League of Women Voters of Massachusetts Citizen Education Fund
Middlesex, Worcester, Norfolk Counties, MA November 4, 2008 Election
	Dan Haley Answers Questions Candidate for State Representative; Eighth Middlesex District

The questions were prepared by the League of Women Voters of Massaschusetts and asked of all candidates for this office.
Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

Questions & Answers

1. What proposals do you have to increase employment opportunities in Massachusetts?

Our economic strengths are increasingly tied to our human capital. Massachusetts generates some of the most talented, creative and well-educated graduates in the world. Unfortunately, the cost of living here in prompting too many of them to take their diplomas elsewhere. And as employers move to other states, their gravity pulls yet more of our human capital out with them. The *only* way to reverse this trend and encourage broad based investment and job growth is to first reduce and then stabilize the cost of doing business in this state. Beacon Hill needs to stop trying to balance the budget on the backs of our employers. The recent broad-based tax hike on business should be repealed, as should the recent additional health care assessments and ill-advised new emissions regulations passed literally in the 11th hour of the legislative session. Until prospective employers can feel that (1) the tax situation here is stable, and (2) Beacon Hill's enthusiasm for attracting and retaining quality employers goes beyond mere rhetoric + which is what it is today + we will continue to lose our existing employers and fail to attract new ones.

2. How will you rectify problems with aging Massachusetts infrastructure, especially bridges and tunnels?

One would be hard-pressed to find a proposition that garners more universal agreement in MetroWest than this one: forcing Mass Pike commuters to fund the Big Dig is fundamentally unfair. The Pike is a terminally dysfunctional entity that hemorrhages money. Unsustainable labor contracts, rampant political patronage, and nonsensical redundancies between the Pike and MassHighway combine to create a perfect storm of inefficiency and waste. Temporarily bailing out the Pike with MassHighway funds, as the Administration did recently, only flushes more taxpayer dollars down the drain. Unfortunately, the Pike is not merely a self-contained money flush. Its inefficiencies negatively impact our ability to adequately maintain our infrastructure across the State highway system. What we need is exactly what is lacking in state government now: the political will to aggressively tackle the problem of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. The best way to address the fundamental unfairness of Pike tolls, and to begin to save massive amounts of money that can be better used to maintain and then upgrade our aging infrastructure, is to eliminate the Turnpike Authority.

3. Governor Patrick has proposed a wide-ranging plan to transform education in the Commonwealth. What do you see as the top priorities in his plan and what funding mechanism do you feel will enable their successful implementation?

Governor Patrick's education reform proposals are the perfect example of what is wrong with the current mindset on Beacon Hill. Challenged to identify how his multi-billion dollar proposals will be funded, he remarked that when one builds a house, the first step is to design it, before pricing it out. That way of thinking is exactly wrong. It may be that when one has access to unlimited funds, the common procedure is design first/price later. Most people, however, first decide if they can afford to build the house, THEN determine how they are going to pay for it and how much they can afford, and only THEN design a house that fits within their budget. Governor Patrick apparently believes the Commonwealth has access to unlimited funds, and can therefore afford to design education reforms without regard to cost. It does not, and it cannot. We have some of the best performing public schools in the nation. We need to adequately fund what we have, before we think about a massively-expensive overhaul. It is unconscionable that last year the State took in record tax revenues, yet in local cities and towns across the Commonwealth neighbor was set against neighbor in Proposition 2-1/2 override battles as our communities struggled to adequately fund their schools. This results from a failure to set realistic priorities on Beacon Hill. Public Education should be among the highest priorities for our tax dollars.

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Responses to questions asked of each candidate are reproduced as submitted to the League.  Candidates' responses are not edited or corrected by the League.

Read the answers from all candidates (who have responded).

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: September 22, 2008 16:48
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