A mixture of federal and state funding are being used to address Rhode Island’s housing situation. More than $166 million will be put to work to support the construction and preservation of affordable housing in the state, Gov. Dan McKee said. RIHousing has now opened a competitive funding round that will be used for financing those efforts throughout the state.
Apparent unemployment insurance correspondence from the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training (DLT) sent to an address in Mississippi joins the list of examples of problems handling the government program.
The shock of employment data in the latest Jobs & Opportunity Index report is big enough… and then one realizes most of the data in the index doesn’t even reflect COVID-19, yet.
The desire to open up the economy isn’t selfish or reckless; it’s humanitarian.
Is it time for you to get involved… to save our state? If we are ever going to change the policies that are driving away families and crippling businesses, the sad truth, my friend, is that we are going to have to change the players.
Rhode Island’s political class is so beholden to so many special interest groups and agendas, that they are paralyzed when it comes to considering common-sense, pro-growth policy reforms.
State of the State co-host Richard August invited me on for a full hour of the show to cover a broad range of topics, from Tiverton’s recall election to broad political philosophy.
12-9-19 A Different View of Matters from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
Well, this news isn’t exactly surprising:
On New Year’s Day, the state Temporary Disability Insurance tax rate will rise from 1.1% to 1.3% of pay, according to the state Department of Labor and Training. That means someone making $50,000 per year should expect to pay $650 in TDI tax next year compared with $550 this year.
The biggest reason is that Rhode Islanders are beginning to take advantage of a 2013 change in the law that allows them to use the disability program to take time off in order to take care of other people who are injured or sick, or to “bond with a new child.” The sponsor of that legislation insists it’s a small price to pay, and she works diligently every year to make it a little less small:
Sen. Gayle Goldin, sponsor of the 2013 bill that created caregiver insurance, said Tuesday that more people taking advantage of the program is a sign that it’s working and that taxpayers are getting good value.
“It’s a very small [tax] increase to pay for a benefit that helps people when they need it the most,” said Goldin, a Providence Democrat.
Going from 1.1% of pay to 1.3% is actually an 18% increase. What should families forgo in order to cover a benefit that people in 46 other states somehow manage to live without?
Naturally, the state’s army of spokespeople spins it as a positive:
“It is not surprising that improved income conditions would increase claims; more employed workers result in more individuals eligible, therefore, more potential users,” Angelika Pellegrino, spokeswoman for the Department of Labor and Training, wrote in an email.
That comment has two layers of deceit. First, the program is funded by a percentage of total payroll. More people working means more people paying into the system, which shouldn’t have to be adjusted if it’s designed well. Of course, if Rhode Island is only creating low-paying jobs, then new tax contributions would be less likely to cover the cost of coverage.
Second, the increase in employed Rhode Islanders cannot possibly account for an 18% increase in the rate. The number of people employed has barely budged year over year, and the number of jobs based in the state is up only 1.5%.
We should also remember that these policies pile up, including, for example, more-recently-mandated paid leave for employees. That policy arguably froze and reverse employment increases in the state.
This 18% increase in the TDI tax is a visible warning sign for what we can’t see. We can’t know all the jobs that would have been created or the raises that would have been given in the absence of these progressive policies. And we can’t forget that employers (and potential employers) can’t only adjust for the policies that have been passed; they have to plan for all of the new burdens their betters in the General Assembly are likely to impose every year.
TaxProf Blog’s Paul Caron highlights an important point from a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Phil Gramm and John Early:
The published census data for 2017 portray the top quintile of households as having almost 17 times as much income as the bottom quintile. But this picture is false. The measure fails to account for the one-third of all household income paid in federal, state and local taxes. Since households in the top income quintile pay almost two-thirds of all taxes, ignoring the earned income lost to taxes substantially overstates inequality.
The Census Bureau also fails to count $1.9 trillion in annual public transfer payments to American households. The bureau ignores transfer payments from some 95 federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, which make up more than 40% of federal spending, along with dozens of state and local programs. Government transfers provide 89% of all resources available to the bottom income quintile of households and more than half of the total resources available to the second quintile.
Teasing the direct wealth redistribution our government imposes on the economy out of the equation changes the picture dramatically. Click over and look at the included chart. Adding wealth transfers to those in the lowest quintile moves their average income from nearly zero to over $50,000, while removing taxation from the top quintile drops their average income from nearly $300,000 per year to less than $200,000.
This is a nifty trick from progressives that might just slip past folks’ notice or might be deliberately obscured. Government takes action to correct a presumed problem but then doesn’t account for the correction in future years, so it looks as if the problem never changes.
In fact, it might appear to get worse! In this case, for example, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that progressive taxation actually leads to a bigger difference between earned income (not including transfers). After all, the higher taxes are, the more companies have to pay at the high end in order to produce the same take-home-pay, and the more progressive the tax structure is, the less incentive workers have to take higher paying jobs that carry more responsibility or require more investment in credentials and such, so the more pressure there will be to maintain or increase take-home pay.
If reducing the gap in earned income is really the goal (which I think it should be), then a redistributive tax structure is exactly the wrong way to go about it.
What is a progressive mayor to do when his city’s policies produce the inevitable problems, including homelessness? Well, in an area of the country where the average temperature ranges from 60 to 80 degrees, the government can let tent cities emerge for a while. In a place like Bill de Blasio’s New York City, where January’s average is 40 degrees (which any winter visitor knows can feel like it’s in Kelvin, not Fahrenheit, when the wind cascades between the buildings), that isn’t an option.
So, the city has come up with a novel solution:
From the tropical shores of Honolulu and Puerto Rico, to the badlands of Utah and backwaters of Louisiana, the Big Apple has sent local homeless families to 373 cities across the country with a full year of rent in their pockets as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “Special One-Time Assistance Program.” Usually, the receiving city knows nothing about it.
City taxpayers have spent $89 million on rent alone since the program’s August 2017 inception to export 5,074 homeless families — 12,482 individuals — to places as close as Newark and as far as the South Pacific, according to Department of Homeless Services data obtained by The Post. Families who once lived in city shelters decamped to 32 states and Puerto Rico.
As Shaun Towne reports, using the interactive map provided in Sara Dorn New York Post article on the program, a handful of beneficiary families found their way to Rhode Island — one each in North Kingstown, Pawtucket, and Woonsocket and three in Providence. The mayors of the northern three of those communities are reportedly not happy about the situation:
Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien and Woonsocket Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt released a joint statement Thursday calling the program “an outrageous example of bad public policy.” They said it’s “irresponsible” for New York to spring needy families on other communities without warning, especially those already “working with limited resources to improve [their] residents’ quality of life.”
A cynic might quip that these mayors are only upset that they were not notified so as to ensure that their new constituents are registered to vote. This thought leads to a more intellectually interesting problem. The Big Apple’s program suggests a system that creates pressure for the exportation of bad ideas, including both the policies that created the unpleasant situation and the paternalism of using taxpayer dollars to compensate their victims.
Would it be possible to design a system that sends people from localities where good ideas dominate to such benighted states as New York and Rhode Island?
Perhaps the most clarifying statement in Rhode Island politics, recently, came from one of the candidates now involved with Matt Brown’s Political Cooperative (which, despite the name, is not an alt-country band):
“Thought I may be the epitome of the American dream I cannot sit around and watch while many of my brothers and sisters are denied a shot at that very dream,″ said Jonathan Acosta, tracing his own story from “first generation American born to undocumented migrants from Colombia″ to the Ivy League.
“I believe that we are not free until we have dismantled structural inequality, developed sustainable clean energy, enacted a $15 minimum wage that pays equal pay for equal work, extended healthcare for all, provide[d] affordable housing, ensured quality public education starting at Pre-K, undergone campaign finance reform, criminal justice reform, and implemented sensible gun control,″ said Acosta, running for the Senate seat currently held by Elizabeth Crowley, D-Central Falls.
So, to Mr. Acosta, we’re not free until we’ve taken from some categories of people to give to others, limited people’s energy options to benefit fashionable technologies, forbidden employers and employees from setting a mutually agreeable value on work to be done, taken money from some people in order to pay for others’ health care (as defined by a vote-buying government) and/or put price controls on what providers can charge, placed restrictions on who can live where and what they can build, tightened the regulation of politics with limits on the donations and privacy of those who become politically active, and reduced the rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.
If that doesn’t match your understanding of “freedom,” you’re not alone. Indeed, by its mission, this “cooperative” is cooperating against anybody whose understanding of freedom differs, because it cannot possibly cooperate with anybody who disagrees. You simply can’t hold a definition of freedom that doesn’t have satisfactory outcomes for the interest groups that progressives have targeted.
If you hear that the federal government is changing some policy that will affect welfare benefits for millions of people, what is the first bit of information you’d want to know? For me, the answer is what the change actually would be. For mainstream journalists, that’s often a secondary or tertiary consideration, probably because they fundamentally see their job as advocacy, not the provision of information.
A prime example is the Columbus Dispatch and Gatehouse Media article by Catherine Candisky and Jayme Fraser about the Trump administration’s proposed rule change for food stamp eligibility appearing in the Providence Journal. Readers have to get more than halfway through the article before finding a direct statement of what the policy does:
The proposed change would end benefits for people who receive assistance because of broad-based categorical eligibility.
The policy change would only add a requirement that state governments must actually check the eligibility of people applying for food stamps even when they are already receiving other forms of welfare. The only people who would lose food stamps under the new rule are those who are not eligible for them now, but who receive them because states don’t check.
Of course, as a society we can have the conversation about what level of income ought to entitle a family to assistance, but sneaking beneficiaries onto the rolls seems mainly to be a way to expand the business available for government and the dependency of the people on it.
Right AGAIN! Did you see Speaker Mattiello on GoLocal Prov Live?
We’re glad that he echoed our Center’s long-time call that the Commerce Corp, and the state overall, must diversify its economic development program beyond just corporate handouts.
With the State of Rhode Island writing ObamaCare into state law with this year’s budget, it’s worth noting a proposal floating around in conservative circles and the Trump Administration, as Avik Roy articulates here:
Last week, the White House finalized a new rule that allows employers to fund health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) that can be used by workers to buy their own coverage on the individual market. This subtle, technical tweak has the potential to revolutionize the private health insurance market. …
The administration estimates that as many as 800,000 employers — mostly smaller businesses — will choose this option, expanding health care choices for 11 million workers in the next decade. These employers will benefit from having fiscal certainty over their health expenditures. And workers will benefit from being able to choose their coverage and take it from job to job.
This is the health-care-market fix for which I’ve been advocating for years. Everybody would get accounts, and employers could put money into them for their employees. So could the government, as welfare benefits, and so could charities. So could parents or even concerned members of a community after some surprise accident or illness for a neighbor.
At the same time, eliminate most mandatory coverages for health insurance so people for whom it makes sense can buy catastrophic coverage inexpensively. That way everybody is covered for emergencies and nobody ever has a preexisting condition, because everybody has always had some sort of coverage. At the same time, Americans would be better able to make health care decisions because they’d more often be paying directly for the services they receive and doing the cost-benefit analyses that people several steps removed from their situations can’t possibly do.
Of course, under such a system politicians attempting to buy votes would have to be more direct about it. They’d be limited to transparently depositing taxpayer money into accounts instead of implicitly driving up costs in our opaque system by requiring insurers to cover certain benefits. But in a fair analysis, a better, more-sustainable health care system that doesn’t distort the employment market is probably a little bit preferable to enabling corruption in politics.
Mandating school participation in free breakfast programs makes sure that somebody gets fed, but it also feeds the government bureaucracy.
Businesses should be applauded for hiring those most in need of work…not punished with more taxes, and certainly not made out to be the bad guy. It is misguided to think that if employees are not covered by their employer’s insurance plan, full or part time, and instead are enrolled in Medicaid, then the business should be punished.
My weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, this week, was about the governor’s focus on pre-school and post-secondary-school (avoiding the real problem) as well as the question of Deloitte’s continued employment by the state.
A recent Providence Journal editorial highlights yet another indication that the administration of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo isn’t exactly exhibiting a casual competence when it comes to the basic operations of state government. This time, the problem is the company with which the state has contracted to ensure that people in need are able to make it to their medical appointments, and the House Oversight Committee, led by Representative Patricia Serpa (D, West Warwick), is looking into it:
It has not escaped Ms. Serpa’s attention that there is a pattern of problems in state contracting. For many years, the executive branch has had trouble drafting strong contracts (without requiring an abundance of costly change orders), making sure services are properly implemented, and providing sufficient oversight once services have commenced. At the same time, the Raimondo administration has dramatically increased the number of public-relations people on its payroll.
Public-relations people on the payroll is just the start. Apparently, the governor also has plenty of time for things like this:
Gov. Gina Raimondo is all-in on a statewide bag ban and past opponents of the concept aren’t objecting.
Raimondo gave her support Feb. 14 at the final meeting of the Task Force to Tackle Plastics, an advisory board she created last July with the mission of cutting plastic pollution in the state.
That’s progressives (like socialists) for you: trying to save the world while letting those who rely on their competence for day-to-day operations suffer. The problem, at its bottom, is that people are willing to pay for certain services from government (for themselves and on behalf of others), but not so much for insider excesses and progressive schemes. So, to make way for the excesses and schemes, government has to scrimp on the things for which people are willing to pay so there’s money left over for the things for which they probably wouldn’t.
And at the end of the day, ensuring that the medical transportation vehicles run on time isn’t all that exciting.
Back in the sunny days before many people had even heard about the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), let alone before it was a byword for the Ocean State’s dysfunctional government, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity was warning about a “dependency portal.”
The idea behind the system is that state government will consolidate the information it collects for every type of welfare benefit and program it operates. That information would be updated in an ongoing way, and people will automatically receive any benefits for which they are newly eligible.
Of course, the flip side is that people would also automatically lose any benefits for which they are no longer eligible. Moreover, nobody should believe that politicians and bureaucrats would not find other uses for this treasure trove of information.
Turn, now, to Elizabeth Brico’s commentary on Talk Poverty:
… after decades of collecting this data, the government is putting it to use. This information is feeding algorithms that decide everything from whether or not you get health insurance to how much time you spend in jail. Increasingly, it is helping determine whether or not parents get to keep their kids.
When someone phones in a report of suspected child abuse — usually to a state or county child abuse hotline — a call screener has to determine whether the accusation merits an actual investigation. Sometimes they have background information, such as prior child welfare reports, to assist in their decision-making process, but often they have to make snap determinations with very little guidance besides the details of the immediate report. There are more than 7 million maltreatment reports each year, and caseworkers get overwhelmed and burn out quickly — especially when a serious case gets overlooked. New algorithms popping up around the country review data points available for each case and suggest whether or not an investigation should be opened, in an attempt to offset some of the individual responsibility placed on case workers.
Admittedly, I get the impression I wouldn’t agree with some of Brico’s broader assumptions and prescriptions, but empowering a faceless bureaucratic system to intervene intimately in people’s lives based on cold data is a frightening idea on its face.
RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse offers the Center’s view on legislation that would limit landlords’ right to decide whether the way potential tenants’ will pay their rent should be a factor in deciding whether to rent to them, including a mandate to accept Section 8 vouchers:
Based on conversations with landlords I know, there is a major, legitimate, and non-racial reason why some business prefer not to accept clients subsidized by public money and all the red-tape they would have to go through. In this case, once a landlord accepts a federally subsidized Section-8 tenant, that business is now subject to a whole new array of mandates, red tape, and risks that otherwise, it would not have to worry about.
Under this legislative mandate, landlords would be subject to unfair rules by HUD, which we know from the RhodeMap RI debate years ago, does not care about private property rights. HUD has corrupted its mission of putting low-income people into appropriate housing to the point where it routinely tramples on the rights of other private property owners.
Here’s some legislation that would be a reward for the SEIU for all of its political donations during last year’s election. Unsurprisingly, the bill summary is misleading:
This act would expand the tiered-rate structure for the childcare assistance program to meet the federal benchmark for access to high-quality childcare for all age groups of children, with higher rates paid to licensed child care centers that have achieved higher quality ratings in “BrightStars”, the state’s quality rating and improvement system. A requirement that childcare providers must raise tuition rates for all other public or private paying families in order to receive higher state rates is removed.
The law already provides for tiered payment rates. All this bill would do is dramatically increase the amount that taxpayers are required to pay.
Taking the taxpayer’s point of view puts another light on the section removing a “requirement that childcare providers must raise tuition rates for all other public or private paying families in order to receive higher state rates.” Right now, the law simply states that taxpayers won’t pay more than child care providers charge their unsubsidized customers. This bill would allow providers to charge those families who pay for their own care less.
One consequence of this change in incentives is obvious: To the extent that the market rate for child care is less than the government’s rate, providers will have incentive to fill up available space with subsidized customers unless families can pay more. If this creates a crisis, then (from the Big Government perspective) so much the better. The politicians will be able to cash in on the promise of giving away “free” care to everybody.
One always has to wonder something after reading an article like the one Madeleine List wrote about legislation to force landlords to take government housing vouchers and to block their ability to find out if potential tenants have appeared in housing court before. Was the reporter absolutely unable to find anybody to offer a contrary view?
The first argument one hears as an opposing view is that tenants who aren’t paying their own rent might not feel as inclined to keep it up or stay on good terms with their landlords. Although this might be a reasonable concern, in some cases, it may be more of a strawman, because it isn’t the best of the three most-obvious answers.
The most practical of the other two answers is that Section 8 isn’t simply a source of income. Accepting Section 8 vouchers requires the landlord to accept regular government inspections and other impositions. Even if we take as a given that the government will never make inspections more burdensome than the most basic health and safety concerns that all landlords should cover voluntarily, many may simply not want to deal with that extra layer of bureaucracy.
The third obvious answer is that accepting low-income tenants comes with some risk, whether the risk is that they won’t treat the property well, that they’re on the bordeline of being able to afford the rent at all, or that the government might decide that its vouchers give it more authority over your property than was initially the case. And risk comes with a cost.
This gets to a point about unintended consequences that legislators really should keep in mind at all times. Imposing risk effectively raises the cost of being a landlord, either by imposing an cost in stress or by forcing them to raise rates or lower profits in order to compensate when the risk goes bad.
Raise the cost of rentals, and we’ll have fewer. Have fewer rentals, and the natural price of the market will go up. Raise that price, and we’ll have fewer rentals. Rinse. Repeat. Housing crisis.
It’s anecdotal, to be sure, but add Ellen Lenox Smith’s letter in the Providence Journal to the evidence that Rhode Island has a worsening doctor problem:
Just last week, I had an appointment with my pulmonologist, who shared that out of the four doctors in his practice, only two are now left. This poor doctor is expected to take on the work of the two that are now gone along with his original patients, and they are not intending to replace those gone. I am so concerned that he will decide it isn’t worth it and leave, too.
This is not the type of medicine he planned of doing: overstretched, overtired and not able to care for his patients in the manner he was first hired to do.
Rhode Island imposes a high number of mandated coverages on health insurance, driving up the cost. We’ve pushed nearly one-third of our population into Medicaid. And our laws are restrictive when it comes to occupational licensing, regulations, and taxation.
This environment of massive government control puts a lot of pressure on the prices that providers can charge customers, which has an effect on how much time they can afford to spend with them, meaning that the job may not be what they wanted it to be.
We need to learn this lesson, because ideological and motivated activists are trying to push our state even farther down this road. Market forces allow us to match up the things that people want done (and can afford) on one hand and the things that other people are willing to do (for an income they are willing to accept) on the other.
Messing with that freedom-derived balance means that something else is determining who gets what from whom. Then, the incentives of politics will make it more beneficial to promise the moon to the getters at the expense of the providers. Even if the current providers tough that out and don’t cross the border, we’ll inevitably see fewer new ones as time goes forward, and everybody will suffer.
Merry Christmas! Imagine Rhode Island as a more attractive home and destination of choice for families. We could be a state that offers financial security now and opportunity for prosperity in the future. We could have a policy culture where individuals and business are successful in increasing the overall wealth of our state’s economy, and enhancing the quality of life for every Rhode Islander.
Writing about public policy day in and day out, one can forget that not everybody follows every argument with close attention. Broad philosophical points of view and underlying intentions can therefore be lost.
Just so, I almost didn’t bother reading a brief essay in which Michael Tanner promotes and summarizes his forthcoming book offering a broad explanation of a conservative policy response to poverty. It’s worth reading, though, because he summarizes some conservative policies specifically in terms of their human objectives:
As he concludes:
An anti-poverty agenda built on empowering poor people and allowing them to take greater control of their own lives offers the chance for a new bipartisan consensus that rejects the current paternalism of both Left and Right. More important, it is an agenda that will do far more than our current failed welfare state to actually lift millions of Americans out of poverty.
My only objection is that I’m not sure that the “paternalism of the Right” is a view that conservatives actually hold rather than a caricature that the Left spreads about us. Of course, the fault is arguably ours, if we don’t often enough express our real intentions.
Of course, the idea of making the federal government something like everybody’s rich uncle, endowing every baby with a $1,000 savings account with annual deposits at taxpayer expense, strikes all the wrong chords for a conservative like me. The details of legislation that U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D, New Jersey) has submitted don’t really help:
The accounts would be federally insured, and the funds could only be used for homeownership and “human and financial capital investments that [change] life trajectories,” according to the summary. …
The program would cost roughly $60 billion if implemented in 2019, a Booker aide told The Hill, and would be funded by increasing the capital gains tax rate by 4.2 points, increasing the estate tax to its 2009 level and raising taxes on multimillion-dollar inheritances.
So, the federal government would create and help fund individual investment accounts and then pay for it by increasing the cost of investing as well as taxing those who are able to change their “life trajectories” enough to ensure that their own children don’t need rich Uncle Sam. That doesn’t sound like the most efficient policy design.
All of that said, Booker’s concept does have some similar features to my long-standing proposal for health care: Set everybody up with a health savings account, which government could use as its Medicaid/Medicare mechanism, which employers could use to provide their health care benefits, which charities could use to offer assistance to the poor, and which would bring market mechanisms into health care.
That would be a better use of money than buying houses. Moreover, some significant part of the funding could be found in government health care savings (as all of the funding for any new program should be found in the existing budget).
Somehow the weekend of Thanksgiving and Black Friday seems an appropriate time to turn our attention to Jessica Botelho’s Turn to 10 report on arrests for food-stamp fraud:
Twenty-four people have been accused of fraudulently obtaining a combined total of nearly $50,000 in public assistance and food stamps, Rhode Island State Police announced Tuesday.
… anyone convicted of fraudulently obtaining public assistance may be sentenced to up to five years behind bars and/or fined $1,000 if the value of public assistance was more than $500.
Anyone convicted of fraudulent use of food stamps, will be ineligible to participate in the food stamp program for no less than six months and no more than 24 months.
In the scheme of things, this is pretty small-scale stuff, with an average theft of $2,040, and looking at the mug shots doesn’t give the impression of a well-off crime ring. Probably, these folks saw an opportunity for some extra money and acted on the not-uncommon principle that a little bit of “I got mine” wouldn’t actually harm anybody.
This holiday weekend, we express our gratitude for the good things in our lives and (some of us) take part in ritualistic exercises in excess, whether at the Thanksgiving Day table or in an effort to give our children (or ourselves) a materially exciting Christmas at a discounted price. These holidays are supposed to direct our attention to those whom we love and those whom we should help, but they often highlight our weaknesses and tendency to measure well-being by things.
These contrasting aspects of the holidays apply to those of us who need help, too. There is no shame in doing what one can to help one’s family, and food stamp fraud might be easily forgiven for that purpose, but is that really what’s going on? Stealing in order to fund some habit, like smoking, or to keep up on the season’s materialism carries a bit more culpability, and a drive toward taking control of one’s financial well-being should always be central.
We do our disadvantaged neighbors no favors by instilling an opportunity for fraud or temptation toward dependence, so our welfare programs should be modest and well controlled. At the same time, we lose perspective if we blow their infractions out of proportion.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes cracks the case with the observation that a dog didn’t bark during the commission of a crime. From this, he infers that the animal knew the criminal. Perhaps that explains a phenomenon that Rick DeBlois notes in a letter to the editor:
… Rhode Islanders complain about high taxes, incompetent leadership, back-door deals, cronyism, nepotism, and all the mobsters up on Smith Hill. We complain about poor roads, poor schools and a myriad of other issues that are wrong with our state.
But when the time comes to make a change, they reelect the same old gang of incompetent fools who got us here in the first place.
To be sure, part of the problem is that the people complaining turn on each other, a conundrum now personified in the person of Republican gubernatorial candidate Patricia Morgan. She spent years building up an admirable brand as a politician who responds to Rhode Islanders’ complaints and presses for change, but when primary voters didn’t pick her to be their candidate, she targeted the only alternative candidate with a chance to win.
The bigger, more-systematic problem, however, is all the dogs that aren’t barking… the voters who aren’t complaining. These are folks who don’t want anything to change because they’re getting something out of the system as it is, whether it’s a do-nothing government job, a government union perch with inflated compensation, or some kind of handout (from welfare to corporate cronyism). These voters know their masters.
Another layer of voters may sometimes growl a little, but they are easily distracted. The insiders throw them some progressive causes, some bits of identity politics, or some Trump hatred, and they happily gnaw on those meatless bones while the crime against our state persists.
It’s a fascinating state of affairs to investigate, although one needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out. Rather, where that character’s genius is truly needed is in coming up with a way to unravel the trap, because the complaints (and the bites) will multiply exponentially when necessary reforms begin to clear the fatal excesses away.
Rhode Island is in desperate need of leadership that will step up and take the Progressive agenda head-on. For too long, the far-left has schemed to take the people of Rhode Island backwards. They want to move us further away from the pro-family and pro-business reforms our state desperately needs.
An essay on NRO by Oren Cass is worth a read for the broad-ranging illustration it provides of the state of politicized science these days. His opening vignette is perfect:
The president of the United States had just cited his work with approval during a Rose Garden speech announcing a major change in American policy, and MIT economist John Reilly was speaking with National Public Radio. “I’m so sorry,” said host Barbara Howard. “Yeah,” Reilly replied.
This was not a triumph but a tragedy, because the president in question was Donald Trump. And the action taken was withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
Trump had cited Reilly’s work correctly, saying: “Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full” using Reilly’s economic projections, “. . . it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree . . . Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100.” But as Reilly explained on NPR, “All of us here believe the Paris agreement was an important step forward, so, to have our work used as an excuse to withdraw it is exactly the reverse of what we imagined hoping it would do.”
In other words, this isn’t about science, but about belief, and in this view, science is supposed to find evidence confirming progressive assumptions. That’s what it means to “believe in science.”
As Cass elaborates, this is especially a problem for people who profess to believe in data-driven public policy. If their data starts to raise doubts about their policies, and rather than adjust the policies, they look for new data, the whole thing begins to seem a bit like a scam. More from Cass:
Some check is needed on the impulse to slice and dice whatever results the research might yield into whatever conclusion the research community “imagined hoping” it would reach. In theory, peer review should do just that. But in this respect, the leftward lean of the ivory tower is as problematic for its distortion of the knowledge that feeds public-policy debates as it is for its suffocating effect on students and the broader culture. Peer review changes from feature to bug when the peers form an echo chamber of like-minded individuals pursuing the same ends. Academic journals become talking-points memos when they time the publication of unreviewed commentaries for maximum impact on political debates.
Tom Mooney presents this with negative language, but it takes a bit of squinting to see the down side:
The state’s improving employment picture may cost more than 1,000 people their food assistance benefits later this year, says the state Department of Human Services.
Since 1996, federal rules have limited “able-bodied adults without dependents” to three months of food assistance within a three-year period. But those rules also exempted people living in communities whose unemployment rates were higher than the average national unemployment rate. …
Able-bodied adults without dependents who are working or enrolled in a work-training program may continue receiving benefits beyond three months, Pina said.
Let’s restate the facts. “Able-bodied adults” — people who should be able to work — who do not have children and who do not have a job and refuse to enter work-training programs now can only receive food welfare for three months because the economy is doing well enough that jobs should be available. Perhaps Mr. Mooney should explain to readers why such people should have an entitlement to unlimited benefits.
Of course, this is par for the course of all reporting on welfare. The unstated presumption is that there is never any reason not to give people anything… presumably until they enter the upper middle class.