Editorials from around New England

MASSACHUSETTS

The Republican (Springfield)

July 7

It came in late and plenty of people will find fault in it, but the Massachusetts state budget for fiscal 2018 reflects the economic reality that the days of free spending and impulsive tax increases are over.

House and Senate leaders agreed to a $40.2 billion budget that avoids tax increases and hold spending flat at state agencies for the most part, according to sources that reported the agreement.

The bill reflected a lower tax revenue than expected when the Legislature went to work on the budget in the spring. The $700 million shortfall was handled with $733 million in budget adjustments, of which more than half, about $400 million, came from direct cuts to the spring budget bills.

Local aid does not appear to be cut from the nearly $6 billion anticipated by cities and towns. About $4.75 billion of that amount is designated for local schools.

The budget missed the fiscal deadline of June 30. Slowly, the need to meet the deadline slowly seems to be receding in urgency, and that is not a good thing, but legislators finally got around to ironing out their differences.

The six-member conference committee that came up with the final compromise budget worked in secrecy for a month. That, too, has raised the ire of some citizens and observers who feel a public process is being removed from public view.

These criticisms are valid. All of that said, the budget addresses the fact that if money is not coming in, it cannot go out.

Department officials will not be happy. Many are used to annual increases that keep pace with rising salaries and inflationary costs. But piling the burden routinely on the taxpayers, without noticeable improvement in services, has angered residents and is not in keeping with the Baker Administration philosophy.

With low unemployment in Massachusetts, and an economy that is growing by most yardsticks, the poor return in tax revenue is frustrating. That cannot be addressed by spending money that isn’t there.

The budget is late, and it’s not perfect, but it’s done and it’s balanced. For fiscal 2018, Massachusetts residents will have to accept that’s good enough.

Online: https://bit.ly/2sPk9Ad

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CONNECTICUT

The Day (New London)

July 6

It was apparently not enough for President Donald J. Trump’s ego to be elected president of the United States via the electoral college. No, Trump being Trump had to win the popular vote as well.

So when the final tally showed Democrat Hillary Clinton receiving 2,904,974 more votes, a 2.1 percent margin, Trump declared it unacceptable.

“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he tweeted in November.

We leave it to those who analyze the workings of the human mind to explain what nature of psychosis leads a man to invent his own reality to enhance his image. However, as to the facts, there is no evidence of massive voter fraud.

When factcheck.org looked into the matter, they reported this:

“Voting experts we talked to pointed to numerous studies that have found such in-person voter fraud - the type of fraud Trump is alleging - is virtually nonexistent. A Government Accountability Office report released in October 2014 said that ’no apparent cases of in-person voter impersonation (were) charged by DOJ’s Criminal Division or by U.S. Attorney’s offices anywhere in the United States from 2004 through July 3, 2014.’”

The bipartisan National Association of Secretaries of State released a statement in January saying that its members are “not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump.”

In the Hans Christian Andersen tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the fact that the emperor instead has no clothes is recognized by the “whole town” when a child states the obvious. If the emperor were Trump, he would have formed a commission to prove he had clothes.

Which is what the president did.

By way of an executive order, Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which has set out to make the case for Trump’s losing the popular vote because of fraud.

It is bad enough that this is a waste of time and money, but it is also potentially dangerous.

The commission is demanding voter information from secretaries of the state across the country, apparently to gather into a massive data base. As former U.S. homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff, who served under President George W. Bush, has noted, that is the worst thing the country can do given recent findings that Russia meddle in our presidential election.

Chertoff noted that the “widespread distribution of data elements in multiple separate (state) repositories is one way to reduce vulnerability.”

Let the federal government aggregate it and you’re inviting hacking.

Then there is the likelihood the administration would use the information not to improve voting, but to suppress it.

The vice chairman of the commission on election integrity is Kris Kobach, who has served as Kansas secretary of state since 2011. The American Civil Liberties Union labels him “the king of voter suppression.”

The ACLU contends tens of thousands of eligible Kansans have been prevented from registering to vote by the 2011 law Kobach championed, requiring not only normal identification but documentary proof of citizenship.

Under his direction, Kansas has also employed the use of Crosscheck, intended to detect people registered to vote in more than one state. An analysis of Crosscheck found that it flags thousands of people allegedly registered in multiple states when, in fact, they are simply people who have the same name and birth date.

Can you imagine Crosscheck taken to a national level, confusing all those Smiths and Riveras?

Given this needless and potentially harmful investigation, how should secretaries of the states respond to its request that they turn over voter names, dates of birth, voting histories, party registrations, the last four digits of Social Security numbers, felony convictions and military status?

They should provide only the information that is public under their respective Freedom of Information laws and held by their offices. In Connecticut, that certainly would not include Social Security numbers. And the Office of the Secretary of State does not maintain court or military records.

This fishing expedition initiated by Trump is an attack on states’ rights and the long tradition of state and local governments administering elections.

So while open government laws must be respected even for foolishly motivated requests, secretaries of the state, including Connecticut’s Denise W. Merrill, should not go beyond their legal obligation in response.

Better yet, Republicans should raise their voices in urging Trump to pull the plug on it.

Online: https://bit.ly/2tpD5nF

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RHODE ISLAND

The Providence Journal

July 4

Rhode Island’s legislative session collapsed Friday as leaders of the House and Senate got into an unfortunate power struggle. Since the state budget is Rhode Island’s essential annual governing document, it is greatly in the public’s interest for leaders to find a means to break through this impasse.

The new budget seemed to be sailing toward passage at the start of last week. It was the product of months of negotiation between the two legislative leaders and the governor. The House, under Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, had passed it overwhelmingly. The Senate Finance Committee had passed it - seemingly giving the document the imprimatur of Senate President Dominick Ruggerio. And Gov. Gina Raimondo warmly praised it as a balanced budget that would help the state’s economy.

But at the last minute, a group of senators decided to amend the budget. At that point, Speaker Mattiello - unwilling to reopen a budget that had already been negotiated and that the House had already passed - sent his members home. The Senate then passed its own version of the budget and went home.

The result? Since the two chambers disagree, Rhode Island has no new budget for the fiscal year that began on July 1. Instead, it is operating under the terms of the previous year’s budget.

We can understand senators’ feeling miffed about their bills facing an uncertain future in the House. The speaker’s strong-willed personality can rub some people the wrong way, and the Senate understandably feels it is vital to preserve its status as an equal body in the General Assembly.

But it is a shame that the Senate did not simply pass the budget that had already passed both the full House and the Senate Finance Committee, and that the governor planned to sign with enthusiasm. We hope its members will yet do so, by reconvening and voting, something that would earn them the public’s gratitude.

While the new budget passed by the House is far from perfect, it provides much needed increases in local aid for such struggling cities as Providence. It includes extra funding to help English language learners. It includes no broad-based tax increases, and begins the process of eliminating the onerous car tax, generally starting with those in the poorest communities who have the worst cars. It provides funds for students to attend the Community College of Rhode Island tuition-free. The governor labelled it a “Jobs Budget” that reduces the “structural deficit while making significant investments in economic development, job training, infrastructure and education.”

None of this will happen if the budget is not passed. And poorer communities will quickly begin to feel the strain.

The differences in the Senate version do not seem significant enough to risk severely damaging the state’s reputation. For example, the Senate plan would trigger the restoration of the car tax if revenues to the state plummeted. But other measures in the budget are not tied to triggers in that way, and it is clear that the car-tax cut would be quickly targeted for elimination, in any case, in the event of a severe budget crunch. This change thus seems more political than substantive. Preserving it is not worth sending a message to the country that Rhode Island cannot govern itself.

For all these reasons, we hope that cooler heads will prevail. There must be some other way to reassure the members of the Senate that their power and interests will be respected. The state needs a new budget.

Online: https://bit.ly/2sxIcj2

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MAINE

The Portland Press Herald

July 5

It is almost a sure thing that President Trump’s proposed elimination of a federal low-income heating assistance program absolutely critical to Maine won’t survive the budget process.

But that the elimination is even on the table, and that the program every year fights for funding, says a lot about the country’s priorities, and just who the Trump administration is looking out for.

Eliminating the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, is part of a series of cuts in the president’s proposed budget to programs designed to help low-income Americans. Individually, they are budgetarily insignificant - LIHEAP makes up less than one one-thousandth of total federal spending.

But together, they add up to enough to pay for tax cuts, mostly for the wealthy, while still increasing military and public safety spending, the one clearly stated aim of the Trump administration.

To justify the cuts, the budget proposal states that the heating assistance program is “unable to demonstrate strong performance outcomes.”

Tell that to the nearly 77,000 Mainers who last winter were able to run their furnaces just a little longer without having to decide to go without food or medication.

The $500 average benefit each household receives through LIHEAP barely puts a dent in one’s energy costs, but it means a lot to families trying to stay warm near the end of a long Maine winter, or to get cool during dangerous Southern heat waves, help the program also provides, along with weatherization and appliance repair.

To qualify, households must fall below 150 percent of the poverty line or 60 percent of their state’s median income, though in reality the benefits go only to the very poor - in Maine, the average income of recipients is around $12,000 a year. Almost all recipient households have a member who is elderly, a child or has a disability. Seventy-two percent have a member with a serious medical condition.

Even that limited amount of help is always on the cutting block. Funding for LIHEAP has fallen from more than $5.1 billion seven years ago to around $3.4 billion last winter, with a benefit reduced by $100 sent to fewer people.

Meanwhile, Trump and congressional Republicans are trying to push through a health care plan that does little for anyone’s health but a lot for the pocketbooks of the most wealthy Americans.

As these and other actions are taken to roll back the programs and services that provide a lifeline to low-income Americans, remember that the end result is often a neighbor wondering how they’ll keep the heat on.

Online: https://bit.ly/2sVyHJJ

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NEW HAMPSHIRE

The Concord Monitor

July 2

Concord, New Hampshire, was once the frontier. A granite obelisk near Concord Hospital commemorates the 1746 massacre of five Concord-area men by Native Americans. Today, the city and its environs are on the frontier again.

On one side lies a utopia of sorts - economic prosperity, easy living and social harmony. On the other, a potential dystopia of joblessness, cultural stagnation, envy and anger. How the city and its institutions respond to the forces described in two recent articles could determine what the future holds.

In 1956, Dartmouth College mathematics professor John McCarthy called researchers together to discuss the future of what he called “artificial intelligence.” It was the first use of the now ubiquitous term.

The 100 or so conferees considered whether computers, with their ability to rapidly analyze vast quantities of information and then act on it, will create or eliminate jobs, how “AI” could speed technological process and what changes might be in store for society. The conferees could only guess.

Today, the elimination of jobs by robots, and the ease of keeping in touch with friends, searching for information and conducting business at a distance are obvious. But the ones outlined by venture capitalist and former Google and Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee, writing in the New York Times last week, may not be.

Lee says the impact of artificial intelligence will dwarf those of all past technological advances, including electricity and the industrial revolution.

Artificial intelligence will eliminate millions of jobs without necessarily creating new ones. The gap between the world’s haves and have-nots will widen enormously unless income is redistributed from those who have almost all of it to those who have little or none of it.

The United States and China are the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence. Because talent attracts talent, nations and industries that aren’t already well on their way to an “AI” future will never catch up, Lee predicts. Traditional banking and Wall Street trading, he says, will soon go the way of camera film.

The second article in this “what’s the future hold” vision appeared in the online magazine “Politico.” Its author is urban studies professor Richard Florida, author of the best-seller The Rise of the Creative Class.

Florida’s article outlines the ideas in his latest book, The New Urban Crisis. His ideas are controversial.

We agree, for example, that America’s “knowledge hubs” on the east and west coasts, and a few outposts in between, are driving the economy and that politically, they’re blue. We disagree with Florida’s proposed response to the nation’s partisan divide.

Just 20 of the nation’s major metropolitan areas account for about half of the country’s gross domestic product. Eighteen of those are so-called sanctuary cities that President Donald Trump has promised to punish for protecting undocumented residents. Their embrace of artificial intelligence, and supply of workers capable of guiding it, will increase. Red America’s share of the pie will shrink; political alienation will grow.

The Boston to Washington metro area, which like other major metros boasts ample public transportation, high-speed Internet service and other advantages, will continue to be economic winners and the rest will stagnate, Florida predicts.

Though some might argue the point, Concord forms the northern margin of that corridor. The city has some of the requisite assets of a metro, including a law school that focuses on intellectual property and a two-year college that offers grounding in computing, coding and artificial intelligence. But it sorely needs better public transportation, easy connections to Boston and beyond, faster Internet service and more housing.

The future may not be the one Lee and Florida describe, but Concord would be smart to act as if it will.

Online: https://bit.ly/2tyUM2G

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VERMONT

The Times Argus

July 7

The astonishing spate of heroin overdoses in Brattleboro over the Fourth of July is cause for a deep reflection on the state of the nation.

Police reported that, in a 24-hour period starting on July 4, there were 11 overdoses in Brattleboro treated with naloxone, the drug administered to counter the deadly effects of an overdose. Ten of the 11 cases were women, and all of them were found in different locations, including homes, hotel rooms, an alley and a gas station bathroom.

Drug treatment specialists worry that the availability of naloxone may have the perverse effect of encouraging more dangerous dosages of heroin. In pursuit of a higher high, addicts may take a more dangerous dose with the knowledge that someone with naloxone might save them.

Even if naloxone has that effect in some cases, police, rescue squads, friends and relatives are bound by the fundamental obligations of human decency to save people who are in danger. Police don’t let a person drown in a dangerous swimming hole because the swimmer took a foolish risk.

Nevertheless, the human toll of the heroin epidemic is brought into sharp relief by the July 4 episodes. The Health Department has reported that in 2016 emergency medical personnel administered naloxone to 587 people. That year there were 105 overdose fatalities.

The opioid epidemic grew out of one of the gravest failings in the history of medicine in America. The profligate use of prescription opioid medications is widely understood to be at the root of the heroin crisis. Many people addicted to heroin began with prescription painkillers, which were distributed by pharmaceutical companies and prescribed by doctors with little understanding of their addictive power. Later, people addicted to painkillers found that heroin was cheaper and more readily available.

The opioid epidemic has been the subject of much analysis into the troubled economy, lingering poverty and shrinking opportunity. Appalachia and the rural South have been especially hard hit. The common profile depicts a rundown coal town where jobs have vanished, where a pill mill dispenses medications recklessly, where people are without hope.

The Northeast has also been hard hit, including Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Vermont is not beset by joblessness or pervasive despair. Yet thousands of people have been caught up in the opioid epidemic. There are more questions than answers about why.

Has our culture become so debased that it’s hard for people to find the kind of enduring values that could give a solid foundation to their lives? What does our culture consist of? Television? Crude commercialism?

There is much more to Vermont culture than that, including the high value placed on education. Vermont has a rich arts community - music, theater, art, literature. Traditionally, Vermonters placed a high value on the importance of work. As elsewhere, however, meaningful and satisfying work has become harder to find. Moreover, the past was not necessarily a golden age, and poverty has always plagued rural America. The farm hands and factory workers of years past may have only barely been able to get by.

But all culture - all people - must be animated by values that give meaning to the work of making a living or of participation in the life of the community. It must hold together as a human enterprise, woven together with our personal and family lives. In the past, faith communities helped do that weaving. Our communities now struggle at times to hold onto those community values, as much commentary, including the well-known book “Bowling Alone,” have described.

People now suffering from addiction are an integral part of our community - our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, friends, co-workers. The first step toward bringing them back into the community is to help them address the health crisis that has overtaken their lives - their addiction. A new treatment center has opened up in St. Albans, with hundreds of addicted people ready to receive treatment. It joins centers in Rutland and elsewhere that are helping people get on top of their habit.

Treatment and recovery are possible. The shock of the Fourth of July in Brattleboro ought to remind us how important they are.

Online: https://bit.ly/2uToQp0