03/10/12 – RISC Winter Meeting
Justin writes live from the RISC Winter Meeting at the Radisson Hotel.
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Unemployment Unchanged… but at Least It’s Not Bad News
Unemployment held at 8.3% in February, indicating stagnation no matter how one slices the numbers.
Taxing the Rich Raises Taxes on All
Efforts to increase the top tax rate shouldn’t be viewed in terms of the current tax system, but the system before the tax reform that is just kicking in. In that case, it represents a massive increase on more than just “the rich.”
Measuring the Inflation of Government
Local political analyst Tom Sgouros asserts that government ought to be measured against income, rather than in line with other expenses, but it isn’t as reasonable a premise as it may at first seem.
Attorney General Settlements as Corporate Shakedowns
Forty-nine of 50 states participated in legal action against five mortgage banks resulting in a $25 billion settlement. The public should wonder, first, what the banks gained from the settlement and, second, whether the whole process is wise to encourage.
Jennifer Hushion: Why RI Is Driving Us Out
Jennifer Hushion explains why her family is considering moving out of Cranston and Rhode Island
The End of an Era (But Not Fast Enough)
As impossible as it may be to deny the necessary changes in public policy related to the economy and government spending, the will to reform is not strong enough for due speed.
Mobility Has Held, but Perception and Perspective Have Changed
Economic mobility has improved or held steady over the past half-decade, but public perception is otherwise. Arguing hopelessness or dependence may reinforce the trend.
Laffey Movie Catches Mood, but That Might Be a Different Kind of Success than Hoped For
Justin reacts to an initial screening of Stephen Laffey’s movie, Fixing America.
Tax Foundation Runs Some Test Firms Through the RI Ringer
A new Tax Foundation study exposes some of the flaws in RI’s economic development practices.
Tying Some Threads from Diversity to Education to Social Disparity
The education gap and Rhode Island’s economic difficulties converge in such a way as to suggest school choice and a diversification of opportunities for schooling.
Revenue Above Estimates Not a Sure Sign of Economic Health
The total tax revenue that the State of Rhode Island has received for the fiscal year continued to beat estimates in January, by $57 million (3.6%), but it would be premature to infer either strong economic growth or the disappearance of the deficit expected for fiscal 2013.
RIPEC: Rhode Island’s Business Climate Conference
Justin indulges his wonkish inclinations writing in from RIPEC’s conference on “Rhode Island’s Business Climate: How Rhode Island Measures Up.”
RI Senate Economic Summit, Quonset “O”
Justin writes live and off-the-cuff from the RI Senate’s Economic Summit, “Expanding Jobs through Port Resources.”
Food for All Market Shows Business and Community in the Absence of Regulation
A Philadelphia company illustrates how voluntary action can make very fine and localized adjustments of behavior to repair a short-term error that threatened a long-term community interest, while government regulation would bring about unintended consequences with a much more difficult “undo” button.
Debt and Aid… Fixes for Budget Junkies
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.
Washington, Wall Street, and Populism
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.
The Question Isn’t Whether, but How Bad RI’s Business Climate Is
With one exception, studies of national business friendliness put Rhode Island in the bottom 10 (most frequently in the bottom three).
Assistance by Another Path
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.
A Tale of Two Classes: Wealth Isn’t Irrevocable
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.
Inequality and Economic Dust
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 […]
Consumer and Producer, Which Way the Flow?
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.
The U.S. Needs Innovation, but Government Molds the Economy That Works for It
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.