cuts in December which slashed $1.9 million from substance abuse treatment, the hundreds of millions of dollars diverted from our state’s rainy day fund, or the $142 million that was gutted from Medicaid and pushed into the future.
If we reform our budget process, we can finally begin to make long-term investments in the Commonwealth – like single-payer healthcare and free public college. The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center (MassBudget) has proposed two reforms that do just that. If elected Governor, I’ll fight to turn them into law:
- First, Beacon Hill should disclose the baseline funding levels each service needs in order to be maintained from year to year. While the budget shows a dollar figure for a given service, we never know whether that figure is above or below its “maintenance level.” In other words, as MassBudget explains, “if the budget proposes a decrease in funding for a particular child care account, that could be because of a projected reduction in the number of people who will be eligible for the program or a decision to serve fewer of those who are eligible.” Simply put, if this information were public, we would know whether funding levels are realistic or whether supplemental funding will be needed later.
- Second, Beacon Hill needs to be more honest about revenue estimates. This means incorporating economic growth and contraction into our projections and adding in previously enacted tax changes. For example, revenue estimates this year were unrealistically optimistic, but because of the way our projections are calculated the public couldn’t have known it. Had Beacon Hill incorporated the impact of a dip in the stock market in 2015 around tax time and last year’s Earned Income Tax Credit change, we could have anticipated the shortfall earlier in the year.
This fiscal shell game is hurting the Commonwealth: according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, FY 2016 was the first year in more than a decade when tax revenue projections were revised upward during the year, and yet end-of-year collections came in below the original benchmark.
These shortfalls limit our ability to add to our rainy day fund, which is what led Standard & Poor’s to revise its outlook on Massachusetts debt to negative at the end of 2015.
I’m optimistic that we can do better because we’ve done better in Newton. When I took office in 2010, the city faced a structural deficit of more than $40 million, a pension trust fund that had suffered a large loss in principal, and no rainy day fund. With laser like focus on outcomes that matter for people, we went to work in an open and transparent way to turn around the city’s budget. Seven years later, we’ve eliminated Newton’s deficit and established a $20 million rainy day fund.
Massachusetts is home to the most determined, talented, and hardworking people in the country. We can be the state which leads the fight against growing economic inequality. But until we fix our budget process by making it more transparent, we will be unable to invest in strategies like free public college and a single payer healthcare system.
It all starts with telling the truth.
How will more college be the remedy for our growing economic inequality. Massachusetts is already the most educated state in the union. At the same time, if we use the Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality, Massachusetts is tied for third for being one of the least equal states in the union.
If a lack of education and college in particular was behind the widening wealth gap in the USA in the period of 1970-today, we would expect that this gap was most pronounced between the 30% of us with college degrees and the 70% without. In other words, the massive wealth gap would have a clear line dividing us as “college educated and well off” versus “no college and poor”.
This is not the case.
The gap did not widen along the 30/70 line. It widened between the 99/1 line and even more pronounced between the 99.99/.01 line.
There is no amount of health care or college education that will fix this injustice.
What will? Talk it up.
The richest in our state take home a huge percentage of the money that flows into this state. The goal should be for them to pay their workers more (which would mean they take less).
Higher taxes won’t transfer that income to the government – no one willingly earns a dollar only to pay 90 cents of it in taxes. Instead, they won’t take that dollar. They’ll leave it with their source of income – often a business they own. They will defer the compensation.
But they’re not going to leave it in a lockbox in the company. They will use it to make the company better. Maybe they will decide to expand. Maybe they will shift some money into R&D. Maybe they will pay their employees a little bit more. Maybe they will hire a guy to plant more flowers.
This is not a problem that can be solved easily on a state level because the solution lies in higher taxation at the upper brackets. A state has less ability to tax because rich people know how to move their income around to avoid taxes. Worst case scenario is that you put a high tax on top earners and they all decide to physically move their companies over the border to New Hampshire. Best case is that they create some kind of shell company over the border in New Hampshire and book their income there.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tinker though. A solution can be implemented a graduated income tax. Raise the upper brackets a bit, boil the frog slowly. This will increase state revenues and that can be used to provide common services to people which will make their existing incomes go further. Maybe some can go to reduce tuition at state colleges – but don’t just focus on the college crowd. Some money has to go for services for people who aren’t in the college category. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but maybe it is a reduction of the regressive sales tax to 5%.
Oh, and raise the minimum wage some more. If what people say is true and we are shifting to an economy of high tech and career service employees, then we need to boost the earning ability of our service employees to a livable level. Yes, it will mean that services will cost more, but that is the price we will have to pay for this kind of economy.
I don’t think it’s that clear. in 2012, when Mitt Romney ran for the presidency and Donald Trump was flirting with the idea, they were both asked what they paid in taxes.
Their answer? “I don’t know.”
After some journalists went and asked Romney’s accountant they figure his effective tax rate (swizzling income, cap-gains, investments, etc…) was 13.4%. And Romney still argued that 13.4% was too much. But, one was left with the sense that he’d argue that if the effective tax was 1% or if it was 50%… and a that his day to day life would not be affected in the least whether it was 1% or 50% nor would he even be able to tell, or care. So the argument is, at least, at one remove from reality.
And, indeed, we sometimes are dealing with such fantastical amounts that we could, I believe, take 90 cents on the (marginal) dollar… and they might never notice. And that’s just a clear indictment of those who proffer the idea that taxing ‘too much’ is a real thing… if you don’t know what you’re taxed… how do you know it’s ‘too much’?
To some extent tax avoidance is merely pique and gamesmanship and formulations like “nobody willingly earns a dollar only to pay 90 cents of it in taxes’ (besides being unreal) and all the shifting of this and that to here and there are mere fig leaf for hiding behind the utterly childish appeal of selfishness.
One way to address this is to dramatically raise the gift and estate tax for estates in excess of some arbitrary threshold (arbitrary but in excess of, say, $5M).
Your focus on income fails to reflect the reality that the very wealthy do not CARE about income. There is a reasonably well-defined threshold (the point where inflation-adjusted portfolio income exceeds consumption) beyond which “income” is nothing more than score-keeping. The truly wealthy are simply not affected by marginal tax rates, minimum wages, sales taxes, or any of the other things you mention.
What we MUST do is recapture the excessive wealth currently being horded by our top 1% or top 0.1%, so that that we restore the health of the rest of the consumer economy. Money — cash — is the energy source, and therefore lifeblood (literally!) of a consumer economy.
What we have done is allowed and encouraged our wealthiest residents to slash the throat of the consumer economy. We are collectively bleeding out on the ground while these vampires celebrate ever-increasing gains.
We must stop the bleeding and restore the blood already drained. Once we do that, the “free hand of the market” will again restore us to economic health and prosperity.
We must restore the WEALTH to our body-politic.
What will fix the injustice? We need bold leadership, leaders like FDR who did not promote “Jobs and the Economy”, but instead, promoted “Jobs and Security”.
Security for the working class is missing in present day America. Much of the heavy lifting to remedy this will be the job of the federal government, but what can one state and one governor do?
A progressive tax code, not just a “millionaires” tax would be a step in the proper direction, a higher state wide minimum wage would be another. Yes, lower cost higher education and a health care that along the lines of the European single payer systems would be a benefit, but again, they were not the cause of the widening disparity so they will be ineffective as the remedy.
The tax code could also be written so as to encourage profit sharing and employee owned companies. These are nothing new and can be traced to our founders but they have been forgotten over time or denigrated as “commie pinko” socialism by the right,
Further, we need a governor to ignore the members of his own party who resist tax increases based on the myth that “if we tax them, they will leave the state!”..
As you have said, we need to do more than raise the ceiling in Massachusetts, need to raise the floor. .
If we are going to use the Gini coefficient we should probably make an effort to understand it. A Gini coefficient of zero means all members of the population make the same amount. That amount might be ‘nothing’, or that amount could be one billion dollars each. A Gini coefficient of one means the most inequality. Again, that could mean most members of the population earn nothing while a select few earn one dollar. Or it could mean a population of people each earning fifty grand with one or two billionaires, outlying.
The actual Gini number doesn’t tell us anything about each end of the spectrum, it just tells us how those earnings are ‘scattered’ over the population.
For the CommonWealth, the Gini coefficient is indeed amongst the top three. The other two in the top three? Connecticut and New York. And, I’ll note, Connecticut is number 4 in your other list of ‘most educated states’
But ‘most educated’ is not ‘all educated’ and, indeed, your own sources say that we don’t even have 42% of adults educated… so ‘most educated state’ isn’t even a majority of the population. That means over 58% of the population is, likely, capped at the amount of earnings… and that too is swizzled into the Gini numbers. So the 10% without even a HS diploma will, it is projected, make about 19K/year. If they work hard they might work their way up to 25K/yr… The 40% or so who’ll get a HS diploma but not a college degree with make 29K/year and if they work hard, maybe work their way up to 40K/yr. The 41.5% who do get a college degree will go on to make at least 50K/yr right out of college, but lawyers, doctors and others, will make significantly more and with more skills, and the fluid job market, they can rapidly move up in earnings in a way that people without degrees are forbid from doing by the sheer economics of it.
So the relatively high Gini coefficient in states that are ‘most educated’ is not an indication of failure of college educations it is a misunderstanding of what ‘most educated’ means. If we had a 80% or 90% with college education, instead of the 41.5%, the Gini number would decrease…. as it does in the least educated states (where almost 80% don’t have college degrees) where everybody earns more or less the same amounts, which is to say diddly squat (relatively).
So how would you evaluate the wealth distribution in the state? What measurement would you prefer?
I’d compare the household income of the poorest fraction to the costs that population faces (housing, food, transportation, medical, etc). Those who are suffering in poverty suffer just the same whether or not their neighbor is rich or poor. Put another way, the poor in West Virginia aren’t any less in harm’s way because there are fewer wealthy West Virginians.
I see your point, but ask, “where does the wealth come from” that winds up in the pockets of the super wealthy West Virginians and Bay State wealthy class? Our poorest citizens ought to be living rather wall in this state, given the amount of wealth being generated here.
Why should I prefer something else? I don’t think using the Gini coefficient is, per se, wrong. I’m just advocating for understanding whatever measure you use… and understanding what you are measuring. Isn’t that why you are measuring it?
If college education correlates with higher salary then a population comprised of 42% college educated (higher income) and 58% not college educated (lower income) is going to have a relatively high Gini coefficient (measuring the ‘spread’ amongst incomes…) This is as a result of the distribution of college education within the population and not because of college education: saying that the CommonWealth of Massachusetts is both “most educated’ and simultaneously, ‘most unequal’ doesn’t get at the root of the problem and certainly does not indict education as part of the problem. If the CommonWealth would be even more educated the inequality might decrease. Exactly the same might be true if we stopped educating altogether and became ‘less educated.’ In that instance the inequality would likely also decrease….
stomv, upstream, advocates for a measure that is, essentially, a ratio of income to cost of living. This is not a bad measure. It seems a good place to start. However, it may neglect the impact of wealth and income disparity on cost of living: Housing costs, for instance, are especially sensitive to income inequality and even more so when housing becomes scarce (either ‘naturally’ or ‘artificially’)
I agree that Gini has its faults. I think that no matter what yardstick we use, however, we will discover that the distribution of the wealth created by the people of Massachusetts is distributed in a way that is quite contrary to the idea of justice. Further, this wide and widening disparity, according to studies I have read, has a strong correlation with ever increasing social ills, not the least of which is the opioid epidemic. People feel hopeless, and I would say, justifiably so. In their hopeless state of mind, opioids and other medications provide relief. What magnifies this even more on the poor and struggling working class is the lack of sick days, savings, and a safety net for anyone who has a physical aliment that would simply require “rest” but instead, receives a prescription for pain medicine that, as we are learning, is the real “gateway drug” to the opioid epidemic.
I believe that any adult in Massachusetts who is working 40 hours a week, regardless of “skill level” ought to be able to afford housing, food, clothing, a social budget, medical care, and saving for a rainy day AND eventual retirement. How we get there is will take bold leadership, not more college diplomas.
I don’t think the Gini has any faults. It’s only, after all, just math. Nor do I understand what you mean when you say, “you agree.” I don’t know that I ever said the tools were at fault: The fault never lies in the tool, but in the craftsman.
And when has it ever not been thus? I don’t know that you are inveigling against injustice as against history. Maybe you consider them one and the same. I can’t say I disagree.
I’ll have to disagree with that. Maybe we can agree that any such bold leadership might result in more college diplomas. But forestalling more college diplomas, right out the gate, seems to me to be little more than cutting ones nose to spite ones face… At least let us get to a majority (>> 50%) college educated population before deciding college education is, at all , a problem.
Once again you argue against something that has never been claimed
NOBODY claims that more college will “be the remedy for our growing economic inequality”. NOBODY. Similarly, nobody claims that single payer government-sponsored health care will cure income inequality.
These are BENEFITS that will result from fixing this pressing issue.
It is striking to me that when presented with a piece from a viable Democratic candidate who writes — loud and clear — of his desire to boldly attack our pressing wealth and income concentration issue, you attack and criticize instead of supporting him.
You seem so caught up in repeating your personal anti-education crusade that you turn away all who support what you claim to desire. Here is a candidate who AGREES with you that Massachusetts needs single-payer government-sponsored health care — and you STILL attack him!
The wealth and income gap is real, profound, and our most urgent issue. The GINI coefficient is a perfectly reasonable way to measure our income concentration (it doesn’t address wealth concentration nearly as effectively).
Mr. Warren’s proposals set the table for attacking our wealth and income concentration issue. If you want us to address our wealth and income concentration issue, then perhaps you might consider supporting — rather than attacking — candidates who do just that.
Let’s not forget that part of the need of free public higher education is to remove debt burden students carry, that contributes to their economic stagnation. I suspect there would be a ripple effect on some private institutions managing cost, to be competitive in the market.
That said, part of truth telling must be where the revenue will come from to do this. It’s easy to point at Beacon Hill (and one should) to say they need to be open about the process and numbers. But be prepared to be challenged back how you make these proposals fit in a budget that already is lacking in funding infrastructure, pre-K, mass transit, etc. Part of the problem we Dems have is overpromising and underperforming.
These are issues our (largely) upper middle class base cares about. They were not enough to nominate Berwick and not enough to carry Coakley over the hump against Baker.
I think our biggest issue is wealth and jobs concentration in the Boston area and how they disrupts the cost of living overall. It means working people are being priced into blue collar suburbs like Randolph, Malden and Brockton. Priced out of formerly blue collar areas like Chelsea and Somerville. And places really unplugged from that economy like New Bedford and Springfield are struggling. How do we transform those communities and other places like Haverhill and Fitchburg?
The largest swing from Patrick to Baker and Obama to Trump was in central MA and I don’t see these two line items really addressing their needs. They want access to good paying jobs and affordable housing. And right now the good jobs are not where the affordable housing is. Fixing that problem requires investing in those communities with high unemployment and low wages to create jobs. Fixing that problem mean investing in the T to connect working families to the Boston economy. We can’t continue to be a state of two commonwealths-one of the many dislocated and disconnected and one of the few with access to the pipeline. Education and health care costs are also drivers-but they aren’t the main problem. It’s that the wealth and jobs are concentrated in Boston.
Thanks for the response. I agree with you that we need to do more to grow higher paying jobs where people live and tackle our transportation mess, but let me tell you why I am focused on this budget mess right now. If we’re ever going to have a serious conversation about these big ideas, we need to put an end to the manufactured crises that keep popping up around budget shortfalls, that really serve as excuses for cutting vital programs. As long as we’re in a space where the question ‘how are you going to pay for it?’ is used like a weapon to end discussion about implementing strategies to take on economic inequality, we’re never going to get anywhere.
Over the next few weeks, we have a chance to do something about reforming the budget process, so that we can get in a position to have the bigger conversation. I hope you’ll take a look at the two MassBudget proposals and let me know what you think.
Thanks Steve.
On the money piece, a couple of thoughts. We need to pass the Fair Share Amendment. We also need to examine every “tax expenditure” that we give away to corporations and special interests (they add up to billions).
But for me the more important question is this: How can we afford to not address economic inequality. We know, for instance, that many good jobs – not to mention active citizenship in the age of fake news – require more than a high school education. We have to be honest about the need to reimagine public education to give everyone a chance.
We can talk about how where going to fund these programs, sure. But do you think it’s time to make public college free? Is single-payer health care the best way to go? Let’s have that debate.
Mr. Mayor, both ideas are places we need to go. They are part of the full menu of how we address economic inequality in Massachusetts. The Fight for $15 is in there. Paid family leave is in there. It’s easy to rally people around those, but the hard part of the conversation is clearly on the revenue side. We are sometimes afraid of the argument that taxes should go to a common good, with tangible benefits. I’m looking forward to you and all Democrats staying engaged in that.
Toward your point on cost of corporate incentives, what’s is your stance on the film tax credit and GE? Should those be scrapped? Do you
feel it was right for Gov. Baker and Mayor Walsh to negotiate the latter package without consulting the legislature, city council, or voters? What would your evaluation and transparency process look like?
The GE deal would not have been my first priority. I would start with a focus on people and communities who are being left behind. We’re a Commonwealth, we all need to take care of each other first.
I was not a supporter of Hillary Clinton and there was little in her campaign that I found impressive or noteworthy. The one exception was when she stated publicly (and I forget where and when) that a high school diploma has to make one eligible for a self sustaining life.
Heck, even Rick Santorum was correct when he said “I think there’s a lot of folks who are very disenchanted with both political parties because neither party is really talking about them and really saying what’s the way forward for the 70 percent of Americans who don’t have a college degree but, you know, want economic opportunity like everybody else and nobody’s talking about that.”
An anecdote, for certain, but most adults I know who do not have a college degree voted for Trump – and probably Baker and Brown. And as we all know, 62% of non-minority women without a college degree voted for Trump.
The Democrats contention that college is the remedy just adds to the mistrust many working class voters hold against us, describing us as elitists.
Is that 70% of adults without a college degree stat accurate? If so, I must live in quite the bubble since in my world it’s much closer to the inverse! I do think making sure opportunities for higher ed need to be top priority since evidence strongly shows (though yours truly seems to be an unfortunate exception) that the greater your formal education, the greater your ability to make money over your lifetime. This is of course not at all mutually exclusive with guaranteeing a living wage for all occupations.
If you check the link I provided, you will see that it is viewed as a True statement.
You’d both be interested in a great podcast on welfare reform called the Uncertain Hour.
There was a jobs first and school first debate and jobs first won the debate. In the short run it was viewed as a more cost effective way of moving people off the rolls and out of poverty. After five years though and the start of the 2000’s recessions this inverted and the folks with school first started vastly out earning their peers. Unfortunately only a few states choose to find both and a lot of people-most of them women-lost welfare and college and got trapped in a cycle of low wage jobs. It’s also worth noting only 30% of the school first recipients actually completed their degree.
So it’s a both and issue. We need to increase wages, strengthen the safety net, go back to unconditional cash assistance and provide school for those who want it and jobs
We can and should help people short term, but long term I’ve always been a schools first person, and it happens I’m reminded of all the reasons why as I make my way through another round of The West Wing. (There are a few good speeches/monologues about the importance of education throughout the series.) You may have been a bit young for it’s original airing, but if you haven’t seen it you should. From the perspective of a 2017 progressive you might find the Bartlet WH frustratingly scared of its own shadow at times, but it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of the political landscape Clinton-era Dems were dealing with. It might help you appreciate some of my defenses of DLC centrism in the context of the times. For that matter, the “Bartlet Doctrine” that was created about the time of the second inaugural is pretty close to where I am and goes far toward explaining my greater willingness than some here to intervene abroad.
Nobody wants to say why because the voters don’t care.
Yeah, it’s a shell game. Yeah, it’s wrong. Yeah, voters don’t care.
If voters cared about responsible and careful management then Martha Coakley would be Governor now. If voters cared about careful management then Donald Trump would not even be allowed near the White House on a tour bus. If voters cared about competence and serious, sober-minded, governance Jimmy Carter would have served two terms, followed by two terms of Walter Mondale followed by an unbroken line of Democratic Presidents since then….
Instead, we get Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama and, now, Trump, alongside, in the CommonWealth, Dukakis, Weld, Celuccci, Swift, Romney and Patrick. It’s kinda funny — or it would have been to my racist forbears — that the one with most Irish name was black. Irony hurts, sometimes, donnit? Bill Weld ran the state for five minutes and then got distracted and wandered away. And nobody noticed. Then Paul Celucci ran the state for 4 and a half minutes and got distracted and wandered away. Again, nobody noticed until they realized he left a woman in charge. Mitt Romney managed a full six minutes of actually paying attention before beginning his run for the presidency by bad-mouthing the state.
Then, Deval Patrick actually ran the state rather well, through the greatest economic crisis of our time and well. Did anybody notice? Or care? No.
If the voters cared about governance then Robert DeLeo wouldn’t be allowed in the state house as an effing janitor to empty the trash.
Now, Charlie Baker has realized the shallownesss of the bargain and is phoning in an effort, claiming only (unrealistically) a subservience to circumstance as fig leaf.
You want to be Governor, Setti Warren? Then you need to make the people care about government. Oh, you can win by feeding them drama and recrimination, but you’ll find their appetite for it grows with the surfeit of it — since such diet can never fulfill- and all your time will be spent giving it to them and you won’t have any left over for actual governance.
Barack Obama said “Yes, we can,” and Deval Patrick said, “Together, we can” but they never specified what it is we can do, together. Maybe, it’s time someone did exactly that…?
Massachusetts’s political climate makes it more conducive to changes than many states. We do also have our own bumps in the road. However pushing several aspects of a progressive agenda, getting it done, and hopefully making it a success becomes a model for more reluctant states. We can not talk as if we are nation states rather than a single country, although I have to admit Trump and our present Congress have shifted life and death initiatives to the states. SP is moving ahead in Ca, NY, and of all places Nv.
Reforms must show proven worth to society as a whole:
Education: Provides new directions, better income, and if funded so it is not a barrier to attend, families will have additional income to spend. As a bonus it will bring national pride when there is a collective agreement to take interest in your well being.
Health Insurance: Personal health care is now an essential ingredient for survival. Without the means to pay for it, people die or become bankrupt. The country as a whole loses the talent, energy, and productivity of its citizens. This should be a no brainer, and taken out of the for profit sphere. Done properly more money will stay in people’s pockets. There has to be a better way of demonstrating this is so. Maybe this short movie may help:.
In general I do not come from a left or right perspective. I would say I’m what Henry George answered to that question: “I’m a commonist survivalist”. It is a belief that that a certain degree of collective sense of well being is necessary for a successful country. It is even recognized in our Preamble “promote the general welfare”.
Mr. Warren correctly identifies wealth and income concentration as the single most immediate and most urgent issue facing Massachusetts. I enthusiastically agree that “it all starts with telling the truth”. I hope Mr. Warren agrees that it must NOT stop there.
Massachusetts needs to tax our wealthiest citizens much more than we do. Our perpetual budget crisis is manufactured by our legislature as a way to preserve the power of its speaker. All of us suffer as a result — our weakest and most vulnerable residents suffer the most.
This is a travesty that must end.
Tom, As to your hope that Setti does not stop with just telling the truth, here is a two-minute i-phone video from last night’s Framingham DTC event where he lays out the way he looks at it;
https://twitter.com/JohnEWalsh14/status/874053226907283456
I’m proud to be working with Setti Warren because he states clearly his belief that economic inequality is the defining issue of our time and is willing to state clearly how he feels we need to go at it.
The MassBudget proposals for reforming Beacon Hill’s budgeting process are not a silver bullet, but this bond downgrade illustrates how the lack of transparency hurts real people — right now. In addition to that, when we careen from budget crisis to budget crisis, it precludes us from spending time on the bigger, urgent matters like strategies to fight inequality.