Based on the commentary of progressive Democrat state Senator Samuel Bell (Providence) at a local economic development event featuring central planning guru Bruce Katz, you really have to wonder how little he thinks of the intelligence of his supporters:

“The reason I wanted to go back to that slide [showing RI’s unemployment rate from 2010 to 2018] is you can see the results,” said Bell. “Because before we implemented these corporate policies our unemployment rate was plummeting, relative to the national average. And once we implemented these policies, once they start to bite – implemented largely at the beginning of 2015, we see it stall. And that means people in my district suffering because of the economic damage.”

Here’s the slide he’s talking about, as reproduced on Uprise RI:

 

Now, I think the unemployment rate in Rhode Island is pretty much a bogus statistic that misrepresents the state’s economy, but still: Bell must be relying on slavish agreement from his listeners, because nobody should be surprised that a bad statistic would slow down its improvement as it reached the national average.

Indeed, digging into how the rate is calculated, one could even make the opposite argument to Bells. One important reason the rate of improvement of RI unemployment slowed down in 2015 was that people stopped quitting the labor force, and that number, which is the denominator for the unemployment rate, actually started going up during the period in question:

 

In other words, if Rhode Islanders were more optimistic about their prospect of finding jobs, they would keep looking, which would slow the reduction of the unemployment rate. This could be said to prove that Bell has things backwards.

The irony, here, is that I actually agree with Bell’s observation. Rhode Island’s employment scene has indeed been doing worse under Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo than it had been doing. However, the reason is that her policies are too progressive — too centrally planned — which points to a problem with progressives’ assumption that government can run the economy.

To implement centrally planned policies, the decision makers rely on the continued buy-in of their fellow progressives. Yet, there will always be some truer believer who benefits by being more extreme and more pure. There will always be a Sam Bell with incentive to use misleading statistics and hints of corruption among his predecessors to advance his own career.