USS Massachusetts Heading for Fiscal Icebergs
A number of fiscal storms are brewing in MA. Let’s start with the health care reform law, which as predicted here, will consume more and more of our tax dollars:
“Clearly, what’s going to have to happen in the long run is more money will have to be injected in the program,” said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped to write the state’s plan. “We don’t have to in the next year or two, but if you look five or 10 years down the road, if this program is going to continue to exist, it’s going to take more money to keep it going.”
Next, we visit the Tip O’Neill Tunnel. Sadly, it’s consuming our tax dollars just like its namesake did as Speaker of the House:
Some 500 leaks at the roof-wall joints in the Tip O’Neill Tunnel have never been sealed by contractors despite widespread knowledge of the problem as far back as 2001, state officials said. Money disputes and infighting among contractors essentially caused work on those fissures to come to a halt more than a year ago. The work was further delayed by the fatal Interstate 90 Seaport connector ceiling collapse.
And if those aren’t big enough albatrosses around taxpayers’ necks, there’s always our governor:
Efforts to repair bridges are included in Gov. Deval Patrick’s $613 million plan to improve the state’s transportation infrastructure. The upgrades are included in Patrick’s $12 billion spending plan that includes funding for higher education facilities, housing and environmental protection.
I doubt that figure includes the cool $1 billion he wants to give the state’s biotech companies. It’s also interesting to note the 2 pieces of the Patrick campaign you don’t hear a lot about anymore—property tax relief and trimming waste from government.
Add it all up and it’s probably time to join the MA refugees who fled to other states.
Archived in: Deval Patrick, Education, Environmentalism, Health Care, Higher Education, Housing, Massachusetts, TechnologyAugust 26, 2007 at 10:45 pm | Trackback
13 comments
US Census Bureau Statistics.
Percentage change in residents aged 25-34 from 1990-2004
Rhode Island - down 20%
Massachusetts - down 20%
Vermont - down 27%
New Hampshire - down 27%
Maine - down 29%
Connecticut - down 30%!
For comparison, Nevada is up 60%, Georgia up 17%, Utah up 45% and other Western/Southern states similarly growing.
Progressive politics is a slow, grinding trek to oblivion. Wherever you find it, you find decay. The sensible young have no patience for it in practice.
…and New England’s population during the same period grew 8% compared to the national average of 18%.
We just need more illegals to fill in the gaps.
VW, that is the process in CT. The ethnic distributions are changing.
I have a Vermont house for sale for any prospective Mass. buyers…………
LL, they are the proximate cause of Vermont’s fiscal problems. Selling homes to more of them compounds the condition we experience.
VW, Sadly, I realize that but our life plans call for us to abandon this sinking ship and head west of the 100th Meridian.
Please excuse me, but I need to say this…
Are we prepared to surrender the culture which gave birth to our country or are we determined to preserve it? We have seen the confrontational social wars in Lexington, Ma. over gay rights, New Bedford, Ma. over immigration rights, and of course, New England’s capitol, Boston Ma. over the invasion of the Greenie/Yuppie/ACLU/CORI/Kos Kids clans. We see them hanging around our primary schools, online with our teens, checking out our trash, trying to de-moralize our morals with their “morals”, insulting our sensibilities, inverting our laws and attempting to undermine our defense. The problem has been festering out of the patience of our good natures and ample tolerance.
So what will it be?
Flight or fight?
Tragically, the problem is now regional so the solution will be proportionately regional. Every tool we need is in the documents we inherited. It is our obligated duty to protect and preserve those very same documents for those who will follow after us. A western state is advertising land for sale as an enticement to attract population. Our goal is not land development but instead, cultural maintenance.
Where do we start? Any ideas? No time like the present!
Helen:
I think we can fight around the edges, but we can’t unring a bell. New England’s condition is similar to Europe’s. Leftism is institutionalized, in control of everything of importance, and its narrative has entered every debate, and the population is adapting….leaving or reconciling themselves to the permanence of the disease. I don’t believe it can be stopped. Cultures come and go, and ours is going.
Observe the drooler at the Dodd post, and realize how deep the confusion and hatred is for her own countrymen, how fanatical and nihilistic these crackpots are. In my experience, she’s no different than the representative class of, say, Fairfield County…a bit more polished down there, but the same free-floating contempt for any political class but their own. They want power to improve things by removing their opposition. Us.
She was, I hope, atypical. But she still represents a large cohort of northeastern upper-middle class loons who are permanently alienated and intellectually rootless. The political class seems to mirror them perfectly.
Just for laughs. Stop by the Dodd/dead mouse discussion for a look-see. Not pretty.
I am currently working on moving out of Mass due to the fact that it has come to a point of no return
With Pat’s permission, more on the Census Data and commentary by Dr. Ross Gittle, James R. Carter Professor of The University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Economics and Business.
“The population of this “young adult” age cohort in New England declined nearly 25% (24.2%) from 1990 to 2004. This compares to the national average decline of 7%.
All the New England states are among the bottom 10 of 50 states in population change in this important cohort, and all the states in the region have lost one-fifth or more of their young adult populations. The decline in young adults contrasts sharply with the greater than 10% growth in this cohort in seven of the Western Mountain, Northwest and Southeast states - Nevada, Utah, Arizon, Idaho, Colorado, Georgia and Oregon.
The loss of young adults has occurred throughout the region. Of the 67 counties in New England, every one except for tiny Nancucket County in Massachusetts has experienced some decline
in the young adult cohort.”
He goes on the say that the resilience and energy of the local economies depends upon younger workers, and the possiblities for New England are not good.
Additional data:
Counties with steepest decline in 25-34 age group:
Aroostook ME down 52%
Windham VT down 41%
Newport RI down 41%
Piscataquis ME down 40%
Bennington VT down 38%
Rutland VT down 38%
Rockinham NH down 38%
Coos NH down 38%
[…] New England Republican, I came across this piece at the San Diego Union-Tribune: State officials and health care experts […]