Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse often refers to the value of “a paycheck, not a welfare check.”  Rich Lowry suggests President-elect Donald Trump is on the same page:

Trump hammered away at the true bottom line of the economy for most people. Mike Konczal, a fellow with the liberal Roosevelt Institute, went back and listened to Trump stump speeches after the election to better understand how the mogul pulled off his upset. Konczal notes that Trump “never mentions poverty. And while he talks a lot about reducing taxes, he never talks about increasing transfers, redistribution, or access to core goods. He talks about wages, full stop.”

And that’s the key to Trump’s economics. If you squint just right, you can see a strategy. It is to increase growth through traditional Republican means (i.e., tax reform and deregulation) at the same time, he aims to directly create a tighter labor market through soaking up labor via an infrastructure program and reducing foreign competition by discouraging outsourcing and squeezing immigration.

Related principles applied to Rhode Island would focus on workers both by decreasing the incentive for them to enter into dependency on government programs and by increasing the resources and liberty at their disposal to expand their work and, if they choose, build their own businesses (that is, reducing taxes and regulations).  Instead, the champions of the status quo in the Ocean State are striving to make more of us  dependent on government (through, e.g., UHIP and continually expanding social welfare programs), to attract people to the state who will require government assistance (for the government plantation), and to give government-selected businesses an edge against their local competition by taxing others more to tax the favored companies less.

This is unambiguously the choice Rhode Islanders face, and it has to be made again and again.  For example, infrastructure projects to “soak up labor” are sorely needed, both for jobs and for public safety, but the choice is whether to increase the tax/toll/debt burden or to redirect funds that currently foster dependency to help independent workers.