brendan halpin

Here’s how I’m voting on the five ballot questions and why. I hope you’ll find it useful!

Question 1: Giving the Auditor the power to audit the Legislature

The Massachusetts Legislature is one of the least transparent in the country, and also incredibly ineffectual. And then if you live in a progressive area, you elect a progressive state rep and they get nothing done and then they’re like, “you don’t understand, I have to go along with the leadership and do nothing. Otherwise they won’t let me do anything.”

So my instinct was to support this measure until I read the booklet I got from the Commonwealth, which said that The Pioneer Institute had testified in favor. For those who don’t know, The Pioneer Institute is an anti-government think tank that had the ear of Massachusetts governors for the better part of twenty years. You know how Charlie Baker insisted that the government shouldn’t make the T safe or reliable until the unions were broken? Yeah, that’s The Pioneer Institute’s “reform before repair” policy. They basically believe that government shouldn’t do anything except maybe find a way to make rich people richer.

I don’t understand all the constitutional problems with this question—I just know that a bunch of sleazy clowns support it, so I’m voting no.

Question 2: Eliminating the MCAS as a graduation requirement.

Here’s a quick test for bullshit in any education policy initiative: are private school parents demanding it?

So, do the wealthiest people in Massachusetts demand that Milton Academy and BBN and Noble and Greenough and all the other fancy private schools implement a high-stakes test as a graduation requirement? They do not!

So it’s bullshit. In fact, it seems to be designed as a class sorting mechanism—private school students get to have their creativity nurtured, while public school students are trained to perform arbitrary tasks without complaining.

I could go on at length—standardized testing has its origins in the racist eugenics movement of the early 20th century—but the bottom line is that people who buy the best for their children do not want this. The MCAS is bullshit. Vote yes.

Question 3: Letting Rideshare Drivers form a union: The disagreements about this seem to be mostly tactical—some people think that letting rideshare drivers organize as independent contractors will deal a fatal blow to the movement to have them classified as employees. But since that movement hasn’t really made any progress, I’m in favor of trying this.

Question 4: Legalizing Psychedelics: I think we’ve seen that drug prohibitions don’t work. I’m voting yes.

Question 5: Minimum wage for tipped workers: Yes, for God’s sake. Not only would this free servers from the sub-sub-poverty level tipped minimum wage, it would allow tip sharing with back of house employees, which is only fair.