The Boston Globe - 19.09.2019

A10 Editorial The Boston Globe THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019

T

ime was when end-of-the-year revenue

surpluses in Massachusetts were like

unicorns — lovely to contemplate and

entirely mythical. But not this year.

This year — which in fiscal terms

officially ended June 30 — the black ink kept flowing.

The state is now in the enviable position of having

about $650 million it hadn’t anticipated spending.

There are always a host of worthy (and not-so-

worthy) causes vying for a piece of leftover budgetary

pie, but two that should be at the top of the list in

2019 are (1) investments in the state’s

tattered infrastructure and (2) hiking

the tax deduction for children or for

the care of aging or disabled relatives.

Hiking the deduction from $1,

to $2,000 for each dependent is the

centerpiece of Governor Charlie Bak-

er’s proposed $648 million supple-

mentary budget filed earlier this

month. The governor’s proposal also

directs about $100 million to road,

bridge, and water spending.

Now the Legislature has its say. House Ways and

Means chair Aaron Michlewitz of Boston said the

committee has just begun to unpack the budget’s

many provisions, including its tax provisions, but he’d

certainly like to help the state’s controller close the

books by the traditional Oct. 31 deadline.

“Obviously that would look good for our bond

rating,” he told the Globe.

The tax change would help about a million tax

filers in the state, according to Baker’s office, most of

them middle-income families, especially those with a

couple of kids and perhaps granny to be cared for. The

increased deduction would be worth an additional

$50 per dependent off their tax bill.

Baker proposed to fund the first two years of the

exemption hike (estimated to cost $87 million a year)

by putting $175 million into a reserve account from

this year’s surplus “which will give budget writers

sufficient time to adjust to the revision

in collections,” the governor noted.

The bill — at least as it came out of

the governor’s office — would also

contribute an additional $168 million

to the state’s rainy day fund. That’s in

addition to the $848 million already

transferred this year under a statutory

requirement that wisely requires excess

capital gains tax revenue — an

exceedingly volatile tax — be

contributed to the fund. Preparing for

those inevitable lean years is never a bad thing.

The budget bill also provides substantial new

funding for valuable programs:

ªSome $50 million for “targeted assistance for

school improvement” — aimed at encouraging the

kind of public school innovation that too often gets

talked about but rarely encouraged with actual state

grants.

ªAnother $50 million, also devoted to education

programs, would fund higher-ed scholarships, public

school safety infrastructure improvements, and STEM

(Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)

programs.

ªMortgage down payment assistance for first-time

home buyers is targeted for $10 million.

ªLocal road and bridge projects are slated to get

an additional $50.5 million.

ªAnd $60 million is set aside for projects related

to clean drinking water, including testing for

contamination and supporting a revolving loan

program municipalities can tap to upgrade water

systems.

So, yes, lots of money for lots of worthy things big

and small. Lawmakers will have other ideas — they

always do. Michlewitz alluded to the challenges of

spending a surplus and “doing it appropriately.”

“But it’s sure better than the alternative,” he added.

There is, in these boom years, the temptation to

create new programs that will be difficult to sustain in

lean years and indulge in pork barrel projects subject

to the whims of the more powerful on Beacon Hill.

A modest tax break for the state’s hard-working

families, targeted education investments, and an

infusion of badly needed infrastructure spending

would help curtail both temptations, and would be

fitting ways to spend the state’s unexpected tax

windfall.

Mass. budget: We’re in the money

Opinion

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Let’slendit(for

waterprojects),

spendit(on

schools),andsend

itrollingalong(as

taxbreaks).

W

hen Neil

Sheehan arrived in

Saigon in April of

1962 to cover

America’s new war in

Vietnam for UPI, he

had no idea he’d soon

become the enemy.

Sheehan, a 25-year-old rookie reporter

on his first overseas assignment, fully

bought into the conventional wisdom of the

day: If one country “fell” to the communists,

the rest would follow.

“We were filled with all the myths of the

Cold War,” he told me. “The domino theory

was real. You had to stop these communists,

or they were going take over all of Southeast

Asia. We’d end up fighting them in

California.”

Until Vietnam, reporters were expected

to “be on the team,” to report the story the

way the government wanted it reported,

and by and large

they did. But as

Sheehan came to

witness the

corruption and

incompetence of

our South

Vietnamese ally,

and the false

Pentagon “body

counts,” he began

to question not only our military strategy

but whether we should be there in the first

place.

His stories, and those of The New York

Times’s David Halberstam and a few others,

infuriated President Kennedy, who was

trying to hide the growing US military

involvement from a public skeptical of

another land war in Asia. When a reporter

asked Kennedy, in January 1962, if US

troops were involved in combat in Vietnam,

he responded unequivocally, “No.” That

same month, the AP reported US pilots flew

229 combat missions over Vietnam. One day

President Kennedy summoned the

publisher of The New York Times, Arthur

Ochs Sulzberger, to the White House and

suggested that he take Halberstam off the

story and out of Vietnam.

Some in the conservative media back

home accused Sheehan and Halberstam

of lying.

“They tried to get us fired,” recalled

Sheehan. “I was very glad that I had briefly

joined the Republican Club at Harvard,

because I knew they were going to try to

show I was a pinko.”

As more stories raised more questions,

the attacks on journalists escalated.

Reporters were beaten covering anti-

government demonstrations; some were

arrested. The South Vietnamese

government compiled an assassination list

that included reporters’ names.

Yet these reporters, the subject of my

documentary “Dateline-Saigon,” were not

deterred. The Pentagon Papers confirmed

their reports were accurate. Both

Halberstam and Sheehan would go on to

win Pulitzer Prizes for their Vietnam

reporting.

Reporters in conflict zones today,

whether in the Middle East, Afghanistan —

or Washington — do a better job of bringing

us the ground truth because of the example

set by Sheehan and Halberstam.

“They taught us great lesson,” says

Dexter Filkins, who reports today from

conflict zones for The New Yorker. “And that

is, truth is not just a point of view. Truth

does not adhere to the person who shouts

the loudest. And truth does not necessarily

belong to the people with the most power.”

Not everyone learned the same lesson,

however.

“Vietnam is taught to young information

officers today as the great mistake,” the late

Morley Safer, who reported from Vietnam

for CBS news, told me some years ago. “How

they screwed up by letting us cover the war

the way we covered it.”

In Vietnam, reporters were free to go

anywhere and report with little censorship.

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere today,

the Pentagon regularly requires journalists

to be embedded with troops and tries to

limit their information to that disseminated

in government briefings.

Yet the best of today’s reporters

approach their jobs with a healthy

skepticism because of the lessons of

Vietnam and what they have learned from

Sheehan, Halberstam, and other intrepid

reporters of that earlier era.

As consumers of news, we are all in their

debt.

Thomas D. Herman wrote and produced

“Dateline-Saigon,” which has won the Best

Documentary Feature award at the Woods

Hole, Middlebury, Newport Beach, and

Coronado Island Film festivals.

How Vietnam changed war reporting

ByThomasD.Herman

Someaccused

Sheehanand

Halberstamof

lying.

AP

David Halberstam (left) of The New York Times, AP Saigon correspondent Malcolm Browne (center), and Neil Sheehan of UPI, and

later The New York Times, chat beside a helicopter during an operation in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam in 1964.