After the blatantly manufactured “statewide” report on municipal health insurance entitled “The Utility of Trouble. Municipal Health Plans: Gilded Benefits from a Bygone Era,” released in April by the Boston Foundation and the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, Paul Grogan and Michael Widmer need to change the names of their organizations and the press needs to start reporting them for what they are. The same big businesses that have record profits, and for the first time in history stole all the productivity gains from workers and kept them as profits, fund, generously, the smokescreen “think tanks” that produced that report. The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation should be called the Massachusetts Business Taxpayers Foundation. But businesses don’t pay taxes in this country or this commonwealth like the rest of us do, so Widmer should completely reinvent his group’s name.
The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center reports that the corporate income taxes of businesses like those that bankrolled Widmer and Grogan only accounted for 6.4 percent of total taxes in this state, compared to 36.8 percent paid by working people in personal income taxes. No wonder Paul Grogan has allowed the Boston Foundation to so drastically lose its way; a lot of the money it’s saving on taxes is going to his endowment. The only thing gilded here are the salaries of Grogan and Widmer, both of whom are making closer to a half-million dollars than they are to your average municipal worker’s salary. That is, unless, you’re talking about Jeffrey D. Nutting, the Franklin Town Manager prominently featured in a Boston Globe story, who makes $128,125 per year and has a $6,000 annual car stipend, $4,000 per year in lieu of long-term disability payment, a retirement plan, 47 days of paid time off every year, and an insurance annuity, in addition to health insurance even better than the “gilded” benefits he criticizes those selfish women in the school cafeterias for having: cafeteria workers who make barely above minimum wage, who haven’t seen a raise in years, and whose personal shares of health insurance costs have gone up every year.
This is an all-out public relations assault on the working class by business interests and it’s being waged by their mouthpieces like Widmer and Grogan, who masquerade as defenders of the public interest. The public would be shocked at whose interests they’re really shilling. Of course, the public will never know if the press doesn’t bother to report it. Workers could very easily cherry-pick the 14 communities with the worst health insurance benefits and produce a report that just as strongly supports our position that municipal workers pay their fair share and have historically, time and again, given up raises in order to maintain their health insurance benefits.
More shameful than the bias and foregone-conclusion nature of this “statewide” report is the press reporting on it, as if it were an actual reflection of all health insurance benefits for public workers around the state. Municipal workers don’t have “overly generous” benefits. They have benefits, just as we all should have, whether union or not, whether public or private sector. The report’s methodology is so flawed that even the most lax professor would give it a failing grade; the communities were chosen because they had the very best benefits, and those with worse benefits were not included. A statewide report should have a bigger sample than just 14 out of 351, or 4 percent, of cities and towns. And the press should do better than print it as gospel.
