Government Accountability

The growth and development of the nation’s public transportation systems may soon reach a screeching halt. If crumbling infrastructure, mounting debt, and painful service cuts aren’t evidence enough, the administrators of some of the nation’s largest transit systems are coming to Boston to say out loud and in unison, “We’re not kidding.”

By Bruce Mohl

Howie Carr and Jim Braude are about as far apart on the political spectrum as you can get, but both of them are singing the same song about the state’s probation service.

MassINC Research Director Ben Forman testified today before the Joint Committee on Revenue regarding the fate of the state’s film tax credit, which grants tax breaks to moviemaking companies that shoot in Massachusetts.  The incentive costs taxpayers approximately  $125 million annually, and the Massachusetts legislature is considering capping the measure.

An interview with Mark Erlich, Executive Secretary-Treasurer, New England Council of Carpenters 

"To understand what’s ahead for the American worker, you have to look back on what’s been happening in this country for the last three decades. From my years in the labor movement and certainly in my lifetime, I’ve watched us become a different kind of society with a different set of values. Over the last 30 years, there has been an unprecedented growth in income inequality.  Eighty percent of Americans have seen their wages diminish or stagnate.  Now it takes two wage earners in a family to make the equivalent of what one used to earn. Not only is this alarming on its own but it represents a dramatic turn in a society that was on a trajectory to greater parity after World War II."