Quick Ideas on State Government

Quick Ideas on State Government
Usually the liberal answer to government is just throw more money at it, the conservative answer is just cut the program just not the one in my district, etc. Republicans in this state are fairly lucky, they can vote and complain about waste without anyone in their districts actually losing a dime of services.

A primary theme of this blog is that people love government services, sure they'll complain about government but they love what it brings, so much that sometimes I think they just take it for granted, road plowing is a great example, how quickly it gets done and how ready people are to race right out and get back to business even after three feet of snow that would have paralyzed the city for days if not weeks in the past have fallen. But the second part of that is that people hate to pay for these services, I know people on MassHealth who complain about their income taxes, people with three kids in public schools who complain about their property taxes. The fact is that most people just assume they are getting screwed.

The Commonwealth as many states is in a bad place economically. We have grown accustomed to growing budgets that would absorb the increased costs of health care, energy, general inflation and salary expenses. This is not just Massachusetts of course, there has been a decent safety net funded by federal largess but this too is unsustainable. There are very simple things that would save a lot of money, the so-called fat in government, the procurement issues, the redundancy, the constant covering of your ass and lack of supporting innovative programming and staff that prevents government improvement and cost saving but those are more leadership and governance issues .

So here is my initial framework for some of the Commonwealth's issues, as usual, mostly unresearched, some somewhat far fetched, may some that would require legislation and a few that may be plain illegal, just some ideas. Hell, some of these ideas probably hurt me in the pocketbook.

1. The GIC-all municipalities receiving state aid (OK, so all) whose health care costs exceed that of the GIC per person are required to participate in GIC, certainly this is very controversial to some local unions who have been blessed with very low premiums and co-pays or have more gold plated health plan. These changes will go against the long ingrained ideas of local control, likely something that is coming to pass as we get involved in much more high professionalized workforces in police, fire, DPW and other important city functions. (including schools obviously)

2. Regionalization
Some schools have already done this, and below I would encourage further regionalization of school functions, this is often treated as some sort of "Death Panel" argument of education, like all local elementary schools are going to be closed and they are going to ship my kid from Swampscott to New Bedford. But there are other functions such as fire and police dispatch, and specialized functions of government that are usually too expensive for one district that isn't Cambridge or Boston to fulfill. For example, I'm unsure if a single part-time veteran's agent (required under state law) serves our veterans better that an experienced regional, multi-town agent who isn't a local VFW denizen could provide. My feeling is that regionalization would help to move away from the local, often parochial hiring of "life long residents" who may not be as qualified for the job to a further professionalization of the workforce.

3. Casinos
I'm going here. They likely aren't as good as some people will say they are revenuewise and certainly not as evil as those that are against them are. I'm more pro-casino because of my libertarian streak, if you don't like them, don't go. I can do the math, I know "gaming" is stupid economically and morally it is a tax on the stupid, the old and the desperate. But lets face, folks are going to spend their money on something and even with Foxwoods, etc claiming economic issues, I still know dozens of folks who descend on these resorts to gamble. There are immediate licensing, construction and design dollars that would come out of these projects and some permanent jobs and tax income as well. I'd rather see some nice resorts than the inevitable panic of building big Quonset Huts filled with slots lined with buses filled with senior citizens during our upcoming continuing economic crisis. Certainly there are enough "Gateway Cities" that would welcome a little economic energy.

4.Education
I usually don't write about education because it is where I work, and I just don't want to represent my organization, since I don't set policy. However perhaps the biggest things I would advocate for are 1. Regionalization of particular school functions and governance 2. A statewide teacher contract for all of the Commonwealth's teachers 3. Full vertical articulation of our early childhood, K-12 and higher education system 4. Merit teacher pay for teams of teacher in underperforming schools.

5. Health
Education and health care are the two most expensive pieces of state government. I know very little about health care except that I have great health insurance (it cost me more out of pocket for lunch after my little girl was born than paying for the entire prenatal care and birth) and that I've been blessed with pretty good health all things considered. Massachusetts took the amazing but likely unsustainable step of universal health care. It was a good first step. The state will have to take step to work on tort reform, more options for lower and middle income people, likely built on higher co-pays and possible development of local non-profit co-ops run by health care professionals for health care professionals. The state will likely have to take steps to improve people's long term health through encouraging prevention and interventions for people with chronic disease, unsure that happens. The other big piece is to look at the health care system in a different way, nurses and nurse practitioners who are the heavy lifters in the system are more than qualified to do most than the most complicated medical procedures and come at a much cheaper price. More could be done to build the pathway to these positions that will serve our aging population as well as empower these professionals to do the work that they can do.

6. Business One-Stops
This may have happened already but these would be an extension of One-Stop Career centers that would focus on business development. These folks would work through permitting processes that often get held up locally, acting as ombudsmen or liaisons with local governments, working on permitting and licensing issues, etc. Working with local universities as economic incubators to build innovation, people don't come to Massachusetts for the waters. They come for the brainpower.

7. Collective Bargaining
I'm a union member. In fact it seems that a time may come where government employees are the last remaining major union the way things are going. This is probably some dangerous ground but I got to say that public employee unions and teacher unions are doing the best they can to mimic the United Autoworkers Union (also a former local UAW 2322 member here) in burying their workforce. I imagine that the image of public employee unions may be slightly better than Congress right now, seen as protecting our worst employees, standing in the way of real change, etc. There is something to be said for those accusations, there are many employees who judge themselves by seat time instead of performance, position rather than competence. (and many higher ups who feel the same way) But in fact there is a large majority of public employees who put public service first and are looking for the same economic security everyone else in the free world is looking for. I look for my own union leadership to negotiate in good faith with a strapped Commonwealth, unsure how this happens. Creation of career ladders for successful employees, more rapid and welcoming hiring and HR systems that support employees and a union that's more responsive to cleaning it's own house. OK, maybe this one is the biggest pipedream of them all.

8. Law Enforcement and Crime Prevention
First the Quinn Bill and the whole use of details are a joke and don't prevent crime or keep us safer. The cost of construction and utility projects grows higher and in fact police departments can pretty much require a higher level education or it's military training equivalent as a matter of pre-service for hiring. These are huge issues for the boys in blue, leading to huge salary cuts from the hundreds of cops in the Commonwealth earning over 100,000 a year. I realize that being a cop is hard job, but public employees have to realize that with the promise of relative job security and a pension and good benefits is the balance that you're not going to get rich doing it. Again regionalization of some law enforcement and the increase of specialized units and the state police would be helpful. To use a firefighting example, the fire chief of our city was asked when the last time they put out a fire without mutual aid was and he quite honestly declared, "I don't know, but I'm sure the fire engines were pulled by Clydesdale's". This mutual aid idea needs to be formalized more, not just for firefighting but for fighting gang violence and other specialized functions. The Crips and Bloods don't really care if they are gangbanging in Lynn, Revere or Chelsea, these issues quickly cross our quaint municipal borders. Certainly there are other complex issues of law enforcement and public safety that are analogous to this.

9. Zoo's and Pools and Rinks
I like state parks and likely they could be added to this list but maybe a primary function of the state should be recreational areas, but when it comes to zoos, pools, and rinks, I'm unsure if these are core functions of a state government that is having difficulty housing homeless kids or putting social workers into the lives of kid's whose very reality is falling apart. In this case, I think the development of non-profits or actually selling off of these assets to private or local public entities is necessary. I love the bears at Stone Zoo, just don't think it's a government function, although I think a beer garden at Stone Zoo would be really cool, I don't think the government's going to be trucking in Hefeweizen anytime soon.

So just a few quick ideas, I'd like to get into the complexities of transportation issues, but I got nothing, I just want to see some discourse about these and other issues other than we need to cut! or we need to raise revenues!

The Empire Strikes Back

A BIT OF A ELITIST, EGGHEAD, NORTHEAST INTELLECTUAL RANT

I try to be a moderate, well OK politically. It's hard sometimes for me, I'm very liberal on social issues, I don't care what you do that doesn't affect me or the general welfare. Don't care who you love, who you sleep with, who you marry as long as it's consensual. Don't care what you drink, eat, smoke whatever as long as you're not driving my bus or sitting in a firehouse or something. In contrast, I would like to make abortion as rare an event as possible, I lean towards pro-life tendencies but am aware enough to know that sometimes women have to make this terrible choice and I want it to be safe, I'm pro-soldier and pro-national security as long as we pay for it, and pretty much think that long weapons (rifles and shotguns) should not be abridged. I think parents and students should be the focus of schools allowing for charters and choice. I believe in personal responsibility but also the second chance. I'm an investor in stocks and think people should be allowed to invest, innovate and get rich. Also I tend to be a fiscal conservative, but lean towards tax increases to pay down debt versus tax cuts that just make the problem worse. So I guess this basically makes me a tax and save libertarian.

I haven't been an political extremist for a long time, in fact as most, I tend to get a little more conservative as I get older, jaded by life experience and as a father a little more protective and paranoid of outsiders. I do however try to remember where I came from and all the opportunity, choice and second, third and fourth chances that I got.

So currently, I'm really struggling. For the past 30 years the right has been pretty organized, oh there were bouts of real weirdness but they figured out their talking points and starting fighting battles in school board meetings and on the local level. The strategy was brilliant, building a national political machine that built itself on post-Vietnam malaise, declining industrialism, evangelical Christianity and the perception of declining family values. The battles ended up securing a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, electing 12 years of Bushes, 8 years of Reagan, 8 years of a largely centrist Bill Clinton whose administration was often tagged as liberal, immoral and corrupt by the same right and a fiscal ponzi scheme that allowed a nation to have lower taxes, high economic growth, and even more government services such as social security, medicare and a military budget that equaled the rest of the world combined.

Then finally the wheels came off the bus for the right. 8 years of George Bush, constant war and an economy that sunk to the bottom hit the conservative movement hard and moderates and independents began to think that President Obama despite the unfortunate name and skin color would make for better leadership than the old crazy guy and the moose hunting ice princess from Seward's Folly.

There were always populist elements among the right, the footsoldiers outside abortion clinics for example but they were always pawns of a bigger well oiled machine. Now it's as if a train full of zombies has jumped the track spilling it's contents across the nation. There are voices of the rabble who have waited for the opportunity to serve a buffet of strange information to the masses, the undereducated DJ's turned political leadership of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other self taught demagogues with easy to repeat sloganry and catch phrases. Imagery that can somehow simultaneously evoke Nazism, Socialism of all kinds and Communism in some odd manner and some (certainly not all) evoking thinly and sometimes not veiled images of racism and nativism.

Many of the crowd feel that they are modern versions of the founding fathers, vestiges of a better time at the birth of a nation, they see themselves as a vanguard (some) and others has representing "real America", you know the America that we saw on TV in the fifties, the nostalgic fantasy of the Reagan era even. You know when Norman Rockwell walked you home from school and the only black people around were Sidney Poitier and Nipsy Russell.

The signs and actions are disturbing, cartoonish even and the gatherings are of a lot of really pissed off white people. I'm not sure what they are so pissed off about, you seem to look at the crowd and there are a lot of old and fat people there. So if you're fat, than you must not be starving, hell you can still hit up the breakfast buffet at Shoney's and the Sizzler on Saturdays. Chances are you're going to end up needing some ObamaCare eventually. And the elderly, hey wait don't all you old folks have some of that delicious socialized medicine that we call medicare? How are those social security checks treatin' ya?

Conservatives will argue, "well Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, MoveOn, etc", OK if Cindy Sheehan jumped off a bridge would you jump off a bridge. I thought their actions were stupid too, it's like those people who go to church and then go home and beat their kids and treat people like crap all week. The people who come armed and are supporting militias are among the scariest, they are the intimidators, but most are just harmless buffoons who think that their country has gone down the tubes in the last 8 months. (God only knows where these people were for the past eight years)

I do fear the Lone Wolves in the group, the people that take it to another level, the homegrown right wing equivalents of SDS or the Weather Underground or Black Guerilla Army. Most of these folks will go home, get pissed off, watch Fox, pick up their social security checks, unemployment checks or other government aid and head down to Walmart for some crappy Chinese imported stuff. It's harmless likely except to the political discourse that feeds off theater instead of reality and data. It's much easier for media, particularly with the dearth of print and serious journalism to bring some cameras than do analysis of complicated issues that are actually going to cost people money and have them make difficult choices.

I want to analyze these Tea Parties in detail among the different issues that they are attempting to address, there does not seem to be the same hatred of Wall St. and the big financiers that helped to create most of the fiscal mess, as you may have seen during the Great Depression. It is again, a considerable part of the population that seems to be venting their anger at a government that has been somewhat forced into a situation of large Keynesian deficits. Dissent is healthy of course and I mean in no way to stifle anyone's right to expression, but we really don't have to listen? Do we? Is this truly the best way to run an airline? Will the Republican Party draw it's energy from the mob?

Seven Months

I went into hibernation for seven months. Lots of stuff, working, my daughter looking at maps, gardening, brewing beer, all sorts of stuff. The election and Inauguration killed me mentally. I really started to realize that I have a life long love/hate relationship with politics. I find them fascinating, the ultimate chess game, or perhaps more accurately the largest demonstration of game theory possible. So much give and take, so many variables. I vacillate between my love of rhetoric and writing of politicians and the idiocy and absurdity that it breeds.


Lots of stuff going on. A president with over 200 days experience that has not pleased the left but certainly really pissed off the right and kind of left the middle saying, "what the hell is going on."

HEALTH CARE IS OTHER PEOPLE
Joint Session of Congress

8:02 Michelle Obama really looks good, she's a beautiful woman
8:03 Here comes Hillary, she's air kissing everyone, that's a damn red pantsuit
8:07 Hillary gets a little time on camera, better start talking about Bill
8:11 Switched over to Fox to watch the right wing scroll on the bottom
8:12 My 2 and a half year old daughter is yelling Obama and waving an American flag, unprompted by the way, she asked for the flag. Maybe the right wing is right, we are creating a nation of toddler Obamabots
8:13 Mitch McConnell apparently left his chin in another suit, the President whispers in Hillary's ear, hopefully saying "damn, sister I hope this goes better than Hillarycare in 1994"
8:15 Pelosi tells the President where to stand, I bet that woman can tell water to boil.
8:17 "E, you have to go to bed soon", "AFTER OBAMA!"
8:20 "He's talking about babies and medicine and doctors?" OK, my toddler has a better understanding of this than half of the general public.
8:21 Drops TR's mantle on the session and then old Johnny Dingell who I believe participated in the charge up San Juan Hill.
8:24 Yeah, dummies it's about the middle class. Now for the love of God talk about small business, talk about sole proprietors and family businesses who don't have access to health care, please. The people that drive this economy.
8:25 The President cannot pronounce "metastasized" so he avoided a Bushism and said grew larger in size. Whew, he brings up entrepreneurs....
8:26 Yes, the fact is this health care system is unsustainable fiscally, even if you are the most selfish bastard this side of Ayn Rand
8:28 My daughter has now changed sides and is calling the President a "pig", maybe she heard about the death panels. Wait she's clapping now. She seems pretty pleased with the lack of a cap
8:30 NO MONEY DOWN! OK, I'm a wonk I need details.
8:34 Gotta get old man McCain on board, he's the magic man, crazy mf'er but the magic man
8:36 Ah, the details need to be ironed out
8:38 Someone yelled out during the illegal immigrant thing, seriously Mr. President, just walk up, knock one of them out and it's smooth coasting for the next 3 and a half years.
8:40 BEAT ON WALL ST, BEAT ON WALL ST. Obama hates plutocrats.
8:44 The look on Eric Cantor's face says "f#ck you Barry and you're work together"
8:46 OK nothing to the deficit, now or in the future, interesting, must be magic
8:48 Medicare, yup untouched, it must be magic
8:53 900 Billion, "now that's a lot of meatballs!"
8:56 The Teddy Kennedy personal touch
9:00 F#ck you and your civility, it got lost somewhere around the corner of Gridlock and Partisanism

Republican Response: Agree on some stuff (the nice stuff everyone likes), too expensive, tort reform

Then Fair and Balanced FoxNews goes right into a right wing political commercial about health care without missing a beat


THE END OF AN ERA


Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust, or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and he lived it intensely. Ted Kennedy eulogizes RFK


The Republicans loved to hate Ted Kennedy, at least when they were fundraising. The image of the heavy, non-repentant liberal with the tarnished past played great in the red meat districts in the west and south while at the same time using his political abilities to strike bipartisan bargains and get the job done. It was interesting to see the eulogizing for Teddy, Orrin Hatch's story, the unlikely pair who served for decades together in some of the most disagreeable settings putting judges on the bench.



Ted Kennedy was liberal in only the way really rich people could be liberal. He owed nobody anything. He never had to worry about ending up having to lobby for drug companies or chase K Street blackbag jobs. Sometimes I would find some of his largesse with the federal pocketbook to be somewhat over the top, a commitment to a welfare state that would give many of us who grew up working class a time for pause, without thinking of what it actually brought us and that was humanity. I could disagree with some of the proposals, but they actually were rooted deep in the Irish Catholic politics of Boston. The Kennedys were just a generation removed from the city wards and machines that built themselves on largesse and aid to immigrants and the impoverished.



I think about what Teddy brought to me. Student loans? An access to an education that may have not been able to a person of my means. As a kid when we had nothing, AFDC and food stamps? And those are just the selfish tangible things. I had a great sadness, like losing an uncle when Teddy died, we had come to take him for granted, we laughed at his families foibles and showed great disdain at their greater failures. He was a public being. I think of what he brought to the poor, the elderly and the disabled. A promise to protect social security, medicare, and medicaid to those that couldn't speak up for themselves. Teddy was always there for them.



It's a helluva seat to fill, as we speak the machinations in Massachusetts begin. How do you replace a giant? How does a future back bencher fill the hole in the Senate. Likely, Ted Kennedy will be the last real liberal every elected to the Senate. Certainly there will be Democrats with a progressive tilt but never of the intellect and drive for social change that Teddy brought with him.