Hello, Matt,  I have a suggestion regarding automatically granting American citizenship to children who are born here of illegal parents. I feel these children should be CONCEIVED here as well as born here. The mother must prove she has been living in the United States for the 10 months before the birth of her child. Also, I would not grant American citizenship to the child until the mother applies for and receives citizenship for herself. Thank you for reading this! R.T.

Dear R.T., Thanks for writing. I don't have anything to do with immigration because it is all Federal Law and I don't think states should be making their own laws on immigrants because you will have 50 different laws.

I believe John F. Kennedy had the right idea with the Alliance for Progress in Latin America. For a time we were building nations to make them stronger economically so they would have the jobs that kept them in their countries. After Kennedy, the Alliance for Progress fell by the wayside and instead we started sending all of our jobs to Mexico with our industry which of course became nonunion jobs. Our industries continued to pay the Mexicans dirt wages to work in demeaning and often life threatening conditions.

Who won? The rich who let their money earn more money for them. We now have the biggest gap between rich and poor than any other developed nation...only a few steps ahead of Mexico. The top tax bracket used to be 91% in the 1950s when we had the largest growth in the middle class in the U.S. It wasn't until Reagan's free market theories went into effect with tax cuts for the rich and anti union and anti regulatory policies that we started losing middle class families and seeing widespread homelessness.

CEOs in America now earn more than 367 times what the average working stiff earns in the US. That is the highest of all developed nations in which CEOs average about 40 times the average wage of workers in Europe and Japan. In the 1940s through 1970s, US CEOs only earned about 40 times the average workers wages. Unions played a big part in keeping CEOs honest and their salaries at reasonable levels but their numbers and the industries they worked in have shrunk substantially due to Republican free market policies that, by the way, recently gave us this current recession. If all workers had kept up to the increase in CEOs salaries we would be making about $125,000 a year on average.

Let me ask you this. Would you break the law if there was no other way to feed your kids?  Don't let this right wing bull !@#$ about immigrants change the real subject that should be asked about any candidate that runs for office. Will they vote against union organizing and for free market, anti regulatory laws? Will they vote to stop the tax credits for moving industry out of our nation? Will they let Wall Street Bankers continue to conjure up ways to steal money from hard working people who only hope to have a decent retirement from their investments?  Matt

Rep. Patrick and Colleagues Push Feds on PACE Boston

Rep. Patrick and 108 colleagues sent a letter today pushing Federal law makers to support legislation that would force FHFA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to adopt standards that support PACE. Property Assessed Clean Energy, PACE is a program enabling cities and towns to acquire funding through bonds to help residents finance two types of improvements in their homes: energy efficiency improvements and renewable energy improvements. After loaning the money out, the municipalities will place a betterment charge on the homeowner’s property taxes. The homeowner will get the benefit of low cost financing for their energy project that will allow them to capture other government incentives. An added benefit is that if they decide to move the new owner will take over the payments.

Originally Patrick's bill, the PACE legislation was passed by the Massachusetts House and Senate last week. It is awaiting the Governor’s signature.

The letter states, “In just the past two years, twenty-two states have passed laws enabling local governments to develop PACE programs. State and local governments are embracing PACE because of its tremendous potential to cut energy bills, increase homeowner cash flow for mortgage payments, reduce mortgage default risk, create tens of thousands of local jobs and dramatically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by spurring investment in clean energy improvements. PACE has received strong bipartisan support nationwide because creating jobs, saving energy and reducing utility bills for families and businesses is important to all Americans. Our nation’s PACE programs were set to launch a 24-month pilot period this summer, funded by $150 million in grants from the Department of Energy, and with consumer and lender protections that were developed by an inter-agency working group that consisted of HUD, NEC, OMB, CEQ and DOE. The White House has also shown strong support for PACE and was instrumental in the issuance of guidelines that ensure PACE programs adequately protect both mortgage lenders and property owners. Unfortunately, despite PACE’s great promise, on July 6th, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued statements blocking our nation’s PACE pilot programs, wrongly claiming that the consumer and lender protections and the White House guidelines were not sufficient.”

RE: DPU 10-54 National Grid/Cape Wind Contracts

Dear Chairwomen Berwick and Commissioners Woolf and Westbrook,

I believe we must be realistic about our need as a nation to change our current fossil fuel usage that is neither environmentally nor financially sustainable. Our current course is a dead end and the catastrophe now happening in the Gulf is one in a long line of damaging symptoms we are inflicting on the planet and ourselves.

We are all somewhat responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico because we demand to have cheap gasoline, heating oil and all the petro chemicals that are used to make the plastic products and grow the food we demand. Peak oil is just around the corner if not here already and oil that is readily accessible is now gone. That’s one of the reasons we are drilling a mile under water to get oil. Heavy tax subsidies make it feasible. After peak oil, the price of it will climb to a point that it will be impossible to heat homes or run our current fleet of light vehicles.

Just recently we have seen how cheap coal costs lives and does untold damage to the environment by leveling entire mountains and burying and poisoning streams. Natural gas exploration is doing untold damage to ground water supplies. And of course, all fossil fuels contribute to global climate change. Global climate change is real and we are already seeing its impact in the form of more violent hurricanes. Our oceans are becoming more acidic killing off coral and the microscopic plankton that forms the basis of our food chain. Even the oceans have a maximum capacity for absorbing CO2. All damage is caused by our profligate use of fossil energy.

For those who say that oil drilling is not relevant to today’s discussion, the power capacity of our 175 million light vehicles is 24 times larger than the nation’s entire electric generation system according to the Council of State Governments. If we could convert just one fourth of our fleet to electric vehicles, the power stored in their batteries would be about the same as the entire generation of the grid. The battery storage of electric vehicles would work very well with wind energy which tends to generate electricity at night when our usage is down and thus help us adopt intermittent renewables like wind and cut emissions by 80 percent for each electric vehicle. I intend to file legislation next session to set up the regulations and incentives to prepare Massachusetts for the conversion of our light vehicle fleet to electricity. Electric vehicles are four times more efficient than gasoline powered vehicles. That is why Cape Wind is directly related to the production of oil and the transportation sector of our economy.

In addition, we should remember that all the health and environmental costs of burning fossil fuels are not currently included in the price. Fossil fuel exploration and generation have been heavily subsidized by the Federal Government for decades. Estimates of $20 billion in subsidies for fossil fuels are conservative. If the health and environmental impacts were included in the price of fossil fuel generated electricity, it would be much more expensive. Therefore, the price for Cape Wind generated electricity is quite reasonable due to its benign impact on the environment.

I am proud of the efforts the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has made to reverse our dependence on fossil fuels. The Green Communities Act and the Regional Greenhouse Gas legislation are monumental tributes to the people of Massachusetts who looked to the future and set an example of what can and should be done. Thank you for your consideration,

Sincerely, Matthew C. Patrick,

State Representative, Third Barnstable District.

 Toward a More Equitable Tax System in Massachusetts

Speech at the Unitarian Universalist Church, East Falmouth

Rep. Matthew C. Patrick
July 4, 2010

Recently, I have received a lot of attention for one of my budget amendments that would have increased the tax on wealth.  Talk show personality, Howie Carr, decided it wasn’t a good thing to do so he dedicated an entire column to misrepresenting it.  Mr. Carr, who is currently, and somewhat ironically, battling his employer because he is upset with his million dollar a year salary, does not endorse me for re-election.  Bob Murray said I should put that on my bumper sticker, “not endorsed by Howie Carr.”

The intent of my amendment to the budget was to restore the tax on income derived from wealth to support the Commonwealth’s institutions and services which are being severely curtailed.  We have undergone an 18% decline in tax revenue and are only surviving on Federal money which will end next year leaving us in a very deep hole.  We have had to cut the equivalent of 1500 full time jobs in next year’s budget and many more last year.  For the first time in years we have cut local aide and education aide to cities and towns.  If my amendment had passed, it would have given the Commonwealth about $500 million that we desperately need.

What is clear is that a disproportionate share of our state and local tax burden falls on the bottom half of our wage earners.  According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the top one percent of income earners in Massachusetts pay less than 5% of their income in state and local taxes while the lower half of us pay about 10% of our income in state and local taxes.[i]  My amendment would have restored the tax rate on interest and stock dividends to the 12% level it was at before 1998.  The first $5,000 in this income would be exempt for people 65 years of age.  It doesn’t include income from social security or pensions.

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After being in the Peace Corps in Ghana, Africa, a third world nation, I gained a tremendous appreciation for what our taxes do to provide infrastructure and the institutions that enable people to become wealthy and stay wealthy.  Without our infrastructure such as roads, bridges, water, sewer, airports, ports, internet, parks and open space and institutions such as schools, colleges, courts, libraries, hospitals, fire and police protection , regulatory agencies that protect our health, welfare and the environment, people would not be able to earn and keep wealth.  It’s that simple.

Rabbi Elias Lieberman Remarks

for the presentation of the

Presbrey Public Service Award to Rep. Matthew Patrick April 7, 2010

When I was informed, last year, of the HAC tradition that would find me presenting this year’s Presbrey Public Service Award to some worthy recipient, I naturally wondered who that person might turn out to be and what kind of sleuthing I might need to do in order to find praiseworthy things to say about that individual.

You can imagine my immense relief, therefore, when I was told that this year’s recipient is Rep. Matthew Patrick. Not only am I one of Matt’s constituents who has, on more than one occasion, bent his ear or sent him an impassioned e-mail, I am also, admittedly and unabashedly, a tremendous fan of this man. I’d like to think that it has something to do with our both having graduated college in the same year or that we can both lay claim to that dubious mantle of being “baby-boomers’, but Matt Patrick exemplifies for me everything that I would hope to find in someone who has committed himself to public service: passion, integrity, thoughtfulness, courage, stamina, compassion and vision.

Spend even a few minutes reading any of Matt’s blog entries and you’ll get a sense of the man. He is passionate about, and has proven himself over the decades to be a great steward of, Cape Cod’s environment. Long before any of us had even heard the word “Prius”, Matt was driving around the Cape in that little silver Honda hybrid vehicle. He was, as they say, an “early adopter”.