TENY GROSS has never felt better about his work with urban youth. As executive director of the two-year-old Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, Gross is building on a decade of outreach work on the streets of Boston, where he was one of the unsung heroes of the city’s successful campaign to quell […]
Economy
Posted inEconomy
Commonwealth Forum ponders middle-class debt crisis
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTENÂ about federal and state governments spending beyond their means, but many middle-class American households are also awash in red ink. At the Commonwealth Forum “Going for Broke: Middle Class Families on the Financial Edge,” held on December 5 at the Omni Parker House Hotel in Boston, panelists discussed the reasons and remedies […]
Posted inEconomy
Moving In-or Moving On?
TENY GROSS has never felt better about his work with urban youth. As executive director of the two-year-old Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, Gross is building on a decade of outreach work on the streets of Boston, where he was one of the unsung heroes of the city’s successful campaign to quell […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Down but not out
SPRINGFIELD, THE STATE’S third largest city and the metropolitan anchor of western Massachusetts, is in the soup. To say it is on the brink of disaster might be going too far. But to say it is a struggling third-tier city facing the same challenges as many urban centers across the state, while true, would not […]
Posted inEconomy
Massachusetts comes around to supporting an Internet sales tax
A pair of boots from L.L. Bean. The latest bestseller from Amazon.com. A diamond engagement ring from Blue Nile. Every day, more and more consumers are buying items like these over the Internet. According to the most recent estimates, nearly 100 million Americans bought something using the Internet in 2003, with about 7 million buying […]
Posted inEconomy
The Hub has averted economic disaster before and can do so again
What a difference two decades make. In 1980, Boston was a city in decline, the Hub not of the universe but of a middle-income metropolitan area in a cold-weather state. The city’s population had fallen from 758,000 in 1920 to 563,000, and real estate values had sunk so low that three-quarters of its homes were […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
A 5 raise buys a lot of trouble for Stonehams town moderator
STONEHAM–Five bucks can’t even get you into a movie in most places, but it can still buy a lot of trouble in Stoneham. Moderator Michael Rotondi won an annual pay raise of $5 from town meeting in May, but two months later the voters snatched it back, with some claiming they never realized just how […]
Posted inEconomy
Mass production
MORE THAN A dozen executives from high-tech companies doing business in Massachusetts are seated around a rectangle of wooden tables in the Governor’s Council chambers in the State House. They’ve been invited for a “technology summit” to discuss the challenges facing business with Gov. Mitt Romney and his top deputies on economic affairs, Robert Pozen […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Marblehead hikes property taxes and avoids a sticky trash situation
MARBLEHEAD–Mayors and managers in cash-strapped communities may eye Marblehead with a certain amount of envy this summer, and not just because of the North Shore town’s rocky beaches. Last month, Marblehead voters passed a Proposition 2 1/2 override by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, providing $1.4 million in new revenue for the town and scotching talk […]
Posted inEconomy, Education
Spending on public higher education
Even before recent budget cuts, Massachusetts was considered a skinflint in the area of public higher education. According to the Center for the Study of Educational Policy, we ranked 48th in per-capita funding of public higher education ($158.32 per state resident) in fiscal year 2002 and 49th in funding as compared with the state’s total […]