Published August 12, 2010

Uncle Sam is getting ready for the weekend. (Jeff Sandquist/Flickr)

This weekend in Massachusetts: The more you spend, the more you save!*

Bay State shoppers will be lining up in droves Aug. 14-15 — or maybe they won’t, since so many retailers let you arrange tax-free purchases in advance now. It amazes me, what people will people will do to save a few dozen dollars. My boss is buying a mattress and a television. Another colleague is considering an iPad for her son.

What the state economy loses in tax revenue is more than made up for in consumer spending, the Globe reported:

Between 2005 and 2008, total sales revenue rose in Massachusetts during the tax-free shopping weekend from the usual $100 million to approximately $500 million, according to the Retailers Association of Massachusetts. Last August, however, total sales were down an average of 20 percent compared with August 2008, the association said.

Cranky Howie Carr opines:

It’s funny how the state couldn’t “afford” a sales-tax holiday last year, but this year it can. Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that this is an election year for the State House, and 2009 wasn’t?

Meanwhile, New Hampshire is taking great pleasure in reminding Massachusetts that sales are tax-free every day in the Granite State.

So, how will you spend your sales tax holiday? What are you buying?

____

*Unless you spend more than $2,500, in which case the sales-tax exemption no longer applies. (more details at Mass.gov)

Published August 12, 2010

Mom and Magic Beans co-owner Sheri Gurock says she was misquoted in today’s Globe article about maternity leave — and mortified mommies have the wrong impression in comment threads and on Facebook.

Gurock says her company — which sells baby clothes and toys at stores around Boston — is portrayed as tough on moms. From her blog post:

Here’s the quote:

“It’s my dream that someday Magic Beans is big enough and secure enough that anyone who works for us would get three months maternity leave, but that’s just not an economic reality right now,”

Here’s what I actually said:

“It’s my dream that someday Magic Beans is big enough and secure enough that anyone who works for us would get three months fully paid maternity leave, but that’s just not an economic reality right now,’

That’s a big difference.

In fact, as I told her in the beginning of our conversation, Magic Beans has enough employees that we are subject to the FMLA, not the Massachusetts state law. We would never consider anything less than 12 weeks time off for our employees. I told her that from the perspective of most working mothers, 8 weeks is nowhere near enough time.

A mother of three herself, Gurock has suffered from too little maternity time.

This week the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that employers are not required to guarantee a woman’s job beyond eight weeks. We discussed “the motherhood penalty” Monday on Radio Boston.

Published August 12, 2010

A Naragansett is the Boston hipster's answer to Pabst Blue Ribbon, Zezima reports. (one light/Flickr)

New York Times reporter Katie Zezima recently documented 36 hours of good times in Boston. It’s an impossibly ambitious guide for the tourist or the local — where to stay, where to eat, what to do. The Beehive, the ICA, the Greenway, 75 Chestnut, Drink, the Ames Hotel and the Charles River all get love.

Zezima is our guest today for Radio Boston’s Thursday arts roundup. She joins Hubbub immediately afterward for a live Web chat.

Of course, when a New York newspaper tells America what to do in Boston, Bostonians inevitably take offense. Consider the comment thread at Universal Hub:

Commenter Roslindalian writes:

I have to say, this was actually a pretty standard format and tone for these NYT “36 hours in ___” and was genrally free of offensive invectives and derision. This is, of course, with the exception of every New Yorker’s inability to make reference to any marginally Italian neighborhood as anything other than “Little Italy” and its mention of the gastronomic “inferiority complex” that apparently exists in The HUB. I was able to brush off those slights by imagining what nose-look-donwery might be found in one of these pieces on (gasp) Chicago, or other western frontier villiages. Heavens, what would cause you to leave Manhattan for one of THOSE areas?!

But Katie (who is a friend) is no carpetbagger; she lives and works here in Boston. The article focuses on the new and novel, and I’ll admit, I hadn’t tried (or heard of) a lot of her discoveries. It’s a good read.

Surely you have suggestions of your own. How would you kill 36 hours in Boston? Dish it out in the comments, and join us for the live Web chat at about 3:45 p.m.

Published August 12, 2010

The Big Dig keeps coming back to haunt us this week.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker capped a day of dueling news conferences in front the State House on Wednesday. (Adam Ragusea/WBUR)

With just eight weeks till the election(!), the gubernatorial trio held dueling news conferences on the same spot in front of the State House.

“Charlie Baker got government out of ‘the future business’ with his Big Dig financing scheme,” said Deval Patrick, the incumbent governor. “And we’ve been pulling our way out of that hole for four years now.”

Baker, a Republican, was state budget director from 1994-98. He secured funding for the project by borrowing against future federal highway money. What began as a $2 billion plan ballooned into $15 billion. The debt saddled the state for years.

Baker said he owns just 10 percent of that plan — but the blame is bipartisan. “There were lots and lots of people who owned a piece of that project, and I’ve taken full responsibility for the part I owned,” Baker said.

The independent Tim Cahill piled on, accusing Baker and the Republican administrations he served of being dishonest.

“I did not lie,” Baker retorted.

Patrick talks of building bridges to the future, even invoking Bill Clinton in his remarks Wednesday. Where does the Big Dig fit into the future?