In keeping with my ongoing quest to find common ground with everybody on all sides of every issue (hey, scarcity isn’t always evidence of a lack of demand), this part of Mark Patinkin’s column recounting his visit to John DePetro’s anti-Raimondo rally, jumped out at me:

Then there was Ed Mitsmenn, 57, another retired prison guard who lost his COLA. His hands were shaking and he told me he’s come down with Parkinson’s and almost lost his house because of health-care costs and his pension cutback.

“I see they have money for this and money for that,” he said, “but they took our COLAs away.”

There can be no doubt that one of the looming big stories of Rhode Island’s near-to-mid-term future is that pension promises are going to have to be reined in considerably.  The promised benefits are just too unrealistically huge for the state to be expected to cover them, and the fault for this reality lies squarely with labor unions and friendly legislators, who have conspired to saddle taxpayers with a bill to come do well into the future, and the union members who have been content to keep the scam going in their favor.  Eventually the future arrives.

But… as Mr. Mitsmenn suggests, there are hundreds of millions of dollars (perhaps more than a billion) in more-immediate spending reductions that ought to occur before the state figures out what kind of hit pension plan members are going to have to take.