With one exception, studies of national business friendliness put Rhode Island in the bottom 10 (most frequently in the bottom three).
When it comes to the average annual pension payment given to its retirees in the state Employees’ Retirement System (ERSRI), Cranston pays only a few percentage points more than the average for all cities and towns; its local fire and police retirement plans, however, are dramatically more generous.
While public assistance costs certainly bear watching, the larger reason for concern may not be that payments to individuals are growing and going to more people, or even that they’re covering more exigencies, but that the deepening involvement of government in private industry is making it more and more difficult to tell who is forcing whom to give what to whom else.
Relying too greatly on debt and the great money shuffle to resolve poor financial and civic management in the past has a frightening upper limit.
Early results an increase of the top British income tax rate raise questions about the strategy. A tax increase shouldn’t result in level tax revenue, let alone decreased tax revenue
Ash Wednesday seems an appropriate day to consider ruminations on economic inequality, from James Nuechterlein’s “Public Square” column in last April’s First Things (subscription required): … the connection between inequality and hard times is so prevalent in folk wisdom that expressions of alarm over the nation’s distribution of income followed in the wake of the […]
As a social institution, marriage is a force to overcome differences, not an acknowledgement of preexisting and perfect compatibility.
The larger argument over economic policy is whether it’s possible for a governing class — whether politically elected or untouchably technocratic — to account for all of the necessary variables sufficiently to justify as strong a hand as it currently has.
NY Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin believes the U.S.’s economic conundrum is competing with high-growth regions; Providence Journal columnist Edward Fitzpatrick doubts that new casinos will do the trick. Justin Katz considers the central problem to be a government seeking to shape the economy in ways that increase its own power and revenue.
Rhode Island’s overall score improved on Education Week’s annual report card and ranking report, while the national average remained exactly the same. But a look north to New Hampshire suggests that it will be some time before RI can show that its gains are more than just a consequence of the study’s methodology.
The contradiction of liberal populism and liberal technocracy resolves if one blends questions of power in with ideology. If our current state of coinciding prosperity and freedom is an accomplishment, then the objective of political action is to manage power so as not to undermine the achievement; if it is a discovery, implying an inability to undiscover it, then the objective becomes to marshal power for more expeditious achievement of progress.
On Tuesday, February 14, the department heads in Tiverton’s municipal government went before the Rhode Island State Labor Relations Board (RISLRB) as a step toward unionizing. No judgment has been announced, but the issue bears close watching. These are positions that elected officials and voters ought to have maximum flexibility to change.
As important as Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs’ conclusion, in a Heritage Foundation study, that public-school teachers are overpaid is the way in which Bureau of Labor Statistics data is biased to promote the opposite conclusion.
If the system that brought us to our current state of inequality is the “fool me once,” increasing taxes across the board would be “fool me squared.”