Those of us who have experience manipulating our finances (as well as the people around us) see the state’s methods of handling municipal budgetary problems as a definition of the process. This is how you get out of financial trouble in the future; the habitual path has simply incorporated a pit stop, and “anytime soon” may be sooner than we think.
After reading Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison, by Peter Schweizer — a book that he calls “the most offensive and disturbing thing I’ve read since sampling the oeuvre of the Marquis de Sade” — Kevin Williamson illustrates how dangerous the concept of Big can become.
With one exception, studies of national business friendliness put Rhode Island in the bottom 10 (most frequently in the bottom three).
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.
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 […]
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.