Patricia Morgan’s op-ed in yesterday’s Providence Journal lists a handful of the items in the latest state government budget that will represent new money taken from our pockets:

As we look back on this legislative year, one phrase comes to mind: “It’s easy to spend other people’s money.” The political majority trumpeted Rhode Island’s $8.9 billion budget as spending that would improve the lives of citizens. But it’s hardly austere, especially when compared with the financial challenges that average families have endured for the past nine years. …

For me, this session was another missed opportunity, and our citizens deserved better.

I’d go a step farther and suggest that it was continued theft.  Sure, the politicians in power have multiple rationales by which to convince themselves that they’re governing, rather than stealing, but they have no track record of success to substantiate that delusion, and they repeatedly offer evidence of self-dealing that brings the whole system into doubt.  Really: If they think this type of government is a benefit to the state and its people, then they must, by implication, believe that we’d reduce ourselves to barbarism and destitution were it not for them.

Rhode Island’s problems get more and more clear, and as they do, people decide whether to try to get in on the system or to leave.  Some set out to change it, but it’s a difficult fight that often seems more like missionary work.