I saw in the Northeast Venture Capital Funding and M&A Activity blog today (yes, I read a lot of blogs) that Kayak and SideStep merged. The first sentence describes them as “popular travel search web sites…” and that’s pretty much where I stopped reading.
Correction: Popular would be Orbitz, Expedia, or Travelocity. You, good sirs, are in the “unpopular” crowd.
The petition to end the income tax in Massachusetts misses a lot of things, like inflation. But if we take at face value their claim that the government can continue to run with a 39% reduction in revenue, what do you think will get cut?
First, we’d have a hiring and wage freeze for all state government, of course. And state aid to individual towns would be gutted. Rich towns could then raise money themselves, but poor towns would start hurting.
At the same time, we’d probably start dismantling everything cultural the government does. State parks, say. Museums. Arts funding. UMass.
What little highway maintenance we do would probably just cease.
We’d cut community outreach for at-risk youth, and things like that summer jobs program for teens in Boston. We’d join Arkansas in failing to keep up with our flu prevention efforts. Any kind of AIDS and drug abuse prevention efforts, certainly. Everything helping the homeless and immigrants (they don’t vote, so why spend meager resources on them?) would have to go.
And of course any agency the legislature has a grudge against would get run over with a fine-toothed comb. Massport? The Turnpike authority? Everybody will be gunning for them.
Next, we could expect to see some new fees and fines. To make up for missing state aid, we’d see cities increase the cost of parking tickets. RMV fees would go up. General merchandise sales tax, excise tax, gas tax, cigarette tax, alcohol tax, licenses for filming, parking, special events, restaurant openings, inspections…. way up.
And they’d legalize all the gambling you could possibly imagine. You thing scratch-ticket fever is bad now? Wait til there’s a video poker machine in every bar in town. Or at least every bar in town that can afford the outrageous license fee.
I’d love to see the state legalize and tax prostitution and marijuana. That would both save money on jails and bring in huge amounts of revenue.
Far more likely, the legislature would pass a new law, reinstating the income tax exactly the way it was.
I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
And I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it’s already too late
Newspapers are supposed to refrain from voicing opinions, but sometimes you can tell they care, at least a little. Or maybe I’m projecting. For example, some guy in Weston built an enormous house. Enormous even for Weston, I mean: $21M to build, 20 rooms, 21,000 square feet. Yes, each room costs about a million dollars and is approximately the size of my entire apartment. Why would the Globe point out that kind of wretched excess if not to instill shame in its creators?
Nets would stop this from happening, but they’d block the view, so it keeps happening. They did take the time to install some emergency phones of course… but they occasionally break.
But sadly, they didn’t catch anyone entering or leaving the porno shop over on Mystic Ave:
I went down to the basement today to get the laundry and opened the door into the basement and there was a thing that looked kind of like a chunk of lint or a sock hanging on the edge of the door. I grabbed it and it was warm and furry and surprising. I dropped it and jumped back. It was a bat. It wasn’t moving. Did I stun it? Was it sick? It can’t have been dead. It was still warm and twitchy when I grabbed it and dropped it.
I opened the door and shoved it out gently into the cold. It didn’t move. Later I checked back and it was gone.
Flown away? Eaten?
Krugman points out that comparing Dick Cheney to Darth Vader is hardly fair. After all, Darth Vader once served in the military, and his contractors at least finished building the Death Star.
My father points out that Dick Cheney was actually not a terrible person forty years ago. Conservative, sure, but not vicious. It was only after his first or perhaps second heart surgery that he became the vicious monster he has become today. He’s not the only person to have had personality changes following heart surgery. In a lot of cases, people take their post-heart-surgery lives and use them as an opportunity to turn into evil bastards. Only Dick Cheney, however, seems to have been in a position to turn his years as an evil bastard into war crimes.
You can stream your Rhapsody music subscription through your TiVo. And I am listening to the complete works of the Mountain Goats while my girlfriend is out of town because she totally hates them and I have just decided they are the only thing I can listen to right now.
Indexed explains that a strong Euro means more ugly men in Speedos on American beaches.
