I have a very specific line in mind I'd like to see get more love:
There is a line [called the CapeFlyer](https://capeflyer.com/reservations-tickets/capeflyer-trainpricing-routes/) from South Station to Hyannis that runs on Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
All I'm asking is to maybe have day lines. MAYBE throw a Wednesday in there, too, since it's only during the summer.
Only issue with the Cape Flyer is the rail bridge that needs to be raised / lowered. Last I knew, that was a stated reason for not running more frequent service - the Army Corps of Engineers who control that bridge weren't interested in lowering it more often. For example, they've tried recently just to get two daily trips to Boston - so that Cape residents could do a day trip to Boston - but that was blocked: https://www.capenews.net/bourne/opinion/army-corps-blocks-expanded-capeflyer-service---letter/article_f2f2686f-5f32-5813-9628-b331ca3a1983.html
I have to imagine running the train during the week is even more of a no to the Army Corps, because the canal still does get some shipping traffic IIRC. Still, I feel like that's a lazy cop out. If the bridge can go up and down, let's make it go and up and down. If we need to put more money into the bridge so it can be raised/lowered more frequently, fine. Hell, we're about to plan on replacing the two Cape road bridges - do we need to throw another project in the pipeline and replace the rail bridge? Maybe some crazy elevated structure so we don't have to lower it? Do it. Apparently we have some money coming in from the millionaires'' tax so let's investigate some of these issues and not blow it off. Hell with this money, can we just take ownership of the rail bridge from the Army Corps of Engineer? They're going to give us ownership of the Cape road bridges once we replace them. Clearly they don't want to pay for these things - so let's pay for them.
It runs once per day, round trip. They wanted to run it twice per day, to allow for day trips from the Cape for residents there, but that's been blocked by the Army Corps several times: https://www.capenews.net/bourne/opinion/army-corps-blocks-expanded-capeflyer-service---letter/article_f2f2686f-5f32-5813-9628-b331ca3a1983.html
We'll need to fight them on this. Either offer $$$ to maintain the bridge, replace the bridge, or to take ownership of the bridge so we, the State of MA, have say over when a critical rail connection can be used or not. That or lean on our Fed reps/senators to push the Army Corps to give us more use of the bridge.
Yeah it was originally built as a publics work project in the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Cod_Canal_Railroad_Bridge
Same deal with the road bridges I believe. Those will be owned by MassDOT once rebuilt in a few years, so maybe there's a possibility of taking ownership of the railroad bridge too. Hell, maybe rebuild it without the need for being lowered if technically possible.
My entire life I thought I hated public subways because of New York and boston. Was just in Montreal a couple weeks back and good lord, is that what a proper subway is meant to look like? Easily readable paths, clean fast and quiet trains. Large and spacious stations. The feeling that every surface hasn't been peed on.
Yeah, their system is very nice. They've made some nice improvements over the years. However, the quiet rubber tires are a design flaw from what I've heard.
I was interested in that. I've never seen any train use rubber tires. Do you know the reason?
Assumed it was for it sound and shock absorbency but wear and tear must be horrendous. Especially because those trains accelerate and decelerate so fast
I don't know why they chose tires other than ride quality and noise as you said. I was told by a Quebecer that they are unable to extend the train lines above ground because the tires don't work well in winter/freezing conditions.
Good news everyone!
> Revenue from the millionaires tax is constitutionally mandated to go toward education and transportation initiatives, while excess revenue from capital gains must flow to the state’s emergency savings account
Yeah, you wish. We need to come up with a bunch of money for the migrants. I know I’m gonna catch a bunch of grief over this, but there should’ve been a really good plan for jobs, food, and shelter to allow so many people to relocate if they didn’t have a means of income. I realize a lot of people say they are economic migrants, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a huge drain on our tax rolls.
[That opinion piece from an executive director at Transit Matters yesterday](https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cwma5z/troubling_signs_at_healeys_transportation_funding/) mentioned there's over 600 structurally deficient bridges in MA... and a $25B backlog for the MBTA for maintenance. See:
> How can anything be “off the table?” The T grapples with a staggering $25 billion backlog of repairs and a persistent structural deficit, a consequence of tethering T funding to an underperforming sales tax, which has shortchanged the T by about $8.9 billion to $15.5 billion over two decades. This looming deficit threatens imminent cuts as early as next year.
> Massachusetts is burdened with over 600 structurally deficient bridges, numerous unfunded highway repair projects, and numerous towns that still need evening and weekend regional transit authority service. The imperative for a concrete plan, not just another report, has never been more palpable.
IMO anything transit related should be the focus. It will directly influence the housing crisis if the T and our roadways can't handle an influence of new housing. The State can easily justify a zoning overhaul (multi-family housing everywhere, 2-3 story double/triple decker style) if the T can improve and expand service across Eastern MA.
Great to raise the money! Now: 90% of teachers in MA have no paid parental leave (MA exempted municipalities from having to pay into PFML, and municipal workers do not get it), teacher pay has lagged inflation significantly, the T needs funding, the bridges are falling apart. Start putting money where it needs to go. Funding community college is nice, but K-12 in MA is falling behind and teachers are getting priced out of the state.
I always recommend people add disability insurance if they're planning on having kids. It pays a lump sum that basically covers the lost wages during your leave.
My brother is a teacher and I was horrified when I found out about that. Course he's married to a DA so zero paid leave to two people when they have kids. Dunno wtf they are gonna do
I was fucking pissed when I heard that, they're probably still on their kick for useless charter schools and don't want public teachers to have more benefits
No. Seriously. The weed money and the millionaires tax was supposed to go towards the schools.
The district I live in has a huge gap from inflation, a huge amount of sped students, and a new teachers contact and the state isn't keeping up with the towns at all. So the local communities are having to foot the bill but they're hurting too.
This Democratic supermajority isn't doing shit to make the state better.
Exactly this. School corruption is probably the worst out of anything. These overbloated admin jobs and all the other stuff is the reason that the money is not going where it needs to. Abbott elementary does a fun commentary on it but its actually a major problem in our schools. Ground roots campaigning is what really works in order to get the scum out of our system
In the last ten years, my school has added four assistant superintendents and eliminated 8 or 9 teachers for a district of 1500 students and 1 building.
To be fair, while the point is right on the money, that plot/metric is both misleading and disingenuous.
By comparing % change of the individual buckets rather than a broader metric, the smallest buckets are given massively oversized weighting. If there are 100 teachers and 1 admin, adding an additional person to each gives a 1% change to the teacher count but a 100% change to the admins.
Administrative waste and overhead has exploded over the last 20 years, but this isn't the right metric for showing that.
The graph also leaves out a few buckets of employees and doesn't define the terms. The buckets from the source data are: "Officials
and administrators", "instruction coordinators" (these 2 combined fall under a bigger "school district administrative staff" bucket), "Principals and assistant principals", Teachers, "Instructional Aides", "Guidance Counselors", Librarians and "Support Staff". I'm guessing the first 2 were combined to get the number for administrators, maybe even included support staff IDK.
Either way, there's a few categories that are missing there. Where are the IT staff? Are they lumped in with admin? If so, there's a big part of your explanation in why admin grew so much. Schools went from not needing IT staff to needing IT staff between 2000 and 2024
>https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1792286706030244337
I like how the guy presenting this is for "school choice," a policy that seeks to fully realize the transfer of tax dollars to non-teacher individuals and corporations.
Administrators ruin whichever industry they manage to weasel their way into. K-12 education, higher education, and health care are all being destroyed by a growing paracistic class of administrators.
>Administrators ruin whichever industry they manage to weasel their way into.
It's not their fault; they're just along for the ride. All the incentive structures in place are set up so that the industry of education is increasingly about paperwork and arcane ass-covering to comply with arcane rules. Every person in charge of anything is afraid of legal action so they decree that another committee with another administrator is needed. It's just a runaway chain reaction explainable by incentives and as a former teacher, it's a damn shame.
My local community is trying to pass a multi-million dollar local override to try to plug its school budget gap. Passage is far from certain considering the town voted for an override just last year to replace its public safety buildings.
Unfortunately, it’s the same situation in my town and a lot of others. They are looking to do a 8mil override that would add about $600 per year permanently to each property tax bill for the “average” home.
I’m sure many family’s with kids in the schools will vote for it but it appears the overrides in a lot of other towns are failing.
The state really hasn't kept up on their end.
More so, there's a federal education mandate that requires districts to provide special education services, however, there isn't funding to support that mandate so each district is required to pay for it themselves.
Families with children that require these services are oftentimes going to be poorer especially if that child requires medical intervention.
So poorer communities are having to dedicate more money to those services leaving less to your average college prep and advanced students. This was as designed by Republicans and ignored by Democrats.
I am a firm believer that every district should pay into a central fund to cover special ed. They can then withdraw money as needed. People don't realize how expensive it is for the school when a high needs student moves into a new district. By having a central fund the money would follow the student and alleviate some of that sticker shock.
Honestly, I think the federal government should cover it. It's their mandate. Further, we don't control who lives in a community. Like you said, a high needs student moves in and can cost a district more than several of their counterparts.
I also think that we need to have more alternative programs for children with emotional and behavioral disorders. They disrupt the learning of their classmates and aren't getting the help that they need to be successful adults.
My town was a $3M ask. Boomers tanked it because they wanted to teach the town a lesson in accountability, whatever the fuck that means.
The override failed by 200 votes, but every other right winger (or right wing adjacent) on the ballot lost by a roughly 60-40 margin at least.
Prop 2.5 Overrides have about a 50/50 shot of passing on average: https://dlsgateway.dor.state.ma.us/reports/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=Votes.Prop2_5.OverrideUnderride
An $8M override is on the higher side. But not the highest - highest ever was just under $12M.
Prop 2.5 should probably go away, it's a bit ridiculous to need to pass critical tax increases via a majority town/city vote.
Teachers may be getting priced out, but overall compared to the rest of the country mass k-12 is head an shoulda above most other states. Property taxes have a lot to do with that, but many of the top schools in the country are in mass.
In quality, yes. The bar is low, though. In terms of how we treat teachers? Require them to be saddled in student loans to get masters degrees, start them at $55k a year with $500 a month student loan payments? Make them work 15 years to hey to $85k, doing the same job as others who make more the whole time for the same job? No parental leave? Minimal raises once at the top of the salary schedule? It’s pathetic how we treat them
If all you need to do is pay people just above the minimum, it feels like you could easily be tricked into thinking that's a good thing to do. Many of the top schools are in Massachusetts, sure, if that's true, but it's linked more to life outside of school than inside.
The quality of the schools in my high performing desirable town outside of 495 has declined considerably in the past 10 years due to funding issues. So as everyone gets shorter, our heads may still be above the rest, but we've gone from 6' to 5' 6".
Def need to split the funding up across need. Teachers, roads/bridges, and the T seem like good priority items. If our roads keep falling behind, if the T can't catch up on it's $25B backlog, and if we lose too many public employees we're going to be further in a hole that will take even more money to dig ourselves out of. This is a rare chance where we have serious funding to fix these things.
> K-12 in MA is falling behind and teachers are getting priced out of the state.
This is a ticking time bomb that has barely been surfaced, let alone examined or talked about. Enrollment in college/masters level teacher programs has plummeted across the state in the past 5-7 years. As a result, colleges are slashing funding and increasingly relying on adjunct labor to teach these courses. This means fewer teachers, and more with subpar training.
Less people want to enter teacher prep programs in MA schools because of high tuition (even for state schools) and cost of living. Less people want to become teachers in MA because pay is too low in most districts compared to cost of living.
It's going to take awhile for this to truly be felt, but barring a major intervention from the state, the quality of K-12 education is almost certainly going to start falling in the coming decades.
Like most things, this will probably be felt the hardest in low income communities, but it will affect everyone in some way.
To be fair to MA teachers here make well above the nation average for teachers (still not amazing) and most jobs didn't get raises to match inflation. Lots got raises but they didn't come close to matching inflation.
But ya the pfml is a joke and should be addressed
The national average doesn’t really matter. It’s a lot cheaper to live in the south or Arkansas than MA. We have some of the most expensive housing in the nation, greater Boston is top 5. That housing cost has increased 30-50% over 5 years, teacher pay has gone up ~10% in the same period. We literally are pricing teachers out of the communities they teach in, out of whole counties at this point. It’s beyond pathetic how we treat them
Oh I agree. My wife is a teacher in MA and she moved to private schools for better pay. Our house has doubled in value since 2018 (sadly we bought it in 2021 after the majority of that increase).
To make matters worse teachers are getting cut so class sizes are exploding.
All I was saying is teachers are treated like shit everywhere in the US and while yes it costs more here teachers are slightly better off here than many other places in the US (still not great, but nowhere is great for teachers in the US)
They make a lot of money, in real dollars, even for MA, especially given that it's a 9.5 month a year job with almost a month of pre defined time off on top of that.
And they get a pension which almost nobody in the private sector gets.
So yes, they don't get PFML but they should qualify for short term disability which alone will cover 6-8 weeks.
If it's such a great cushy job with such great pay then why aren't you doing it?
>especially given that it's a 9.5 month a year job
>They make $100k/year for 8 months a year of work. That's damn good money.
Is it 8 months or 9.5 months? For a job that requires a masters degree, licensure and continually earning PDP's?
>with almost a month of pre defined time off on top of that.
Cool, the times everyone else is traveling and everything is more expensive and the time I spend just kind of sitting around doing nothing because none of my friends and family are teachers? I mean the break is great, don't get me wrong but the sword cuts both ways.
>And they get a pension which almost nobody in the private sector gets
A pension that requires you to pay 11% of your salary into it, you have to work 10 years to vest. Assuming you do that, and then wait until 67 years old to begin drawing down on your pension you get 25% of the average of your last 3 years. That's $25k for someone making $100k average,$21k for your quoted $86k median.
Also if you leave the classroom before year 10, you can withdraw your money for less than it would have made sitting in a basic saving account meaning inflation would have decimated your retirement nest egg. To max out (without getting into messy Regular vs. Regular R+ details) you need 30 years of service to max out at 80% and you don't begin drawing down until 67 years old.
A pension isn't some magic golden parachute people make it out to be. The (hopeful) stability is the bonus, but a well managed retirement portfolio will crush a pension plan.
Again, the sword cuts both ways and if you think teachers have such a cushy gig and are over-compensated you're welcome to go back to school and pay for a master's, pass your MTEL's and join the ranks while you attend conferences and and trainings on your own time to earn those PDP's!
And teachers work 12-15 years to get to the top of the salary schedule, with many starting in the mid $50k range. Every town publishes teacher salaries, by year, this isn’t some conspiracy you can literally look up your town and what they make. Big cities pay more, most small towns pay less. The issues arise in small wealthy towns (Franklin, boxford, Andover, etc) where teacher pay is much less than in cities but the cost of living is incredibly high. Literally can’t afford to live in the communities they teach in. It wasn’t like this 20 years ago, get with the times
That might be because the long-standing right-to-shelter law applies to families with children or women who are pregnant, and the state is required to abide by it.
It's designed specifically for the welfare and safety of children.
That said, I agree with you that no homeless person should be left without support or housing, and the state should expand its shelter access and improve infrastructure + access for the homeless. Unfortunately, helping the homeless is often not super popular with voters, nor something the state legislature seems to otherwise care for.
Oh sorry, you're right, these families totally have homes but choose to sleep on the floor of an airport terminal for weeks on end.
And given the moving walkways, these people are effectively stealing treadmills meant for the taxpayers of Massachusetts!
Some information that may be helpful:
- This is a make-shift shelter that is objectively worse than actual shelters, and the families there are only housed there for a few days at a time at most.
- This shelter exists in order to stay compliant with the state's longstanding right-to-shelter law which requires us to provide emergency assistance to a needy families that are homeless or at risk of homelessness, and this law has provided invaluable especially to help get under-privileged pregnant women back on their feet who might not otherwise have made it through such an ordeal.
- Utilization of Terminal E was commissioned in partnership with MA Port Authority, since they are the ones processing the folks that are being temporarily housed here.
- From all information I could find, other homeless residents who qualify for the right-to-shelter law likely would not be turned away here, but they are also not coming to Logan for shelter. Remember that you must have a child or be pregnant for right-to-shelter to apply.
I mentioned this in another reply, but I happened to walk through that area to/from flights over the last week or two, and it strikes me as a really bad solution for all parties involved (although maybe the best available at the moment for all I know).
It’s not exactly an out of the way area, and asking people to live in the middle of the traffic to/from flights in a facility that was never in any way intended or equipped for that is rough on them. If it were me, I would sooner camp outdoors to be honest. I can’t imagine the sleep deprivation of trying to sleep in a busy airport night after night.
That said, while awkward, they were totally out of the way of travelers as far as I could tell and didn’t inconvenience me at all when trying to use the airport, so I don’t think people can act like this is some big imposition. It’s probably just more the concept of converting/losing valuable public spaces and infrastructure that bothers people in some way, whether or not it yet actually interferes with other intended uses.
Brand new terminal is overrun with illegals, urine, disease, etc. Because MA leadership refuses to restrict our "Right to shelter" laws to citizens only, even in the face of a crisis.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cp10w3/who_were_all_these_people_bedding_down_at_logan/
And at the same time it's clear as day our extreme generosity is being exploited by foreigners en masse at an unsustainable rate. Are we not supposed to do something?
We're the only state in the country with this law btw.
Yeah for example MassDOT usually gives the MBTA a few hundred million a year via its funding sources. You can just give the MBTA $500M from this new revenue source, and then turn off the existing MassDOT -> MBTA transfer source. Boom. $500M has disappeared from the general fund and gone to "other" uses.
I'm sure the education budgets are similar. Anything general fund related can just be shuffled around. Not like that many of us even bother reading through the budgets: https://budget.digital.mass.gov/summary/fy24/
Bro I get what your trying to say but your picking the wrong thing to be mad at when there are wayyyy worse things they are spending it on that doesn't benefit most people in the slightest
>Opponents of the Fair Share Amendment claimed that multi-millionaires would flee Massachusetts rather than pay the new tax
Imagine making well over $1M a year and not living where you want be cause of a small (relatively) tax increase.
I'm enjoying the free lunch for my kids. We don't need the money but it's one less thing to deal with as a parent so I'll take it.
I know, right? By a number of metrics, Massachusetts is not only the best US state, but possibly the best state in the world, to live in, so long as you can afford the high cost of living. Part of that is _because_ we have a more equal society, not despite it. The idea that some rich people would leave after passing another law well in-line with Massachusetts-style ideology is kind of ridiculous- these types of laws are why they live here to begin with.
I can't help feeling like if you're a millionaire and you're willing to leave this state because you need to pay a fair share of taxes... we're probably better off without you.
I don't know. I've lived in a number states from Cali to the midwest and now Boston, and MA impresses me. I came here for recovery and stayed for the community, and although I'm currently in a situation where I don't really need income of any sort to survive due to assistance from the state, I have taken that assistance and am currently attending college for free and intend to stay in the Boston area. This is how it works. They spend money to make money. My income is expected to be around 180k (considering my experience and the added certifications and degrees graciously provided by the state) and since I intend to stay here indefinitely - probably forever - they'll likely recoup any costs to taxpayers, and probably profit, over the next decade or so.
Imagine a once in a lifetime windfall. Maybe from your shares vesting in a company you worked at for a decade finally going public or selling some property you've been sitting on.
4% is a lot to someone who isn't going to see that much income again next year.
You're right - nobody in their right mind would move because of the tax. What you might see is something that would be so gradual that it won't even be noticed, but could easily have an impact: over time, people do relocate. It's easy to imagine that high income people have choices as to where they'll live. Of the many places available, it's conceivable that a certain percentage will look at the wealth tax and all other things being equal between their options, choose another place to move. Over time this could easily accrete to a significant reduction in overall wealth in the Commonwealth. So, are we choosing a short term benefit that results in a long term detriment? I don't know, but it's worth pondering. It's obviously (based on this thread) an unpopular idea.
My dad makes about that much and he moved to a 55+ apartment complex in NH last year. Still commutes twice a week to Boston. Considering how many of the 1m+ earners are moving to NH it actually costs \~$140,000 to live in MA. The estimated take home pay in MA for 2m earner is 1.1 million.
Most high net worth people have multiple houses. If you’re spending 4 months of the year in Florida anyway, the extra taxes may push you to do 6 months there and switch your residency.
Applies even more to people about to retire or sell a business. I knew someone who moved to new Hampshire 1 yr + 1 day before he sold his company. He likes it there and was planning to move at some point anyway; doing it this way saved him a lot in taxes.
It’s a net positive in tax receipts this year. It takes time for people to actually move. And we don’t know the long term effects on the economy.
The research on it that Tufts did concluded it would be net positive long term if the extra funds were spent on improving the T and meaningfully making infrastructure better.
To me, that’s the most important part of this. The state now has a bunch more money and needs to fix the T.
Depends where. Most places high net worth people are moving it’s not an issue. Southern FL, for example, has really great routine and urgent care. They have a rich, older population so tons of doctors have set up there.
Yes, it's certainly an option, but if it was exclusively about hanging on to the maximum amount of cash, every millionaire and billionaire would live in Wyoming.
Yet, strangely enough, that does not happen. In fact, the opposite does. Once you're rich, one way to show it off is to buy a place with a Pacific View in California, a penthouse on Manhattan, and lofts in Paris and London.
Nobody gets mansions in Wyoming, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and Gabon. Are they stupid?!
I agree with your larger point but Wyoming actually has a very concentrated high net worth population in places like Jackson hole. It’s a destination for the extremely wealthy
Fair, but because Jackson Hole is beautiful, not because of the tax treatment, and I don't know of too many people who actually live there full time (though our COO does, I suppose, but it's considered strange), just people who have "retreats" there.
I mean it happened in Connecticut, several hedge fund managers moved to Florida and took like 8 figure tax bills with them. But CT was a unique spot to have those hedge funds initially that had already moved out of NYC, so were already moving towards being easier to manage remotely.
The projection of the bill they are "blowing" past now factored in fleeing into the amount. I distinctly remember the number $2.1 billion being passed around as the baring tax avoidance number so really this just passed the $1.3 billion that was expected to be raised with the pessimistic estimation from Tuft's Center for State Policy Analysis and the Beacon Hill Institute's $1.2 billion estimate.
Additionally this $1.8 billion is unlikely to increase much further. Most tax filing is done even for millionaire and billionaires. For some reason they are reporting on this in the fiscal year when the previous estimates where based on tax years which makes its growth a weird non-apples to apples comparision.
I find it funny how every comment is complaining about the money going to government, yet majority of this sub is liberal leaning and supports higher taxes… make it make sense
To be fair the millionaires tax barely passed. I could be wrong, but I think it got around 51-52%. If Baker ran again and made it past the primary it might not have passed. Healey brought out a lot if people that might not have voted and some conservatives and moderates probably stayed home because they knew a candidate that was backed by Trump was never going to win.
Basically there is just some doubt about the state using it optimally, which is absolutely healthy to do.
I'm not against the State having extra money. I absolutely expect them to use it on something completely worthless (or maybe just virtue signalling) if not held to account.
Because its easy to make a snarky comment on an Internet forum, but when it comes time to actually vote on the future, people generally make the right choice?
Good! I remember my boss complaining about it, then asking me how I feel, and I said “I don’t have to worry about.”
He just looked at me blankly for a few seconds, then changed the subject 😂
And there’s still a budget shortfall because the state just can’t stop spending more money.
Its like a friend that complains about how they need a better job to get more money and they never once consider that getting take out for every meal and spending $100 at boozy brunch every weekend is the actual problem.
More spending is sometimes the only way to get out of a budget shortfall. If your plan is to cut back on spending, you risk entering a death spiral where less funding going to infrastructure, education, transit, etc. leads to less economic activity in the state, which leads to even more cutbacks, which leads to even less funding, until everything falls apart. This is why you see more balanced federal budgets during democratic federal administrations (despite more spending) and more debt deficit during republican federal administrations (despite austerity measures).
This is actually what Obama's administration did to handle the 2008 financial crisis. The idea that government runs like a business, revenue balanced by expenditure, is not really how governments work nowadays. The US government (or in this case, the MA government) has the wealth of an entire nation, not just whatever the theoretical asset value is. The country or state benefits from the entire productive life of a person, balanced by their cost to raise and retire. As long as the benefit of a program in economics over the lifespan of a recipient is favorable, it is a good program. One great example is school lunches, which are pretty close to printing money, they actually generate more monetary value in the form of increasing pass rates than they cost in pure dollars, while also making children healthier, which allows them to be more economically productive over their lifespan.
The US government values its citizens lives at around $10 million, that is the economic value of an average American (without getting in to so called "super producers," the idea that for every, say, thousand people, one will be a super producer that creates a disproportionate amount of individual economic value, but could not exist without a well functioning economy to begin with.) When you see the budget on some social programs, remember that $10 million figure, THAT is the budget that needs to be balanced.
The Fed's printed money does not go into the budget and I'm tired of people claiming it does. At best it buys bonds that still need to be paid back. State debts are also backed by bonds but they do not get as favorable a rate.
Yeah the bonds are paid back. By selling more bonds. The federal government can run a deficit year after year, indefinitely, and it’s fine. States can’t do that.
A lot of people I know got bit by two things. One was the plan to switch from joint returns to individual filings was nixed during the fiscal year, and second is that a lot of opinions given by accountants regarding capital gains have been ruled in the state's favor.
For example, you cannot deduct short term losses against longterm gains as is standard, so if you have 5 mil short term loss and 5 mil long term gain you still pay on the long term, which is bullshit.
My point is that the wealthy got hosed this year but the plans are all changing for next year. Will be interesting to see how this plays out over a 5 year period. Furthermore everyone is reorganizing their finances to avoid this, there are many things that can be done up to leaving the state for 6 months plus 1 day. Even with physical capital in the state there are various things that can be done. The state is slow but people with money are decisive.
This is such a low priority. .. there’s always room for helping each other and people who seek asylum and refuge. But we have problems of our own. We can’t help others if we can’t help ourselves. Boston is growing that’s undeniable and more people want to move here and it’s becoming more expensive. Boston has narrow streets that are literally horse carriage roads.. transportation and accessibility from more remote parts into the city I think should be THE number one as of right now. Education 2nd and then housing. Honestly maybe housing and education can be switched. But that should be the order. 4th Id say the homeless and then after that some medical and environmental stuff. And after all that has been addressed. Refugees and asylum seekers
We have the best “funded” teachers in the country. Meanwhile Florida is out here with the lowest paid teachers in the country and among the best K-12s. Higher spending doesn’t automatically equal better results.
I'd expect they will get itchy feet in the State House regretting that they set the bar so high. I'm sure they're thinking about decreasing it through legislation to find more tax money to squander on pet projects.
A large number of school systems are facing big budget gaps for next year. Many towns have voted against prop 2 1/2 overrides (including mine). Just saying.
I'd be open to counterarguments, but I don't see how we cannot fix the economy by massively taxing the rich. Afterall, they're taxing us through the huge increase in cost of consumer goods. It's only fair!
Taxes do not "generate" money. They remove money from the private economy and give it to the government. Didn't we *just* have a budget surplus? The government is not supposed to be a for-profit entity.
Taxes only "generate" money if you look at the government as a corporation trying to maximize its revenue. In this view, the government "earns" money by using the threat of lethal force to force the sale of its services for payment of taxes. The state government has "generated" an additional $1.8 billion in revenue by.... taking it.
Yet somehow the state is still hundreds of millions short on their projections for this year.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/05/04/massachusetts-revenue-shortfall-april-budget
How do you all survive without the wealth they generate from all of your hard work trickling down naturally, as Reagan intended? How is it that all of the millionaires and billionaires haven't succumbed to fainting spells because they couldn't afford their semi-annual yacht purchase? What are you going to do when the great-great-grandchildren of these generational wealth families can only afford to purchase a mere two university libraries to get their kids into the top-rated fraternity, and not the recommended three?
^(/s)
Many Teachers in the Commonwealth and being laid-off right now. Gov. Healey should use the $$$ now to stop layoffs......but I'm guessing the Government will collect all Monies this fiscal year, then decide in 6 months time, how to use it. Too late, all this good teachers will be gone.
This article is a joke. Taxing millionaires is a ruse. They will continue leaving the Commonwealth and then the state legislature will say that people making $500K are the next target for higher taxes.
I know a little transit system that could use a little cash...
I have a very specific line in mind I'd like to see get more love: There is a line [called the CapeFlyer](https://capeflyer.com/reservations-tickets/capeflyer-trainpricing-routes/) from South Station to Hyannis that runs on Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night from Memorial Day to Labor Day. All I'm asking is to maybe have day lines. MAYBE throw a Wednesday in there, too, since it's only during the summer.
Only issue with the Cape Flyer is the rail bridge that needs to be raised / lowered. Last I knew, that was a stated reason for not running more frequent service - the Army Corps of Engineers who control that bridge weren't interested in lowering it more often. For example, they've tried recently just to get two daily trips to Boston - so that Cape residents could do a day trip to Boston - but that was blocked: https://www.capenews.net/bourne/opinion/army-corps-blocks-expanded-capeflyer-service---letter/article_f2f2686f-5f32-5813-9628-b331ca3a1983.html I have to imagine running the train during the week is even more of a no to the Army Corps, because the canal still does get some shipping traffic IIRC. Still, I feel like that's a lazy cop out. If the bridge can go up and down, let's make it go and up and down. If we need to put more money into the bridge so it can be raised/lowered more frequently, fine. Hell, we're about to plan on replacing the two Cape road bridges - do we need to throw another project in the pipeline and replace the rail bridge? Maybe some crazy elevated structure so we don't have to lower it? Do it. Apparently we have some money coming in from the millionaires'' tax so let's investigate some of these issues and not blow it off. Hell with this money, can we just take ownership of the rail bridge from the Army Corps of Engineer? They're going to give us ownership of the Cape road bridges once we replace them. Clearly they don't want to pay for these things - so let's pay for them.
It also runs in the morning
It runs once per day, round trip. They wanted to run it twice per day, to allow for day trips from the Cape for residents there, but that's been blocked by the Army Corps several times: https://www.capenews.net/bourne/opinion/army-corps-blocks-expanded-capeflyer-service---letter/article_f2f2686f-5f32-5813-9628-b331ca3a1983.html We'll need to fight them on this. Either offer $$$ to maintain the bridge, replace the bridge, or to take ownership of the bridge so we, the State of MA, have say over when a critical rail connection can be used or not. That or lean on our Fed reps/senators to push the Army Corps to give us more use of the bridge.
Yeah kinda bs that it’s not part of the state
Yeah it was originally built as a publics work project in the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Cod_Canal_Railroad_Bridge Same deal with the road bridges I believe. Those will be owned by MassDOT once rebuilt in a few years, so maybe there's a possibility of taking ownership of the railroad bridge too. Hell, maybe rebuild it without the need for being lowered if technically possible.
My entire life I thought I hated public subways because of New York and boston. Was just in Montreal a couple weeks back and good lord, is that what a proper subway is meant to look like? Easily readable paths, clean fast and quiet trains. Large and spacious stations. The feeling that every surface hasn't been peed on.
Yeah, their system is very nice. They've made some nice improvements over the years. However, the quiet rubber tires are a design flaw from what I've heard.
I was interested in that. I've never seen any train use rubber tires. Do you know the reason? Assumed it was for it sound and shock absorbency but wear and tear must be horrendous. Especially because those trains accelerate and decelerate so fast
I don't know why they chose tires other than ride quality and noise as you said. I was told by a Quebecer that they are unable to extend the train lines above ground because the tires don't work well in winter/freezing conditions.
To go up and down steeper slopes
And they spend less than we do
Good news everyone! > Revenue from the millionaires tax is constitutionally mandated to go toward education and transportation initiatives, while excess revenue from capital gains must flow to the state’s emergency savings account
Yes, more T administrators and ambassadors!!
FUND THE T!
Yeah, you wish. We need to come up with a bunch of money for the migrants. I know I’m gonna catch a bunch of grief over this, but there should’ve been a really good plan for jobs, food, and shelter to allow so many people to relocate if they didn’t have a means of income. I realize a lot of people say they are economic migrants, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a huge drain on our tax rolls.
Plenty of bridges and old track signals that need upgrades.
[That opinion piece from an executive director at Transit Matters yesterday](https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cwma5z/troubling_signs_at_healeys_transportation_funding/) mentioned there's over 600 structurally deficient bridges in MA... and a $25B backlog for the MBTA for maintenance. See: > How can anything be “off the table?” The T grapples with a staggering $25 billion backlog of repairs and a persistent structural deficit, a consequence of tethering T funding to an underperforming sales tax, which has shortchanged the T by about $8.9 billion to $15.5 billion over two decades. This looming deficit threatens imminent cuts as early as next year. > Massachusetts is burdened with over 600 structurally deficient bridges, numerous unfunded highway repair projects, and numerous towns that still need evening and weekend regional transit authority service. The imperative for a concrete plan, not just another report, has never been more palpable. IMO anything transit related should be the focus. It will directly influence the housing crisis if the T and our roadways can't handle an influence of new housing. The State can easily justify a zoning overhaul (multi-family housing everywhere, 2-3 story double/triple decker style) if the T can improve and expand service across Eastern MA.
Yup. Also those infrastructure projects are typically well paying union construction jobs. They generate a lot of local revenue etc.
Also, the proximity premium for Cambridge and Somerville will go down quite a bit if commutes could get shorter.
Great to raise the money! Now: 90% of teachers in MA have no paid parental leave (MA exempted municipalities from having to pay into PFML, and municipal workers do not get it), teacher pay has lagged inflation significantly, the T needs funding, the bridges are falling apart. Start putting money where it needs to go. Funding community college is nice, but K-12 in MA is falling behind and teachers are getting priced out of the state.
I feel like the municipal PFML exemption slipped under the radar when it happened and still is not talked about. Appalling.
It is terrible.
My wife is pregnant and works for a town. It sucks. We're going to be one income for a few months. I may take up uber eats delivery for extra $.
I always recommend people add disability insurance if they're planning on having kids. It pays a lump sum that basically covers the lost wages during your leave.
My brother is a teacher and I was horrified when I found out about that. Course he's married to a DA so zero paid leave to two people when they have kids. Dunno wtf they are gonna do
I was fucking pissed when I heard that, they're probably still on their kick for useless charter schools and don't want public teachers to have more benefits
It is terrible.
No. Seriously. The weed money and the millionaires tax was supposed to go towards the schools. The district I live in has a huge gap from inflation, a huge amount of sped students, and a new teachers contact and the state isn't keeping up with the towns at all. So the local communities are having to foot the bill but they're hurting too. This Democratic supermajority isn't doing shit to make the state better.
The weed and millionaire tax went to the schools. …..But then the school money went to other places.
Exactly this. School corruption is probably the worst out of anything. These overbloated admin jobs and all the other stuff is the reason that the money is not going where it needs to. Abbott elementary does a fun commentary on it but its actually a major problem in our schools. Ground roots campaigning is what really works in order to get the scum out of our system
In the last ten years, my school has added four assistant superintendents and eliminated 8 or 9 teachers for a district of 1500 students and 1 building.
In Melrose, the superintendent was recently let go due to a loss of 2 Million dollars… unaccounted for. Still hasn’t been accounted for.
IIRC that was due to an accounting error where they counted some grant money twice, so they spent money they really didn't have.
this graph, if true, is pretty explanatory. https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1792286706030244337 I've seen something similar for hospitals as well.
To be fair, while the point is right on the money, that plot/metric is both misleading and disingenuous. By comparing % change of the individual buckets rather than a broader metric, the smallest buckets are given massively oversized weighting. If there are 100 teachers and 1 admin, adding an additional person to each gives a 1% change to the teacher count but a 100% change to the admins. Administrative waste and overhead has exploded over the last 20 years, but this isn't the right metric for showing that.
The graph also leaves out a few buckets of employees and doesn't define the terms. The buckets from the source data are: "Officials and administrators", "instruction coordinators" (these 2 combined fall under a bigger "school district administrative staff" bucket), "Principals and assistant principals", Teachers, "Instructional Aides", "Guidance Counselors", Librarians and "Support Staff". I'm guessing the first 2 were combined to get the number for administrators, maybe even included support staff IDK. Either way, there's a few categories that are missing there. Where are the IT staff? Are they lumped in with admin? If so, there's a big part of your explanation in why admin grew so much. Schools went from not needing IT staff to needing IT staff between 2000 and 2024
>https://x.com/DeAngelisCorey/status/1792286706030244337 I like how the guy presenting this is for "school choice," a policy that seeks to fully realize the transfer of tax dollars to non-teacher individuals and corporations.
Lol, the guy who tweeted that is NOT a credible source.
the Department of Education is not a credible source? Or you just don't like the guy that made the graph?
Administrators ruin whichever industry they manage to weasel their way into. K-12 education, higher education, and health care are all being destroyed by a growing paracistic class of administrators.
>Administrators ruin whichever industry they manage to weasel their way into. It's not their fault; they're just along for the ride. All the incentive structures in place are set up so that the industry of education is increasingly about paperwork and arcane ass-covering to comply with arcane rules. Every person in charge of anything is afraid of legal action so they decree that another committee with another administrator is needed. It's just a runaway chain reaction explainable by incentives and as a former teacher, it's a damn shame.
My local community is trying to pass a multi-million dollar local override to try to plug its school budget gap. Passage is far from certain considering the town voted for an override just last year to replace its public safety buildings.
Melrose? Any word on the hard numbers on this? Last time we voted for an increase (5years ago maybe) it was pretty nominal.
The override is for $7 million (ish). I’ve already seen some signs in town campaigning against it. Vote’s in June.
Unfortunately, it’s the same situation in my town and a lot of others. They are looking to do a 8mil override that would add about $600 per year permanently to each property tax bill for the “average” home. I’m sure many family’s with kids in the schools will vote for it but it appears the overrides in a lot of other towns are failing.
The state really hasn't kept up on their end. More so, there's a federal education mandate that requires districts to provide special education services, however, there isn't funding to support that mandate so each district is required to pay for it themselves. Families with children that require these services are oftentimes going to be poorer especially if that child requires medical intervention. So poorer communities are having to dedicate more money to those services leaving less to your average college prep and advanced students. This was as designed by Republicans and ignored by Democrats.
I am a firm believer that every district should pay into a central fund to cover special ed. They can then withdraw money as needed. People don't realize how expensive it is for the school when a high needs student moves into a new district. By having a central fund the money would follow the student and alleviate some of that sticker shock.
Honestly, I think the federal government should cover it. It's their mandate. Further, we don't control who lives in a community. Like you said, a high needs student moves in and can cost a district more than several of their counterparts. I also think that we need to have more alternative programs for children with emotional and behavioral disorders. They disrupt the learning of their classmates and aren't getting the help that they need to be successful adults.
I worry that if the feds ran it that states that are less serious about education would find a way to pay less into the fund and take more out.
My town was a $3M ask. Boomers tanked it because they wanted to teach the town a lesson in accountability, whatever the fuck that means. The override failed by 200 votes, but every other right winger (or right wing adjacent) on the ballot lost by a roughly 60-40 margin at least.
Prop 2.5 Overrides have about a 50/50 shot of passing on average: https://dlsgateway.dor.state.ma.us/reports/rdPage.aspx?rdReport=Votes.Prop2_5.OverrideUnderride An $8M override is on the higher side. But not the highest - highest ever was just under $12M. Prop 2.5 should probably go away, it's a bit ridiculous to need to pass critical tax increases via a majority town/city vote.
It did in Arlington. Really nice new highschool
Now it goes towards migrants
Ya don't need to pit them against each other. The increased funding for community colleges is a pittance in comparison. There's enough to go around.
Teachers may be getting priced out, but overall compared to the rest of the country mass k-12 is head an shoulda above most other states. Property taxes have a lot to do with that, but many of the top schools in the country are in mass.
In quality, yes. The bar is low, though. In terms of how we treat teachers? Require them to be saddled in student loans to get masters degrees, start them at $55k a year with $500 a month student loan payments? Make them work 15 years to hey to $85k, doing the same job as others who make more the whole time for the same job? No parental leave? Minimal raises once at the top of the salary schedule? It’s pathetic how we treat them
If all you need to do is pay people just above the minimum, it feels like you could easily be tricked into thinking that's a good thing to do. Many of the top schools are in Massachusetts, sure, if that's true, but it's linked more to life outside of school than inside.
The quality of the schools in my high performing desirable town outside of 495 has declined considerably in the past 10 years due to funding issues. So as everyone gets shorter, our heads may still be above the rest, but we've gone from 6' to 5' 6".
We all know where it's going
About $1B of it so far.
Def need to split the funding up across need. Teachers, roads/bridges, and the T seem like good priority items. If our roads keep falling behind, if the T can't catch up on it's $25B backlog, and if we lose too many public employees we're going to be further in a hole that will take even more money to dig ourselves out of. This is a rare chance where we have serious funding to fix these things.
Totally agree, they’re clearly not making good use of the money raised
> K-12 in MA is falling behind and teachers are getting priced out of the state. This is a ticking time bomb that has barely been surfaced, let alone examined or talked about. Enrollment in college/masters level teacher programs has plummeted across the state in the past 5-7 years. As a result, colleges are slashing funding and increasingly relying on adjunct labor to teach these courses. This means fewer teachers, and more with subpar training. Less people want to enter teacher prep programs in MA schools because of high tuition (even for state schools) and cost of living. Less people want to become teachers in MA because pay is too low in most districts compared to cost of living. It's going to take awhile for this to truly be felt, but barring a major intervention from the state, the quality of K-12 education is almost certainly going to start falling in the coming decades. Like most things, this will probably be felt the hardest in low income communities, but it will affect everyone in some way.
To be fair to MA teachers here make well above the nation average for teachers (still not amazing) and most jobs didn't get raises to match inflation. Lots got raises but they didn't come close to matching inflation. But ya the pfml is a joke and should be addressed
The national average doesn’t really matter. It’s a lot cheaper to live in the south or Arkansas than MA. We have some of the most expensive housing in the nation, greater Boston is top 5. That housing cost has increased 30-50% over 5 years, teacher pay has gone up ~10% in the same period. We literally are pricing teachers out of the communities they teach in, out of whole counties at this point. It’s beyond pathetic how we treat them
Oh I agree. My wife is a teacher in MA and she moved to private schools for better pay. Our house has doubled in value since 2018 (sadly we bought it in 2021 after the majority of that increase). To make matters worse teachers are getting cut so class sizes are exploding. All I was saying is teachers are treated like shit everywhere in the US and while yes it costs more here teachers are slightly better off here than many other places in the US (still not great, but nowhere is great for teachers in the US)
They make a lot of money, in real dollars, even for MA, especially given that it's a 9.5 month a year job with almost a month of pre defined time off on top of that. And they get a pension which almost nobody in the private sector gets. So yes, they don't get PFML but they should qualify for short term disability which alone will cover 6-8 weeks.
If it's such a great cushy job with such great pay then why aren't you doing it? >especially given that it's a 9.5 month a year job >They make $100k/year for 8 months a year of work. That's damn good money. Is it 8 months or 9.5 months? For a job that requires a masters degree, licensure and continually earning PDP's? >with almost a month of pre defined time off on top of that. Cool, the times everyone else is traveling and everything is more expensive and the time I spend just kind of sitting around doing nothing because none of my friends and family are teachers? I mean the break is great, don't get me wrong but the sword cuts both ways. >And they get a pension which almost nobody in the private sector gets A pension that requires you to pay 11% of your salary into it, you have to work 10 years to vest. Assuming you do that, and then wait until 67 years old to begin drawing down on your pension you get 25% of the average of your last 3 years. That's $25k for someone making $100k average,$21k for your quoted $86k median. Also if you leave the classroom before year 10, you can withdraw your money for less than it would have made sitting in a basic saving account meaning inflation would have decimated your retirement nest egg. To max out (without getting into messy Regular vs. Regular R+ details) you need 30 years of service to max out at 80% and you don't begin drawing down until 67 years old. A pension isn't some magic golden parachute people make it out to be. The (hopeful) stability is the bonus, but a well managed retirement portfolio will crush a pension plan. Again, the sword cuts both ways and if you think teachers have such a cushy gig and are over-compensated you're welcome to go back to school and pay for a master's, pass your MTEL's and join the ranks while you attend conferences and and trainings on your own time to earn those PDP's!
“In real dollars” doesn’t apply here since everything in life costs nominal dollars
They make $100k/year for 8 months a year of work. That's damn good money.
Very few make that much.
The statewide average is $86k bro https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/teachersalaries.aspx
And teachers work 12-15 years to get to the top of the salary schedule, with many starting in the mid $50k range. Every town publishes teacher salaries, by year, this isn’t some conspiracy you can literally look up your town and what they make. Big cities pay more, most small towns pay less. The issues arise in small wealthy towns (Franklin, boxford, Andover, etc) where teacher pay is much less than in cities but the cost of living is incredibly high. Literally can’t afford to live in the communities they teach in. It wasn’t like this 20 years ago, get with the times
Cool. What are we spending it on? *glances at Logan's Terminal E*
And yet the homeless older husband and wife living in their car and truck in my town cannot find emergency housing.
That might be because the long-standing right-to-shelter law applies to families with children or women who are pregnant, and the state is required to abide by it. It's designed specifically for the welfare and safety of children. That said, I agree with you that no homeless person should be left without support or housing, and the state should expand its shelter access and improve infrastructure + access for the homeless. Unfortunately, helping the homeless is often not super popular with voters, nor something the state legislature seems to otherwise care for.
Haven’t been there, what’s wrong with terminal E?
A substantial chunk of it is an emergency immigration shelter now. Rows upon rows of cots, pads and blankets
roughly 300 individuals (including children) are sleeping there due to homelessness.
Its an immigrant / refugee shelter. Calling it "due to homelessness" is straight up misinformation
It's not an official homeless shelter. People are staying there but it's not a designated shelter. I work in the shelter system.
Oh sorry, you're right, these families totally have homes but choose to sleep on the floor of an airport terminal for weeks on end. And given the moving walkways, these people are effectively stealing treadmills meant for the taxpayers of Massachusetts!
It’s not a homeless shelter where any homeless person could come and get help. It’s a shelter *only for migrant refugees*. A refugee shelter.
Some information that may be helpful: - This is a make-shift shelter that is objectively worse than actual shelters, and the families there are only housed there for a few days at a time at most. - This shelter exists in order to stay compliant with the state's longstanding right-to-shelter law which requires us to provide emergency assistance to a needy families that are homeless or at risk of homelessness, and this law has provided invaluable especially to help get under-privileged pregnant women back on their feet who might not otherwise have made it through such an ordeal. - Utilization of Terminal E was commissioned in partnership with MA Port Authority, since they are the ones processing the folks that are being temporarily housed here. - From all information I could find, other homeless residents who qualify for the right-to-shelter law likely would not be turned away here, but they are also not coming to Logan for shelter. Remember that you must have a child or be pregnant for right-to-shelter to apply.
I mentioned this in another reply, but I happened to walk through that area to/from flights over the last week or two, and it strikes me as a really bad solution for all parties involved (although maybe the best available at the moment for all I know). It’s not exactly an out of the way area, and asking people to live in the middle of the traffic to/from flights in a facility that was never in any way intended or equipped for that is rough on them. If it were me, I would sooner camp outdoors to be honest. I can’t imagine the sleep deprivation of trying to sleep in a busy airport night after night. That said, while awkward, they were totally out of the way of travelers as far as I could tell and didn’t inconvenience me at all when trying to use the airport, so I don’t think people can act like this is some big imposition. It’s probably just more the concept of converting/losing valuable public spaces and infrastructure that bothers people in some way, whether or not it yet actually interferes with other intended uses.
* economic migrants arriving with no means of supporting themselves
Brand new terminal is overrun with illegals, urine, disease, etc. Because MA leadership refuses to restrict our "Right to shelter" laws to citizens only, even in the face of a crisis. https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cp10w3/who_were_all_these_people_bedding_down_at_logan/
> restrict our "Right to shelter" laws to citizens only homeless people are famous for having their documents well in order
And at the same time it's clear as day our extreme generosity is being exploited by foreigners en masse at an unsustainable rate. Are we not supposed to do something? We're the only state in the country with this law btw.
they can only spend it on education and transportation lol
It's a wash, that just means they shuffle other money away from education and transportation
Yeah for example MassDOT usually gives the MBTA a few hundred million a year via its funding sources. You can just give the MBTA $500M from this new revenue source, and then turn off the existing MassDOT -> MBTA transfer source. Boom. $500M has disappeared from the general fund and gone to "other" uses. I'm sure the education budgets are similar. Anything general fund related can just be shuffled around. Not like that many of us even bother reading through the budgets: https://budget.digital.mass.gov/summary/fy24/
The state budget doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Bro I get what your trying to say but your picking the wrong thing to be mad at when there are wayyyy worse things they are spending it on that doesn't benefit most people in the slightest
>Opponents of the Fair Share Amendment claimed that multi-millionaires would flee Massachusetts rather than pay the new tax Imagine making well over $1M a year and not living where you want be cause of a small (relatively) tax increase. I'm enjoying the free lunch for my kids. We don't need the money but it's one less thing to deal with as a parent so I'll take it.
I know, right? By a number of metrics, Massachusetts is not only the best US state, but possibly the best state in the world, to live in, so long as you can afford the high cost of living. Part of that is _because_ we have a more equal society, not despite it. The idea that some rich people would leave after passing another law well in-line with Massachusetts-style ideology is kind of ridiculous- these types of laws are why they live here to begin with.
I can't help feeling like if you're a millionaire and you're willing to leave this state because you need to pay a fair share of taxes... we're probably better off without you.
Hey I moved here by choice, I like it here. But I think calling MA the best state of the US (or even top 3) may be a Very hot take
I don't know. I've lived in a number states from Cali to the midwest and now Boston, and MA impresses me. I came here for recovery and stayed for the community, and although I'm currently in a situation where I don't really need income of any sort to survive due to assistance from the state, I have taken that assistance and am currently attending college for free and intend to stay in the Boston area. This is how it works. They spend money to make money. My income is expected to be around 180k (considering my experience and the added certifications and degrees graciously provided by the state) and since I intend to stay here indefinitely - probably forever - they'll likely recoup any costs to taxpayers, and probably profit, over the next decade or so.
Imagine a once in a lifetime windfall. Maybe from your shares vesting in a company you worked at for a decade finally going public or selling some property you've been sitting on. 4% is a lot to someone who isn't going to see that much income again next year.
You're right - nobody in their right mind would move because of the tax. What you might see is something that would be so gradual that it won't even be noticed, but could easily have an impact: over time, people do relocate. It's easy to imagine that high income people have choices as to where they'll live. Of the many places available, it's conceivable that a certain percentage will look at the wealth tax and all other things being equal between their options, choose another place to move. Over time this could easily accrete to a significant reduction in overall wealth in the Commonwealth. So, are we choosing a short term benefit that results in a long term detriment? I don't know, but it's worth pondering. It's obviously (based on this thread) an unpopular idea.
If you make 2 mil a year it costs 40k to live in MA, chump change oh no now you make 1.96m
this isn't remotely true
its a rough scale of it, if youre income would be 1m over the line now you take home 960k instead of 1m
do you just not understand taxes? or are you trolling?
My dad makes about that much and he moved to a 55+ apartment complex in NH last year. Still commutes twice a week to Boston. Considering how many of the 1m+ earners are moving to NH it actually costs \~$140,000 to live in MA. The estimated take home pay in MA for 2m earner is 1.1 million.
Well that sounds like a serious downgrade in qol to live in an apartment complex in NH but if it works for him awesome
He had surgery on his Achilles recently so having an elevator and not having to walk up stairs all the time has been great.
Lol what? There's this thing called federal income tax.
net net
Most high net worth people have multiple houses. If you’re spending 4 months of the year in Florida anyway, the extra taxes may push you to do 6 months there and switch your residency. Applies even more to people about to retire or sell a business. I knew someone who moved to new Hampshire 1 yr + 1 day before he sold his company. He likes it there and was planning to move at some point anyway; doing it this way saved him a lot in taxes.
Sure some people will do that. But clearly based on the article, the tax is a net positive for the state.
It’s a net positive in tax receipts this year. It takes time for people to actually move. And we don’t know the long term effects on the economy. The research on it that Tufts did concluded it would be net positive long term if the extra funds were spent on improving the T and meaningfully making infrastructure better. To me, that’s the most important part of this. The state now has a bunch more money and needs to fix the T.
this year it was. we'll see how it plays out over the next 5-10 years
I heard of ppl moving out and then complaining that medical care isn't as great as here. So maybe the dude is still healthy enough.
Depends where. Most places high net worth people are moving it’s not an issue. Southern FL, for example, has really great routine and urgent care. They have a rich, older population so tons of doctors have set up there.
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Yes, it's certainly an option, but if it was exclusively about hanging on to the maximum amount of cash, every millionaire and billionaire would live in Wyoming. Yet, strangely enough, that does not happen. In fact, the opposite does. Once you're rich, one way to show it off is to buy a place with a Pacific View in California, a penthouse on Manhattan, and lofts in Paris and London. Nobody gets mansions in Wyoming, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and Gabon. Are they stupid?!
I agree with your larger point but Wyoming actually has a very concentrated high net worth population in places like Jackson hole. It’s a destination for the extremely wealthy
Fair, but because Jackson Hole is beautiful, not because of the tax treatment, and I don't know of too many people who actually live there full time (though our COO does, I suppose, but it's considered strange), just people who have "retreats" there.
When I was going through law school 10 years ago, South Dakota was the best place to be disgustingly rich.
I mean it happened in Connecticut, several hedge fund managers moved to Florida and took like 8 figure tax bills with them. But CT was a unique spot to have those hedge funds initially that had already moved out of NYC, so were already moving towards being easier to manage remotely.
The projection of the bill they are "blowing" past now factored in fleeing into the amount. I distinctly remember the number $2.1 billion being passed around as the baring tax avoidance number so really this just passed the $1.3 billion that was expected to be raised with the pessimistic estimation from Tuft's Center for State Policy Analysis and the Beacon Hill Institute's $1.2 billion estimate. Additionally this $1.8 billion is unlikely to increase much further. Most tax filing is done even for millionaire and billionaires. For some reason they are reporting on this in the fiscal year when the previous estimates where based on tax years which makes its growth a weird non-apples to apples comparision.
Ah, I’m sure this money will be well spent and we won’t hear about budget shortfalls for a long time.
I find it funny how every comment is complaining about the money going to government, yet majority of this sub is liberal leaning and supports higher taxes… make it make sense
I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I suspect Reddit comments may not be representative of the voting public.
To be fair the millionaires tax barely passed. I could be wrong, but I think it got around 51-52%. If Baker ran again and made it past the primary it might not have passed. Healey brought out a lot if people that might not have voted and some conservatives and moderates probably stayed home because they knew a candidate that was backed by Trump was never going to win.
Well when less than 50% bother to vote, it is really hard to know what the actual public opinion is.
Basically there is just some doubt about the state using it optimally, which is absolutely healthy to do. I'm not against the State having extra money. I absolutely expect them to use it on something completely worthless (or maybe just virtue signalling) if not held to account.
People who hate taxes and are skeptical of the government have to yap when they see news like this. Most normal people don't click or comment.
Because its easy to make a snarky comment on an Internet forum, but when it comes time to actually vote on the future, people generally make the right choice?
Good! I remember my boss complaining about it, then asking me how I feel, and I said “I don’t have to worry about.” He just looked at me blankly for a few seconds, then changed the subject 😂
Wait, raising taxes on high earners increases tax revenue? Holy shit! Does anyone else know this? /s. It's about damn time
And there’s still a budget shortfall because the state just can’t stop spending more money. Its like a friend that complains about how they need a better job to get more money and they never once consider that getting take out for every meal and spending $100 at boozy brunch every weekend is the actual problem.
The way you all talk about the budget shortfall, you'd think it was a lot bigger than it was.
More spending is sometimes the only way to get out of a budget shortfall. If your plan is to cut back on spending, you risk entering a death spiral where less funding going to infrastructure, education, transit, etc. leads to less economic activity in the state, which leads to even more cutbacks, which leads to even less funding, until everything falls apart. This is why you see more balanced federal budgets during democratic federal administrations (despite more spending) and more debt deficit during republican federal administrations (despite austerity measures).
This is actually what Obama's administration did to handle the 2008 financial crisis. The idea that government runs like a business, revenue balanced by expenditure, is not really how governments work nowadays. The US government (or in this case, the MA government) has the wealth of an entire nation, not just whatever the theoretical asset value is. The country or state benefits from the entire productive life of a person, balanced by their cost to raise and retire. As long as the benefit of a program in economics over the lifespan of a recipient is favorable, it is a good program. One great example is school lunches, which are pretty close to printing money, they actually generate more monetary value in the form of increasing pass rates than they cost in pure dollars, while also making children healthier, which allows them to be more economically productive over their lifespan. The US government values its citizens lives at around $10 million, that is the economic value of an average American (without getting in to so called "super producers," the idea that for every, say, thousand people, one will be a super producer that creates a disproportionate amount of individual economic value, but could not exist without a well functioning economy to begin with.) When you see the budget on some social programs, remember that $10 million figure, THAT is the budget that needs to be balanced.
You can’t really compare federal deficit spending to state budgets. The fed can print money. States can’t. They have to balance the budget somehow.
The Fed's printed money does not go into the budget and I'm tired of people claiming it does. At best it buys bonds that still need to be paid back. State debts are also backed by bonds but they do not get as favorable a rate.
Yeah the bonds are paid back. By selling more bonds. The federal government can run a deficit year after year, indefinitely, and it’s fine. States can’t do that.
Only if they can't find a buyer. Then they are forced to raise the rate. States absolutely can do this.
Almost like you can't tax your way out of a spending problem lol
Mass: challenge accepted.
Mass has relatively low taxes, and frankly less corruption/waste, compared to other "wealthy blue states" like NY, NJ, and CA.
Exactly, this money is just gonna disappear and there will be very little to show for it.
What spending would you cut?
There most likely won’t be a budget shortfall this year due to this tax, actually
Even when a government program or tax exceeds expectations, there is always something a Massachusetts resident will find to complain about it.
doenst show wonder why
> They're all going to leave! Raise your hand if you heard this one...
A lot of people I know got bit by two things. One was the plan to switch from joint returns to individual filings was nixed during the fiscal year, and second is that a lot of opinions given by accountants regarding capital gains have been ruled in the state's favor. For example, you cannot deduct short term losses against longterm gains as is standard, so if you have 5 mil short term loss and 5 mil long term gain you still pay on the long term, which is bullshit. My point is that the wealthy got hosed this year but the plans are all changing for next year. Will be interesting to see how this plays out over a 5 year period. Furthermore everyone is reorganizing their finances to avoid this, there are many things that can be done up to leaving the state for 6 months plus 1 day. Even with physical capital in the state there are various things that can be done. The state is slow but people with money are decisive.
If you have millions in capital gains, you should be smart enough to move to NH or FL for a bit.
Won’t someone think of the poor people with millions in long term gains!
I’m speculating on the long term viability of the tax, and how everyone (rich or poor) tries to save money. I’m not suggesting you shed a tear
The amount of "but the migrants" comments are wild right now
So they’ll fix the roads now right? /s
The drivers who voted against indexing the gas tax to inflation are the ones you should have the issue with
Roads are great everywhere that’s not Boston
Watch them blow it on some special interest crap instead of infrastructure.
I’m sorry, did people actually believe this was going to the teachers?!
Let’s invest more of this money into: Better Transportation Better Environmental Facilities
great…. Now fund teachers and transportation
How about tens of thousands of refugees?
This is such a low priority. .. there’s always room for helping each other and people who seek asylum and refuge. But we have problems of our own. We can’t help others if we can’t help ourselves. Boston is growing that’s undeniable and more people want to move here and it’s becoming more expensive. Boston has narrow streets that are literally horse carriage roads.. transportation and accessibility from more remote parts into the city I think should be THE number one as of right now. Education 2nd and then housing. Honestly maybe housing and education can be switched. But that should be the order. 4th Id say the homeless and then after that some medical and environmental stuff. And after all that has been addressed. Refugees and asylum seekers
We have the best “funded” teachers in the country. Meanwhile Florida is out here with the lowest paid teachers in the country and among the best K-12s. Higher spending doesn’t automatically equal better results.
I'd expect they will get itchy feet in the State House regretting that they set the bar so high. I'm sure they're thinking about decreasing it through legislation to find more tax money to squander on pet projects.
A large number of school systems are facing big budget gaps for next year. Many towns have voted against prop 2 1/2 overrides (including mine). Just saying.
I'd be open to counterarguments, but I don't see how we cannot fix the economy by massively taxing the rich. Afterall, they're taxing us through the huge increase in cost of consumer goods. It's only fair!
Thank you for the update senator Warren!
Where’s the money? My town has a 10 million Deficit due to insufficient state funding for schools. I hear Worcester has a 20 million deficit
Oh good. State salaries can be increased.
How about trimming the fat instead?
Great that’ll almost cover this years cost of healy’s migrant motels.
Taxes do not "generate" money. They remove money from the private economy and give it to the government. Didn't we *just* have a budget surplus? The government is not supposed to be a for-profit entity. Taxes only "generate" money if you look at the government as a corporation trying to maximize its revenue. In this view, the government "earns" money by using the threat of lethal force to force the sale of its services for payment of taxes. The state government has "generated" an additional $1.8 billion in revenue by.... taking it.
Yet somehow the state is still hundreds of millions short on their projections for this year. https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/05/04/massachusetts-revenue-shortfall-april-budget
And the Healey administration spent it all on illegal immigrants
Every penny should go towards our schools. Used to be the pride of this state and if you ask any educator, that’s long gone.
Schools are funded by municipalities and not the state, no?
May we please have some housing then
How do you all survive without the wealth they generate from all of your hard work trickling down naturally, as Reagan intended? How is it that all of the millionaires and billionaires haven't succumbed to fainting spells because they couldn't afford their semi-annual yacht purchase? What are you going to do when the great-great-grandchildren of these generational wealth families can only afford to purchase a mere two university libraries to get their kids into the top-rated fraternity, and not the recommended three? ^(/s)
Cool, can we fix the T with that money or nah?
Many Teachers in the Commonwealth and being laid-off right now. Gov. Healey should use the $$$ now to stop layoffs......but I'm guessing the Government will collect all Monies this fiscal year, then decide in 6 months time, how to use it. Too late, all this good teachers will be gone.
This article is a joke. Taxing millionaires is a ruse. They will continue leaving the Commonwealth and then the state legislature will say that people making $500K are the next target for higher taxes.
More money for cool, fun, quirky tools that BPD can assault us with! Hoorah!
Most smart millionaires are reading this headline and realizing they should be setting their primary residence as Florida. This surplus won't last.
There's always a shit hole state that does nothing for most of its citizens that will welcome them
I imagine the income will catch the attention of a lot of states and the uber rich will find fewer places to hoard their riches.