Month: May 2025

• Looks like Mass. will take a big Medicaid hit after all

  May 25, 2025

  Policy wonk alert: The Globe’s Katie Johnston has a good story on how the U.S. House’s ‘beautiful bill’ would impact Massachusetts – and it’s a big impact via mostly funding cuts to Medicaid and the SNAP (food stamps) program. The potential price tag to the state: more than $1.5 billion a year. That’s if the state tries to pick up the federal funding slack. … My own back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest the hit might be far greater. … Either way, assuming the Senate doesn’t radically change the main thrust of the bill (and I don’t think it will), the state is going to have some major policy decisions to make over the next year or so. Potentially hundreds of thousands of people in the state could lose various benefits, while others, such as hospitals, cry for financial help due to the loss of federal Medicaid funds.

  
  Btw — Moderate Republicans earlier this month may have successfully opposed direct funding cuts to Medicaid, something that could have blown an immediate hole in the state budget. But they later went along with disguised indirect funding cuts, via work requirements that they know full well are designed to throw people off of Medicaid, thus achieving $800 billion in savings over the next 10 years, as the Washington Post makes clear (scroll down to chart).

  Update – 5.28.25 – From WBUR: “Healey says 250,000 people in Massachusetts could lose insurance under GOP’s proposed cuts.” … The Globe has a follow-up story estimating the total hit to the state could be around $1.75 billion.

• Memorial Day special: the all-time best war movies

  May 23, 2025

  

  
  As we head into the Memorial Day weekend, the WSJ’s Peggy Noonan lists ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ as her all-time favorite war movie – and I can’t say I disagree. It’s one of the best movies ever made, let alone one of the all-time best war movies. And it’s not even set during war time. It’s about the after-effects of war. … Speaking of war movies set after wars, The Third Man and Judgment at Nuremberg are definitely on my list of favorite war movies. … My all-time favorite war movie? It’s probably Lawrence of Arabia, though my sentiments are constantly changing, depending on how many times I’ve seen a movie on TCM and grown tired of it. Zulu used to be my favorite war movie, but I’ve seen it too often. Ditto Saving Private Ryan and Casablanca (though I still enjoy all three films, of course). … Two excellent films with similar anti-war themes: Paths of Glory and Breaker Morant. I’m surprised the latter isn’t on Rotten Tomatoes’ 100 Best War Movies of All Time. Including Captain America: The First Avenger on the list and not Breaker Morant? What a travesty. … 

• ‘Professional Tenants’: A homeowner’s nightmare

  May 23, 2025

  
  NBC10 Boston’s Ryan Kath has an excellent piece on how landlords are sometimes the victim of abusive tenants, not the other way around. But before you roll your eyes, check out the story. It really is outrageous how “professional tenants,” i.e. scammers, use eviction and bankruptcy laws to scam their way out of paying rent – and collect state housing assistance at the same time. They largely prey on mom-and-pop landlords who can barely make ends meet with two mortgages to pay, as Kath notes. …

• ‘Harvard Derangement Syndrome’: A long-time critic of the university uncorks on you-know-who

  May 23, 2025

  I wasn’t going to write about Harvard this week. What more could I add to the latest outrageous Trump administration assault on the university? Then I saw this NYT opinion piece by Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, and I couldn’t resist. The reason: Pinker, as he notes in his piece, is a long-time critic of Harvard’s past ugly bouts with campus political correctness/woke-ism, etc., etc. After establishing his bonafides as a centrist critic of the university, Pinker rightly unloads on the ‘unhinged’ Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard. … I could also explain in detail how the administration’s treatment of Harvard is a classic example of the Trump 10/90 Rule. But I won’t. I’ll merely point it out.

  Update –– This is encouraging, via the Globe: “Judge halts Trump ban on foreign students at Harvard.”
  
  
  

• Oddest business deal of the week: Microsoft to buy 622K tons of ‘green’ cement from a Somerville startup

  May 22, 2025

  The BBJ has the details on the tech giant’s purchase of Sublime Systems’ low-carbon cement product that it expects to make at a future factory in Holyoke. … How much is 622,000 metric tons of cement? Enough to build 25 to 35 full-scale NFL stadiums, the BBJ reports.

  Update — Banker & Tradesman’s James Sanna has more on the ‘megaton’ factory that Sublime Systems, an MIT spinoff, is building in Holyoke.

• Political Hypocrisy Alert: the Biden Cover-up vs. Trump Silence

  May 22, 2025

  The political kerfuffle of the week is quickly fading away, as modern political kerfuffles usually do, and so maybe it’s time to point out the obvious regarding the Biden Cover-up frenzy that’s now mercifully easing: Democrats, bad, very bad, for covering up Joe Biden’s mental state while at same time hypocritically questioning Donald Trump’s mental state. Just as it’s bad, very bad, for Republicans to remain silent about Trump’s mental state while at the same time hypocritically questioning what Dems knew about Biden’s mental state. … The Globe’s Jeff Jacoby tackled the issue of partisan hackery and hypocrisy back in January. And Bill Maher was attacking political hypocrisy in general the other night. … 
  
  

• Healey can’t distance herself fast enough from the shelter debacle

  May 22, 2025

  Do you think Gov. Maura Healey on Monday knew what was coming the following day? As you may vaguely recall (or not), the governor earlier this week announced plans to quicken the pace of closing hotel shelters for the homeless and newly arrived immigrants. The next day, state Auditor Diana DiZoglio slammed the Healey administration for approving ‘unlawful’ no-bid contracts for the controversial shelter program. … So to answer the opening question: Yeah, Healey knew what was coming. The Herald’s Joe Battenfeld agrees, saying DiZoglio’s harsh criticism could be a preview of a Healey-DiZoglio clash for governor. I don’t know about that. As I’ve previously noted, the time’s not right for DiZoglio, who’s young and can afford to wait.

  As for the shelter program, Healey has known for a while that it’s a complete boondoggle, costing the state a billion dollars a year before she and other state leaders finally imposed some common-sense restraints on an out-of-control program that threatened the state’s fiscal health, not to mention threatened certain Dems’ political futures. Healey, who’s running for re-election, didn’t need Diana DiZoglio’s prodding to act. Next year’s gubernatorial election is motivation enough. The shelter program, as it stood before recent changes, was bad government and therefore bad politics. … 

  Next question: Did Healey act in time to distance herself from the shelter fiasco? I think so. I don’t hear a lot of people talking about it these days. But a competently produced GOP attack ad, run over and over again on the tube and elsewhere next year, could change all that. 

  Update — 5.23.25 – Spoke too soon. GOP gubernatorial candidate Michael Kenneealy isn’t waiting till next year to go after Healey on the issue — and the Healey team is hitting back, the Herald reports. Howie Carr is taking time off from the Karen Read trial to pile on.

  Update II – 5.23.25 – And from MassterList: “The shelter headache that won’t cease.”

• The Boston office market: At least we’re not Portland, Oregon

  May 21, 2025

  Boston’s office market continues to limp along, showing signs of recovery one day, signs of regression the next, etc. But at least we’re not Portland, Oregon, where some office tenants are of the distinctly non-paying variety. From the WSJ’s brutal takedown of the Portland market: 

  “After Digital Trends moved out of the U.S. Bancorp Tower in Portland, Ore., the technology publisher didn’t hold back about why it left.

  “The property, once a premier address in the city, was afflicted with ‘vagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors.’ They were ‘starting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas,’  according to papers the company filed in a lease-termination lawsuit.”

• The American Revolution started in Great Barrington and Springfield, not Lexington and Concord

  May 21, 2025

  Some historians in central and western Massachusetts think we’ve gotten it wrong for 250 long years. The American Revolution didn’t start in Lexington and Concord in 1775. It actually started a year earlier, when thousands of colonists stormed courthouses in western and central Massachusetts in open rebellion to Britain’s takeover of the state’s judicial system, they say. GBH’s Sam Turken has more. … It’s actually quite interesting history. I hadn’t known about the courthouse rebellions until reading Turken’s piece. … I guess I’ve long suffered from a bad case of eastern-Massachusetts bias. … 

  Btw, it seems they’ve been trying to set the record straight for a while now about where and when the Revolution really started.

• Boston Scientific is Massachusetts’ most valuable public company? Boston Scientific?

  May 19, 2025

  

  
  At one point last decade, I sort of assumed Boston Scientific had become a perennial loser, one of those has-been companies whose best days were permanently behind it, sort of like Digital Equipment, Wang Laboratories, GE etc., etc. But guess what? Boston Scientific is back. And it’s now Massachusetts’ most valuable public company, helped by a 19 percent stock price gain since the start of the year and a corresponding loss of 21 percent by reigning local king Thermo Fisher, as the BBJ reports. … Take a gander at BS’s stock performance since 2000, starting the new century at a low of $6.44 a share, then experiencing a brief bump around 2004 before collapsing again to $5.14 in 2012. But it’s been a mostly steady-eddie climb since then. Impressive. … BSX stock chart via Yahoo Finance. 

  Update – Here’s a look at BS’s revenue numbers since the mid-1990s. Notice the 2008-2013 revenue slump, followed by a subsequent rise fueled most recently by a major acquisition spree. They threw money at the growth problem — and some of it stuck.

  Update II — 5.22.25 – And some things never change. From the BBJ: “Boston Scientific CEO buys Palm Beach County mansion for $17 million.”