A PROMISE TO KEEP: 5%
A Ballot Committee of
Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government
PO Box 408 * Peabody, MA 01960
Phone:(617) 248-0022 * E-Mail: cltg@cltg.org
Visit our web-page at: http://cltg.org
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*** Promise Update ***
Friday, January 23, 1998
Greetings:
Today is the deadline for the state Ballot Law Commission to issue its decision on the signatures challenged by the state teachers union.
The teachers’ lawyers are still shopping around for a superior court judge who will order the hearing extended; after being turned down first by the Ballot Law Commission, then by Suffolk Superior Court, they raced over to Middlesex Superior Court—and are awaiting that court’s decision. We don’t expect a precedent-setting special exception to be granted to them by any court.
Yesterday, an angry Judge Hennessey distributed to all parties a copy of a personal letter he received from one of the harassed and irate voters who’d been frivolously subpoenaed. It described the run-around they were put through when she and her husband, who’s in and out of the veterans hospital, contacted the teachers union lawyers and tried to arrange for the union’s alternate method, by signing an affidavit. After making an appointment to meet at their home to sign the appropriate documents, the teachers union representative never showed up, then later told them to just forget about it! Judge Hennessey wanted answers, and an appropriate response from the teachers to the aggrieved citizen on his desk this morning.
Considering that we squeaked by the December deadline with only some eighty certified signatures above the required 64,928, we expect the teachers union to prevail against us in Round One, with the commission finding in their favor later today. The big question now is, by how many signatures will they prevail?
Because our *next* battleground will be in Suffolk Superior Court, where we will challenge all the signatures of registered voters that *should have been* certified by the city and town clerks and registrars of voters, but for some reason *weren’t.* So far, we’ve found some 1,500 such obvious or somewhat more questionable signatures, and we’ve still got a lot of petitions to scrutinize. (We’ll do as many as we have the volunteer manpower and time to do.)
I’ll post another Update as soon as we get any word from the Ballot Law Commission, likely later today.
Chip Ford—
The Boston Herald
Friday, January 23, 1998
Editorial
Let’s avoid ‘80s errors
Reflect for a moment on the 1980s. Because those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
Those were the days of the Massachusetts Miracle. A booming economy was going to produce a cornucopia of money for the state government to accomplish all good things.
The state is in danger of forgetting the collapse. It could happen again, the annual report of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, "Land Mines in a Field of Plenty," cogently points out. We think the best preventative medicine, paradoxically, is the slate of tax cuts proposed by acting Gov. Paul Cellucci.
For the past five years or so, Massachusetts has shown extraordinary fiscal discipline and made remarkable savings in may programs.
But expectations are ballooning. Cellucci’s administration has eased its predecessor’s annual borrowing limit from $900 million to $1 billion for the next five years. Bond issues already authorized and likely to be approved soon amount to 2 ½ times that five-year limit.
The first law of economics is that wants are always greater than the means of satisfying them. The first law of politics is that wants *become* needs.
Government satisfies wants and needs by coerced extraction of wealth from those who create it. Practically coincidentally with the foundation’s report this week appeared warnings that wealth creation could slow down. The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce discovered four of the five growing industries (health care, financial services, high technology, higher education and tourism) that drive the economy as a whole) are growing more slowly here than in other states. (The exception is financial services.)
The foundation concluded the governor’s three-year tax cuts "may well be affordable if the administration and the Legislature continue to work together to constrain spending growth in the ‘budget busters’ and avoid expansion in all but a few priority areas."
With all due respect to the foundation, this is backward.
The fiscal discipline of this decade was the result of limited revenues. The best way to "constrain spending growth," and enhance the ability of our economy to compete with the rest of the country, is to keep revenues limited by enacting the governor’s tax cuts.
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You can e-mail A Promise to Keep: 5% at --> cltg@cltg.org
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