The Massachusetts Legislature has been lacking creativity lately. It’s been a kitchen that serves up left-over, warmed-over solutions to problems.
You’d think the combined brain power of a state like the commonwealth, crowned by a city like Boston, could generate measures that are original, not just imitations of laws and programs invented by other states. Actually, even imitations wouldn’t be so bad if they were imitations of successful ideas. But citizens of this state are being asked to put up with borrowed ideas that haven’t even lived up to their promise.
First there was the idea of jump-starting economic development here by introducing casinos. Was Massachusetts the first to think of that? Rhetorical question.
Massachusetts was the sixteenth state to make casino gambling legal. The casino concept has been lying in the bottom of the intellectual barrel to be grabbed by any state whose leaders imagined that roulette tables and slot machines would miraculously create new money instead of simply siphoning cash out of existing businesses and already-stressed personal budgets.
Pennsylvania has casinos; Gov. Ed Rendell has been truculent with critics in defense of his conviction that they will release a geyser of magic money. New York is talking about getting new casinos. Rhode Island may get new casinos. Florida may get new casinos. Chicago may get a casino. No one is talking about how to bring back electronics factories, solar panel factories, machine tool factories, even clothing factories, with decently paying jobs that achieve a constructive result.
Imaginative visions for economic development? What we’re seeing is people in statehouses across the country who seem to be asleep, except that instead of sheep they’re counting chips. Blackjack tables. Slots.
And what are the results in states that have already been running casinos, racetrack betting operations and lotteries? Fewer than a third of those states have realized the revenues proponents of gambling promised, according to an analysis by Stateline, a publication that studies state policies. Stateline quotes Lucy Dadayan, a policy analyst at the Rockefeller Institute of Government who specializes in studying state gambling revenues, as saying:”States shouldn’t think of gambling revenue as recession-proof.”
More recently, and in a different area of concern, we have a proposal in the Legislature to give Massachusetts a three-strikes law, a concept that got its start nearly 20 years ago, in the early 1990s. Three-strikes laws were supposed to rid the streets of dangerous habitual offenders; in practice, one Californian’s “third strike” was stealing a dollar in change from a parked car.
There were those of us who lived under the happy illusion that the three strikes idea hadn’t been adopted in Massachusetts because it’s another one of those measures, like mandatory minimums, that takes discretion away from judges and ends up costing the taxpayer carloads of money by caging up potentially salvageable people as well as those who really are a threat to society.
But no: Massachusetts wants to come to this grim party 19 years late and apparently without much examination of the results of three-strikes laws in the places that have had them. A study by the Justice Policy Institute done 10 years after a three-strikes law passed in California found no more significant declines in crime rates in counties in which the law was stringently enforced than in counties that invoked it less often.
If our legislators want to borrow someone else’s ideas, let them at least plagiarize something that works. In the meantime, they owe it to the people who elected them to develop measures based on an informed sizing up of the future, not just a hasty scramble through yesterday’s newspapers or a fix of “information” from lobbyists whose paymasters flood the Statehouse with money.
