PFFFFFTTTT!!!!!
"Officials, groups brace for budget ax; Large cuts expected to hit many services" by Matt Viser, Globe Staff | October 10, 2008
Governor Deval Patrick has spent much of this week holed up in private meetings as he tries to figure out how to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in response to the state's worst fiscal crisis in at least five years. Education advocates, state lawmakers, and nonprofit groups have spent the week worried what programs and jobs will be targeted.
At public colleges and universities, administrators are scrambling to reduce spending after receiving word from state officials that their subsidies will be cut by an estimated 5.6 percent next week. Campus leaders are to meet with state education officials next week to discuss their response to the cuts, she said. If some colleges decide to raise fees for the second semester to offset the lost state assistance, it would be the first such move in recent memory.
Patrick has been seeking expanded powers from the Legislature that would allow him to cut local aid, a lifeblood for mayors and other municipal officials. Although there are no indications yet that he would use those powers, it would put him on the same path as his predecessor, Republican Mitt Romney, who slashed local aid in 2003.
Yeah, but he's a DIFFERENT kind of governor? Puh-leeze!!!!
House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi this week said that while local aid is a "last resort," city and town officials should prepare themselves to cut their budgets. --more--"
Of course, THESE CUTS won't be made:
It is O.K. if we are "flushing . . . millions of dollars away supporting a highly profitable industry" when it comes to $300 million in taxpayer dollars for Hollywood, even as the price of a school lunch rises; paying $13 million for a computer software system that could have cost less than $3 million is all right because the winner was a close friend of the House speaker, even as my poorer-than-dirt district "has been struggling to close a $2 million budget gap."; the lottery shelling out "millions of dollars" for sports tickets for "lottery officials, their family members, and friends" is fine, even as schools are closing; making interest payments to banks to the tune of "a staggering $22 billion" for the Big Pit, as we call it around here, is required, even as bridges are neglected across the state; and again, paying off banks like UBS, who can "demand repayment of an additional $2 million a month beginning in January" while also receiving a "$179 million payment," while the state pension fund loses $1 billion dollars -- which still didn't stop the executive director from carving himself a nice "$64,000 bonus on top of his $322,000 annual salary."
Oh, and did I not mention the $1 BILLION dollar giveaway to the pharmaceutical corporations, even though "it's never been easy to turn a profit in biotech?" Flush that money away, too, taxpayer. Of course, the war looters were next in line for a handout. And should the state be appropriating money for a "multimillion-dollar reconstruction" of golf courses?
Nor is it RECKLESS to BORROW the STATE INTO OBLIVION so they can PAY INTEREST to BANKS while SITTING ON $2 BILLION DOLLARS!
Need one final insult, Mass. taxpayers?
See: Massachusetts Gives More Money to Hollywood
Yup, keep the income tax because we need to KEEP SERVICES!!
Are you SICK and TIRED of the LYING AGENDA-PUSHING like me, Mass. residents?
