By Bob Katzen

“As Massachusetts motorists are on the verge of paying six dollars a gallon for gasoline, Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka should reconsider their thoughts that suspending the state gas tax is a gimmick. Instead, they should address suspending the gas tax and cutting other taxes to help middle class Massachusetts taxpayers keep more of their hard-earned money.”
— Paul Craney, spokesman for the Mass Fiscal Alliance

“While this shooting happened in New York, we need to talk about it here in Massachusetts—because that could have been Nubian Square, Grove Hall, downtown Brockton or Forest Park in Springfield. It could have been, and historically has been, a synagogue, a mosque or a center serving immigrant communities.”
— Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence statement on mass shootings in Buffalo and across the nation.

“Achieving an accurate count for all 50 states and DC is always a difficult endeavor, and these results suggest it was difficult again in 2020, particularly given the unprecedented challenges we faced.”
—Census Bureau Director Robert Santos on its nationwide corrected census data which includes adjusting the total number of people living in the Bay State from 7,029,917 to 6,784,000—a reduction of 245,917.

“When you include additional time for construction and the start of construction and the rate of inflation that we have to project, as we are seeing inflation on a lot of our work and a lot of our bids and in the overall economy, there is going to be a significant increase in what we collectively thought the cost estimates would be for this project.”
— Transportation Secretary Jamey Tesler predicting that the estimated cost to demolish and replace the Bourne and Sagamore bridges has risen from the 2019 estimate of up to $1.65 billion to a new estimate of up to $4 billion.