Illustrations By Travis Foster hedging on pork futures Notwithstanding our fame as the site of the “Big Pig” tunnel project, the Bay State gets only scraps of pork from the federal government, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. The “taxpayer watchdog” group says that Massachusetts won $18.25 in “pork per capita” in fiscal year 2006, […]
Robert David Sullivan
Posted inCriminal Justice
The price of justice
despite its lower-than-average crime rate, Massachusetts ranks near the top in state spending per capita on the criminal-justice system. One reason is that the Bay State tends to spend more on all government functions, but the percentage of financial resources devoted to fighting crime is also high here. As of 2003, nearly one in seven […]
Posted inPolitics
Shifting Ground
Illustrations By Travis Foster Four years ago, Mitt Romney beat Shannon O’Brien to become governor of Massachusetts. Another way to look at it is that the town of Westwood, where the Republican percentage of the vote increased by 10 points between 1998 and 2002, beat the city of New Bedford, where the Republican share dropped […]
Posted inEducation
Grading the graders
massachusetts is about as good as it gets when it comes to setting standards for public school teachers and holding schools accountable for outcomes, according to Quality Counts 2006, the latest annual report compiled by Education Week. The report’s editors gave the Bay State an “A” in those areas, the same grade as last year, […]
Posted inPolitics
Constituent service
one effect of the ongoing shift in population from city to suburb is that more and more town selectmen in Massachusetts have constituencies that dwarf that of city councilors. The Bay State’s largest town, Framingham (population 65,598), has regular town meetings but is otherwise governed by five selectmen,or one for every 13,000 residents. That’s a […]
Posted inPolitics
Statistically Significant
Illustrations By Travis Foster GLOBAL SOUL MATES We usually compare Massachusetts with other states, but there’s a whole world out there to search for possible doppelgangers. According to the 2006 World Almanac, Massachusetts matches up almost exactly with Paraguay for total population (about 6.4 million), El Salvador for population density (820 people per square mile), […]
Posted inHealth Care
Off-peak condition
Increases in the infectious disease rate and the percentage of people without health insurance, along with a drop in per-capita public health spending, caused Massachusetts to slip three notches, to ninth place, in the United Health Foundation’s annual ranking of health status in the 50 states, released in December. The Bay State peaked at third […]
Posted inEconomy
Growth spurts
The 21st century has brought more choices to people looking for apartments and condos just outside Boston or spacious homes in the Berkshires, but the construction spurt hasn’t been so great in most of the bedroom communities near I-495. Overall, the number of permits for new homes in Massachusetts jumped by 25 percent between 2000 […]
Posted inUncategorized
Statistically Significant
Illustrations By Travis Foster WHERE ARE WE LOSING? Massachusetts made headlines in late December as the only state in the US to lose population two years in a row, according to estimates by the Census Bureau. The 2004 decreases—2005 estimates for individual cities and towns have not been released yet—were greatest in Boston and in […]
Posted inUncategorized
Revolting development
Popular culture is filled with sympathetic characters who provide food for our tables, from Ernest Borgnine’s lonely butcher in the 1955 film Marty and the sweet-tempered grocer Mr. Hooper on the children’s TV series Sesame Street to all those movie farmers triumphing over flash floods, early frosts, and bank foreclosures so that we never run […]