Lieut. Gov. Tim Murray has forfeited the benefit of the doubt.
Murray, in a recent letter to political supporters, complained that he has been subjected to “false rumors and wild speculation” in connection with the crash of a state-owned car last Nov. 2 on Interstate 190 in Sterling.
Perhaps he would have had a legitimate complaint if he had been completely transparent from the start. But his account of the crash is contradicted in almost every detail by what was more recently revealed from the vehicle’s black box. If anybody is causing problems by saying things that are false, it is Murray.
The lieutenant governor claimed he had been obeying the 65 mph speed limit. He wasn’t. The black box data showed that he been traveling in excess of 75 mph, and shortly before the crash his speed increase to 108 mph.
He claimed that he had slid on black ice. Not according to the black box, which showed he had never applied the brakes. He claimed he had been wearing his seatbelt. False again.
To call all of these contradictions “mistakes” is laughable. They call into question the rest of his account. Murray said he had gone for a drive to check out storm damage – at around 5 a.m. in the pitch dark. Now he says that he went out for a drive because he couldn’t sleep. And, he now says the reason for the accident is that he fell asleep the wheel.
So for Murray to complain about the press demanding his cell phone records is both unseemly and suspicious. He contends that he was not talking or texting on his phone any time during the drive. But, he does not want to release the phone records.
If Murray wants to end rumors and speculation, he will stop stonewalling. That is only feeding them. If his phone records back up what he has been saying, he has nothing to worry about. But he can’t complain that people don’t trust him. In this case he doesn’t deserve it.
Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank’s retirement announcement prompted this from President Obama.
“This country has never had a congressman like Barney Frank, and the House of Representatives will not be the same without him.”
I’m no fan of the president, but in this case, I think he nailed it. It is the kind of “compliment” that could just as easily be an insult. It calls to mind the famous scene from “Amadeus,” after Mozart has just suffered through a lumbering, turgid opera composed by his rival, Salieri.
“I never knew music like that was possible.” Mozart tells him, followed by, “One hears such sounds and what can one say but … ‘Salieri.’”
Indeed, Obama could say what he said about Barney about every other member of Congress – past, present and future. We could say the same about Obama and every other U.S. president: There has never been one like him, and the White House won’t be the same after he leaves. Obvious, and utterly meaningless.
But I like the indirect Salieri connection. Frank has been the Salieri of the House – in love with himself but racked with insecurity, displaying it by bullying anyone less powerful. When confronted by equals or superiors, using whatever was most convenient and effective – in his case the gay card – to claim victimhood that would then excuse his nastiness.
And since Barney is so proud of being blunt, let’s be blunt. He wasn’t “acerbic,” as his admirers liked to say. He was simply mean, and mean-spirited. He couldn’t accept that his political opponents might be motivated by anything good, like love of country. They were pure evil, and had to be treated as such. He was smart, but not intelligent. He had plenty of knowledge, but lacked wisdom, not to mention civility.
He couldn’t even be gracious in victory – check out his 10 minutes of bitter whining after he won his last election by “only” 10 points.
He even exits bitterly whining – complaining that he wasn’t “protected” in the redistricting plan the way fellow Massachusetts congressman Stephen Lynch and Edward Markey were, and that it was unfair to expect him to expend any energy getting to know some new constituents in the Blackstone Valley.
The only truly funny thing he said during his announcement was that he would no longer have to be nice to those he didn’t like. When was he ever nice to those he didn’t like?
Yes, the House won’t be the same without him – it could be worse, it could be better. The point is that Frank being one of a kind is irrelevant. What matters is whether he made the House a better place. He didn’t.
Nor did he make the country a better place. His role in the housing meltdown, as much as he tries to deny it by insulting anyone who reads back to him what he said back in 2003, was catastrophic.
What also ought to matter is being treated as a “side issue” – the casual endorsement of incumbency protection in redistricting. Markey, responding to Frank’s charge that he (Markey) tried to influence the committee to draw district lines in favor of Markey and Lynch, said, ‘‘My influence was to ask that all nine districts be Democratic districts, and independent analysts are concluding that all nine are safe Democratic seats.”
Great – so that’s the “ethical” position to take? Protect your party at the expense of voters, constituents and communities and regions with common interests, but as long as you didn’t specifically try to shaft Barney, it’s OK?
It’s hard to believe that these people claim with a straight face to be “public servants.”
Police union leaders are forever claiming that their highest priority is public safety. But the evidence says otherwise – it is more about money, even if that means cannibalizing their ranks.
As the Boston Globe reports, a lawsuit brought by Boston police went before the Supreme Judicial Court this week. And if the union wins, the likely outcome will be cuts in police staffing throughout the state.
The suit is over funding for the Police Career Incentive Pay Program, more commonly known as the Quinn Bill, which has drained public safety funding since 1970. It is one of the reasons that police base pay, which the unions regularly cite to claim that officers are underpaid, is such a fiction.
In communities that adopted the Quinn Bill, officers get salary bonuses for earning college degrees in criminal justice or law. Essentially, it is another way to cloak pay increases. A bachelor’s degree yields an annual bonus of 20 percent. For a level of education that ought to be required just to qualify for the job, the average benefit to an officer with a college degree is $10,000. The cost to the state, which used to split the cost with the communities, was more than $50 million a year.
“Used to,” is the key to the lawsuit. In 2009, with the state’s bill projected to rise to $58 milllion, Gov. Deval Patrick and the Legislature cut funding for the program to $10 million, to help close a budget gap. Most municipalities, including Boston, continued to pay their half, but refused to fund the state’s half.
The suit seeks to force Boston to pay the full amount. And if the court sides with the union, that will set a precedent that will likely force other communities to do the same.
As Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation notes:
This is a very important case for cities and towns in terms of their finances … Certainly, in some communities, there will be the ironic outcome of layoffs of police officers if municipalities are required to pick up the state’s share.
Ironic indeed. If the union really cared about public safety, there would be no lawsuit. It would be much more important to them to keep cops on the streets.
Opposition to this suit, or the Quinn Bill in general, is not about hating cops, which is the standard “victim” card played by the union. It is about fiscal reality. It would be just as silly to say that the cops hate taxpayers and hate their communities. They don’t. But this is a gravy train that has not been affordable for years.
Nobody likes a pay cut. But those in the private sector have been dealing with layoffs, cuts in hours, pay and benefits and other financial pain for the past decade. The police union ought to be willing to share in that pain to help their communities avoid layoffs. If they don’t, their claim that public safety is their priority will have no credibility.
Politicians have all sorts of ways of avoiding questions they don’t like. There’s VP Joe Biden’s recent, “Don’t mess with me,” threat to a reporter. There’s the standard, “That’s a great question … “ followed by an answer or a speech about something entirely off the topic and unresponsive to the question.
But it seems like false humility is gaining some traction too, as in: “I can’t answer your question because I’m not smart enough.”
The Boston Herald reports that Elizabeth Warren, seeking to unseat Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, wasn’t very responsive recently when she was asked by Jim Braude on the Jim & Margery radio show about “the symbolism of President Obama tapping GE president Jeffery Immelt to serve as the head of his jobs council.”
That would be the GE that Warren has railed against for paying “nothing in taxes” and exploiting loopholes pushed by their lobbyists, even though she recently took a $1,000 donation from one of their lobbyists.
“The question of symbolism here is one I’ll leave to people who are smarter than I am,” she said.
Ah, yes – poor, intellectually challenged Elizabeth Warren. This would be Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, former assistant to Obama and special adviser to the Secretary of the Treasury. The former chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel that oversaw the U.S. banking bailout. The one who presumes to instruct us all on why the wealthy should be taxed at rates even more “progressive” than they are now, because “nobody got rich on their own.”
And yes, who has regularly castigated GE as an example of “corporate greed” in her campaign for the Senate.
But, she’s too dumb to comment on Obama selecting a tax-dodging CEO to head his jobs council?
Tell you what, Elizabeth. If that question is too tough for you, maybe you ought to leave being a senator to people who are smarter than you.
Being a litigious society, we have all received emails from lawyers that include signature sections with name, position, organization, street address, floor, suite, city/state/zip, email, fax, phone, favorite non-profit or case, favorite quote, serial number, favorite cereal, and so on. That’s lots of information to share, but below it is 15 miles of confidentiality verbiage as to why this is protected, privileged, blahblahblah communication.
It makes you laugh in the private sector, but it’s not something you expect in the public sector. Let me share two items I noticed just this morning in various communications with our public servants (state and local):
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This electronic transmission is for the intended recipient only and may contain information that is privileged, confidential, or otherwise protected from disclosure. Any review, dissemination, or use of this transmission or any of its contents by persons other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited. If you receive this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately upon receipt and delete or destroy the communication and its attachments. Thank you for your cooperation.
and
The substance of this message, including any attachments, may be confidential, legally privileged and/or exempt from disclosure pursuant to Massachusetts law. It is intended solely for the addressee. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer.
I wonder if I have broken confidence by sharing the substance of these confidentiality blurbs! More seriously, as Pioneer, the media and every other organization out there that cares about transparency and the public trust knows all too well, Massachusetts governments are notorious for not sharing information. We are worse off for it — and it does nothing to build confidence in the workings of public servants.
This is a good year to do so. The Gallup numbers are no surprise (been in this range for a while), but the dissatisfaction with incumbents is, if anything, deepening. As regards Congress and Washington’s ability to get things done, this and other polls do suggest that the view that states should have a larger role in decision-making is gaining steam on both sides of the aisle.
The findings include
- 82% of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job.
- 69% say they have little or no confidence in the legislative branch of government, an all-time high and up from 63% in 2010.
- 57% have little or no confidence in the federal government to solve domestic problems, exceeding the previous high of 53% recorded in 2010 and well exceeding the 43% who have little or no confidence in the government to solve international problems.
- 53% have little or no confidence in the men and women who seek or hold elected office.
- Americans believe, on average, that the federal government wastes 51 cents of every tax dollar, similar to a year ago, but up significantly from 46 cents a decade ago and from an average 43 cents three decades ago.
- 49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. In 2003, less than a third (30%) believed this.
It’s going to be a rough year for incumbents when Americans estimate waste at a rate higher than Carla Howell!
More proof that those employed in Massachusetts’ public sector live in a parallel universe: The gentle – very gentle – reforms approved by the state Senate last week to head off a total collapse of the pension system are being portrayed as cruel and unusual punishment.
Take a look at the specifics. The reforms, if adopted, would:
- Raise the retirement age for most employees from 55 to 60.
- Calculate pensions based on the top five earning years instead of the top three.
- Raise the age for maximum retirement benefits from 65 to 67.
And, to offset such draconian pain, the reform would cut contributions for some veteran employees and provide all pensioners with larger cost-of-living increases. Also, this would affect only future employees – not a single one currently employed.
Oh, the horror.
The horror is that the complaints of public employee unions aren’t being laughed out of the Legislature. Especially the one about them “paying for their pensions.” If they did, there would be nothing to talk about. The system would not be $20 billion in the hole.
Especially when the complaints are being led by Democratic Sen. Steven Tolman, soon to be freed from his sacred oath to represent all the people of his district when he resigns to become president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. Not that the change will make much difference to Tolman. He has given no evidence of being bound by that oath during his entire tenure.
The horror is that this does not go nearly far enough. The pension fund has $20 billion in unfunded liabilities. These reforms are expected to save $5 billion over the next 30 years. Three decades to address 25 percent of the problem.
The horror is the continued hilarious pandering to the unions by our elected leaders. According to the Globe, Gov. Deval Patrick, “said after the vote that he appreciates that public employees feel under siege …”
Sen. James Eldridge, an Acton Democrat, criticized the reform, saying, “There should be a shared-sacrifice approach.”
It is taxpayers who have been, and continue to be, under siege. How many of them get to retire at 60 with a generous, defined-benefit pension? Yet they have to pay for public employees to get it. It is taxpayers who have been making all the sacrifice. If Eldridge wants some shared sacrifice, he should demand that current employees be covered by the reforms as well as future ones.
This is better than nothing, but not much better. It is obvious that Massachusetts politicians are still owned and controlled by public-employee unions, not the public.
If there was any confusion about what Massachusetts public employee union leaders mean when they keep saying they just want to be “part of the solution” to the struggles municipalities are having with health care costs, the budget just signed by Gov. Deval Patrick should remove it.
To them, being part of the solution means to dilute it – to water it down.
And Gov. Deval Patrick was happy to roll over for them and help with the dilution.
The first attempt at reform – a bill approved by the House – actually offered a credible solution by eliminating the automatic veto power Patrick had granted to the unions if municipal leaders tried to move them into the less expensive but still generous state Group Insurance Commission plan.
There had been some hope that cities and towns could collectively save $100 million – not big bucks statewide, given that the state budget alone is more than 300 times that, at $30.6 billion. Still, it was a step.
But it got watered down in the Senate. If labor and management reached an impasse over health care, the matter will now go to a review panel that will supposedly be tilted toward management, with one member from labor, one from the municipality and a third appointed by the governor’s budget chief.
But, given the governor’s stated “partnership” with labor, taxpayers have a right to be skeptical about how which way this panel will tilt.
And even that was too much for the governor who had implied as a candidate that he would help cities and towns cut property taxes. He diluted the Senate version some more. After all, it is not as though the hard-pressed taxpayers of the state should be his priority. His priority is to deliver the labor vote for his friend, President Barack Obama, in the next election.
There is the usual rhetorical lipstick being applied to this pig. Patrick is using his focus-group-tested lines. In Massachusetts, unlike those cretins in Wisconsin, “we turn to each other, not on each other.” Labor is “a partner, and they’ve been a great partner.” Labor is simply being granted a “seat at the table” and a “meaningful role” in shaping municipal health care benefits.
Outgoing Massachusetts AFL-CIO thug-in-chief Robert Haynes, after threatening to withhold union support from Democratic legislators in the House who dared to vote in the interests of all their constituents, was full of praise for the governor. And you know when Haynes is praising somebody, he has just rolled him.
“Finally, in the endgame, we still get to sit down with municipalities and bang out and bargain what health care looks like in that city or town,’’ Haynes said. “That’s all we ever wanted, was to have a voice.”
Right. Just a voice. For generations, public employee unions have been pretty much the only voice in collective bargaining with municipalities. Rather than a seat at the table, they have owned the table.
This final version of the “reform” takes a portion of the municipal savings and gives it right back to the unions. Yet there are still some hilariously claiming that municipalities will still save $100 million a year.
They won’t, of course. That is why the governor doesn’t talk so much about $100 million. He favors slippery, unquantifiable phrases like “jobs saved or created.” He says this will provide “meaningful savings” to cities and towns.
What does that mean? Whatever he wants it to mean.
Ruffle up my sleeve. Presto. The Great and Good have done it again. The just-passed 2012 budget, it has been proclaimed, has “solved” the structural deficit, which just half a year ago was said to be in the $2 to $3 billion range. According to the State House News Service (sub. required):
…The Patrick administration and lawmakers have also cheered what they have described as the elimination of a persistent structural deficit – caused largely by an annual reliance on onetime sources of revenue and an unchecked use of capital gains taxes – that has forced policymakers to close budget gaps each year with new revenues or revenue grabs, spending cuts or withdrawals from the rainy day fund.
SHNS further reported that Mike Widmer of the Mass Taxpayers Foundation
said the near-elimination of the structural deficit could help lawmakers begin to restore funds for programs that have taken deep cuts throughout the recession, or cover unanticipated costs in programs like Medicaid….
Really? And how was the courage mustered to do all that in one budget cycle, with the only big battle being over municipal health care reform, which will save municipalities money (good thing!) but in fact not save the state government any money?
Before you begin believing in magic wands, a transformational governor or rabbits living in the depths of a moose’s tall top hat, remember that we are dealing with the Great and Good. Can someone drop the magic pixie dust so readers can regain their memories? There we go.
Some examples of the Great and Good’s solutions include Chapter 40R, which was to address fast-rising housing prices, ensure that growth was channeled toward smart growth principles, and alleviate the need to make hard choices about the underlying 40A zoning statute. The number of units built since the law passed is, well, to twist around an over-worn phrase, enough perhaps to make a village, but it would be a mountain hamlet at best. Massachusetts remains a state with outsized housing prices on a relative basis, which act as an additional pressure on businesses seeking to attract and retain young talent.
Chapter 58 of the 2006 Acts, otherwise known as the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act, otherwise known to the pitchfork crowd, the Wall Street Journal’s ed board and Tim Pawlenty as RomneyCare (or ObamneyCare), may have accomplished some good things (see here for Pioneer’s work evaluating it) but it was also meant to rein in escalating health care costs.
Don’t let anyone change the goal posts on you: It was explicitly meant to insure more of the indigent by getting them on private plans (thereby lessening the need for a Free Care Pool), allow small businesses to have a one-stop shop where they would have defined contribution/stripped-down/affordable plans, and help hold down cost inflation over time (through a push for cost and quality transparency for consumers). Has it worked? Brian Mooney (here and here) sure thinks so, and he is partially right. But on the core issue of cost containment, it has not worked because we did not have the courage actually to implement its cost containment provisions—the cost and quality transparency, and the defined contribution provisions. On flexible plans suitable and affordable to small businesses, well, it has been worse than nothing; the cost inflation to business that has come in tandem with the Connector’s gold-plated plans is troubling.
So, I come to the trumpet ceremony where business leaders acquiesce and call victory with a keen ear to the dissonance between facts and figures. In addition, the crack team at Pioneer shows just how much of a sleight of hand the 2012 budget is—in fact two sleights of hand. As my esteemed colleagues Josh Archambault, director of Pioneer’s health care operation, and Stefan Poftak, research director and once consultant extraordinaire to Bulgarian investors, put it in recent blog posts: OK, so we “solved” the state’s structural budget deficit of $2 billion by coming up with a mirage of $900 million in Medicaid savings and by pushing off the equivalent of $1 billion in current pension commitments to future generations.
So basically the House, the Senate and the Governor are telling us that they feel they can bank on higher receipts to make up the Medicaid hole in the budget. And basically we are solving our problems the way we always do — by kicking the can down the road. And that’s something to celebrate?
With the next fiscal year now the current fiscal year, it’s good of the Legislature finally to have approved a state budget – unless Gov. Deval Patrick, who has 10 days to review it, refuses to sign it.
It is another reminder that those who make the rules don’t abide by the rules. If we miss a deadline to pay our taxes, we get penalized with interest charges. If we don’t get our car inspected on time, we can get fined and towed. If they’re late approving a budget, they spend the next several days congratulating themselves on all the hard work and tough decisions they made.
The congratulations, besides being unseemly, are also premature – as Joshua Archambault notes in his excellent post below, the budget is balanced on “unrealistic assumptions,” which are the expectation of unprecedented savings in Medicaid. Archambault correctly calls that a “mirage.” Or, in the grand tradition of politics, I’d call it “smoke and mirrors.”
A few other things are worth noting.
According to the Boston Globe, the governor and legislators,
have described the entire state budget as among the most difficult in decades, because the state has been forced to close a $1.9 billion deficit that is mostly the result of the loss of $1.5 billion in federal stimulus money.
The loss of stimulus money? This was not a loss – it was a $1.5 billion gain that the state shouldn’t have had in the first place, since supposedly those funds were meant to stimulate the private, not the public, sector. Remember the promise that it would keep unemployment under 8 percent?
They knew, from the start, that the stimulus was a one-time injection of money to give them time to get their act together. But instead of doing that, they just used it as an excuse to continue business as usual, to delay dealing with budget problems they should have confronted last year.
Then there is the watered-down version of the House plan that would finally have given municipal officials a real tool to control local health care costs.
This tap dance has been going on for years: Gov. Patrick claimed in 2007 that he’d given cities and towns the ability to control their health costs by moving their employees into the less-expensive state Group Insurance Commission, which still offers a better health plan at a better price for the workers than just about any in the private sector.
But, as a favor to his “partners” in labor, he included a poison pill that allowed the unions to veto any such attempt. With that hurdle in place, only about two dozen of 351 municipalities were able to join the GIC.
This budget makes it a bit tougher – unions have lost their automatic veto. Municipal officials can raise deductibles and copayments outside of collective bargaining.
Still, if that produces an impasse, the matter will go before a review panel with one member from labor, one from management and one appointed by the governor’s budget chief.
The lack of a clear time table and resolution process from that panel could lead to something that looks a lot like binding arbitration.
Finally, it is worth noting that even this was too draconian forSens. Kenneth Donnelly, Marc Pacheco, and Steven Tolman, who claimed this would unfairly diminish the voice of labor unions.
Pacheco, who has been wholly owned by the unions for his entire legislative career, hilariously claimed that this was “a direct attack on the middle class.”
Obviously, the only middle class he knows or cares about is the one on the government payroll. It is Pacheco who has, for decades, been attacking the struggling private-sector middle and lower-middle class workers who get stuck with the bill for benefits for government union workers that are vastly better than their own.
It is sad that the voters in his district keep returning him to office, when he has made it clear he has no interest in representing them if they are on a private payroll.
