Special Election for US Senate - Poll

[ron_newman]

The special primary election for Senator Kennedy's seat will take place on Tuesday, December 8. Seems like a good time to post a poll and find out who davis_square residents support. I'll probably post a second one a few days before the election.

Like previous political polls in our community, this one is public, with all votes publicly readable. If you'd like, post a comment saying why you support your favorite candidate (or oppose some other candidate). There are still a lot of undecided voters out here.

[Poll #1484875]

Comments

[mud-puppy.livejournal.com]

Well, I know I'm sort of late to the game... I didn't see this post until today when Ron posted a link, but I wanted to respond to this. I don't really remember Deval Patrick saying he'd run the state like a business, which is odd since I must've heard him speak in person about 2 dozen times since I volunteered for his campaign.

As for the waste in government, I gotta say from my perspective as a state employee (I work for the committee on revenue in the legislature which is a pretty good vantage point) there is no waste or there is very little left. Any waste that was there has been gutted with 3 straight years of budget cuts. Really, there is no phantom waste.

In my own work I am stuffed into a small room with three of my coworkers and ah.. not so much with the cubicles. My computer is ancient, has a floppy drive, and barely runs. I have to beg, borrow and steal for what I need in order to do my job and most of the time I just bring stuff in from home at my own expense. And I along with all of my fellow staff members in the legislature, most of whom make roughly $33k per year or so, are required to take a 5 day furlough sometime over the next 6 months, which effectively is about a 2% pay cut.

I have friends in the Dept. of Revenue, A&F, DOT and HHS and it's the same story from all of them. DOR is having about $10 million cut from their already cut budget for FY10, and they're responsible for making sure that people pay their taxes. Doesn't make a lot of sense to cut their budget, but there aren't a lot of other choices.

As for cutting a lot of essential social services? I agree, there have been a ton of cuts to services. But I would ask, what would you cut instead? Local aid to cities/towns, or maybe education funding or the myriad other services the state funds? How would you decided what program gets level funding and what one doesn't? The Governor has attempted to cut across the board as evenly as he can, while maintaining funding for education and local aid. I don't necessarily agree with all of is methods or with what he cut, but I do agree that he and the Legislature have had a lot of crappy choices.

The state cut about $3 Billion from it's budget in the last fiscal year and we are poised to cut another billion this year and that was on top of the cuts for FY08. A lot of that comes from job cuts and cost cutting measures along with cuts to services. The rest came from the Rainy Day Fund, which is now mostly empty, and in the form of bail out from the Fed. Next year will probably be worse because most of those federal dollars and our rainy day fund will dry up.

The money has to come from somewhere. And I have to say that from my perspective, this idea that there is waste in government is a bit of a red herring. I just don't see it. What I do see is a lot of people working their asses off with long hours and for very little pay and are the first to get laid off or furloughed when the economy goes south.

Anyways, sorry if this turned into a bit of a rant. I just get really twitchy about the whole idea of waste in government. I think if most people came into the state house or to any of the other state office buildings downtown, you all would be pretty surprised about what you found. Just sayin'.