“Fiscal irresponsibility from Mass Fiscal Alliance” — Jonathan Cohn, CommonWealth (12/27/2017)
IN DECEMBER, when you open your mailbox, you’re used to the usual flow of holiday cards from relatives and old friends, as well as end-of-year fundraising solicitations. However, residents of towns from Pittsfield to Hull recently got something else: an incendiary mailer attacking select legislators for their support of the Safe Communities Act and warning of the flood of “illegal immigrants” into their cities and towns. And they weren’t talking about Santa Claus and his elves.
That would have, at least, been closer to the truth.
The source of these mailers was the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, an organization sometimes quoted as a nonpartisan source of “fiscally responsible” expertise in the press, perhaps best known as a thorn in the side of the state’s Democratic Legislature on budgetary affairs. As a supporter of robust public goods, I’m used to disagreeing with Mass Fiscal when it comes to how much we should be investing in our schools, our roads, our public transit, our health care infrastructure, etc. It isn’t that often that I see Mass Fiscal arguing for greater city and state spending, but that’s exactly what’s happening here.
