Based on Paul Grimaldi’s reporting, one hopes those who attended the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce luncheon, yesterday, left with a profound sense of despair.

The legislators on the stage talked about their regulatory reform, but mainly what they’ve got to show is a bureaucracy researching regulations.  Meanwhile, the General Assembly piles on new regulations and mandates every year.

On taxation, even the “little bit more aggressive” approach proclaimed by Senate Minority Leader Dennis Algiere (R, Westerly) amounts to a piddling poking around the edges of Rhode Islanders’ tax burden.  The biggest claim to success that Speaker of the House Gordon Fox (D, Providence) could come up with was what hasn’t happened (yet):

“Sometimes you need to measure where you may have been,” save for certain actions, Fox said. …

Also, Fox noted, much energy has been used to blunt efforts to undo some of that work, such as the decision to lower the top personal income tax rate from 9.9 percent to 5.99 percent.

“There’s a large effort to backtrack on what we’ve done,” Fox said.

This is as much as to say to the unemployed: “Sure, you’ve got no hope of a job, but at least we haven’t driven every employer out of the state.”

It brings to mind something in a John Stossel column, out yesterday:

What about all the new businesses that would have gotten investment money but didn’t have [Al] Gore on their boards? What new ideas might have thrived if old industries weren’t coddled? We don’t know. We will never know the greatness of what might have existed had the state not sucked the oxygen out of the incubator.

Rhode Island government’s goal posts are devastatingly out of place if it’s touting the fact that it hasn’t allowed itself to do even more damage.  Stossel suggests that we’re turning into “a nation of favor-seekers instead of creators and producers.”

I say, look to Rhode Island for the lesson. We’re already there.  If some of the businesspeople at the luncheon left despondent, at least we’d know that they aren’t all in on it.