Last August, I noted that HealthSource RI had largely become a means of shuffling people into Medicaid, highlighting this grim fact:

The number of new Medicaid enrollments in Rhode Island from March to August was more than five times greater than the number of seasonally adjusted new jobs based in Rhode Island.  If you want a barometer of the direction in which the state is headed, that’s a pretty good one.

Well, herewith, one of the more depressing things I’ve ever read in the Providence Journal:

The total personal income of Rhode Islanders rose 4.3 percent from 2013 to 2014, ranking the Ocean State as the 16th fastest growing state in the country and second in New England, according to figures published Wednesday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

But a large portion of that gain was the result of the expansion of Medicaid benefits under Obamacare. 

Total net earnings   — wages, salaries, benefits and business owners profit — rose 3.5 percent in Rhode Island, below the national average of 4.0 percent. Similarly, investment income — including dividends, interest and rent collections — rose 3.2 percent in Rhode Island, also below the national average of 3.4 percent.

Rhode Island can’t wait for Governor Gina Raimondo’s court of handpicked economic apothecaries to stumble upon a formula for turning lead into gold — or welfare handouts into jobs.  We need the state to get off of the economy’s back and stop pushing freebies onto our neighbors, even if the elite progressives have to go into withdrawal with the removal of their steady source of self-affirming power.