The “Fair Shot Agenda” of progressive Democrats in Rhode Island is morally indistinguishable from a mob deciding to give somebody permission to steal somebody else’s money.
Rhode Island’s Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”) health benefits exchange lost 5,027 members (18.6%) as of the December 31 deadline for open enrollment. Officials largely blame the withdrawal of UnitedHealthcare’s plans:
HealthSource RI said in a statement that the “main driver” of the enrollment decline was the departure from the market of UnitedHealthcare, which HealthSource RI estimated insured roughly 1,400 exchange customers in 2016.
One source of lost customers was more significant, however: Medicaid. A HealthSource spokesperson tells the Current that “about 1500 individuals who had [qualified health plan] coverage at the start of Open Enrollment have since been determined eligible and enrolled in Medicaid.” A request for the number of Medicaid recipients who went the other way — losing the taxpayer-funded welfare benefit and signing up for a paid (if taxpayer subsidized) plan — had received no reply as of this writing.
Since the beginning of HealthSource RI and the related Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has warned that the system was designed to draw Rhode Islanders toward welfare benefits and dependence on government. From the beginning, new Medicaid enrollment has far exceeded the numbers of Rhode Islanders who have used the exchange to purchase insurance.
These decisions and results have been a significant part of Rhode Island’s drop to 48th in the country on the Center’s Jobs & Opportunity Index (JOI) and to 39th on the index’s Freedom Factor, which is the ratio of jobs and employment to reliance on welfare programs.
On WPRI, Susan Campbell and Shaun Towne personalize the latest example of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project’s (UHIP’s) glitchiness:
Since its launch in September, the $364-million United Health Infrastructure Project – or UHIP – has been plagued with problems, including two separate outages on Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Thursday, a Pawtucket woman told Target 12 her husband’s citizenship status was changed in the system, suddenly claiming he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.
What’s amazing to me about all this is that I’m completely and utterly anti-UHIP (aka RIBridges) as a functional project. The fact that it’s still not functional is just astounding, and I’m not really sure how to react.
Reporting on a study by a couple of health care experts, Ted Nesi writes on WPRI:
Using 2015 data, their projections showed Rhode Island would lose $514 million in annual federal Medicaid funding under such a formula – a huge amount of money, equal to 22% of the state’s $2.3 billion in total Medicaid spending during the 2014-15 budget year. Massachusetts would lose $3.4 billion under the scenario.
First, let’s have a little perspective, here. The revised spending on “Medical assistance (including Medicaid)” for fiscal 2015 was $2,382,919,281. The year before — in fiscal 2014 — it was $1,819,597,682. If you don’t have a calculator handy, that’s a difference of $563,321,599, or about $50,000,000 more than the “huge amount of money” in the possible reduction.
According to the mainstream calculus, government spending can never go down, even just to the prior year’s level. On the one hand, we’re told it would be a terrible thing if Congress were to block grant Medicaid based on state income because states that rely on the program as a large part of their budgets would face massive reductions. As the study says, it “would result in a seismic redistribution of federal spending.”
On the other hand, the authors go on to say, we can’t possibly calculate block grants based on current spending, because that “would lock in large and arguably unfair variation in funding across states.” The only solution, clearly, is to just keep giving states as much money as they need for however many Medicaid recipients they’re able to sign up.
Folks, this is the government plantation, or company state. As I wrote when I first began tracing that economic model in Rhode Island, when the state’s major industry (government) relies on its ability to sign up people for services in order to charge other people for them, the people forced to pay the bill will eventually flee the system, if they’re local, or push their own representatives to stop the bleeding, if they’re in other states being soaked by the feds.
Rhode Island should take the opportunity of the Trump Administration to get off this track. The chasm toward which it leads has no bridge.
For years, the insiders have conspired to create the cronyism rampant in the Ocean State. In their zeal for headlines, does the political class ever question the value of these corporate welfare deals? Just this week, we saw the results in questions surrounding the Governor’s claims in the Wexford deal. The tone-deaf Brookings report lays the ground work by recommending that we can achieve better results if, instead of taking the arbitrary approach to 38 Studios-style corporate cronyism that has dominated Rhode Island public policy for decades, we take the same approach in a more targeted and strategic manner. Nonsense.
In light of GoLocalProv’s blockbuster expose Friday that the Wexford job creation claim is off by nine hundred, the General Assembly needs to immediately defund all corporate welfare – and request that the Governor claw back much if not all of the taxpayer subsidies currently earmarked for Wexford.
Much to the detriment of the state’s rate payers, Deepwater Wind began generating electricity on December 12. Less than three weeks later, one of its five turbines broke (oopsie). As though wind energy isn’t already expensive enough, now we have to add the cost of making repairs thirteen miles out on the ocean. (‘Cause the cost of water and seawater-related repairs is always very reasonable, right, boat owners …?)
It probably was not a coincidence that the company made this embarrassing admission on a day – the Friday before Christmas – sure to glean the absolute minimum amount of public attention.
It seems a point of personal pique for him, but Wesley Smith makes a great point when he objects to the characterization of families’ taking care of their own special needs children as “unpaid care”:
Really? What about mothers providing “unpaid care” for their babies? Or spouses for each other? Should such care also be measured in terms of the cost of having services provided by professional caregivers?
As Smith goes on to insist (emphasis in original), “the societal expectation should also be that families are the first line of care-giving.” The first line of care-giving. The first line of financial assistance. The first line of loan guarantees. The first line for education. The first line, period.
The problem is that such activities cut in on the government plantation’s market. Governments can’t tax other people to provide the services. Labor unions can’t take a cut (although they do try). And politicians can’t count on votes from people who aren’t dependent on government.
The deeper affront of the “unpaid care” attitude is how it teaches us to see caring for those we love. The insinuation can be that families would (and maybe should) offload care if they can afford to do so, just as a homeowner may patch a wall to save the cost of a tradesman. As a new state senator from Lincoln touchingly exemplifies, caring for loved ones can be a joyful fulfillment, and society should encourage us to see it as such.
Megan McArdle is well worth a read on why Congressional Democrats designed ObamaCare in the flawed way they did and what the consequent political reality means for Republicans’ likely steps for repeal-and-replace. Both those who would prefer to save the law and those who would prefer to trample it to dust should consider the political reality.
Option One:
For Republicans to fix the system as it stands, they would have to jack up the parts people hate — not to deliver new benefits, but mostly just to keep the existing system from flaming into a tailspin. Only the price tag would now be much higher, for boring technical reasons I’ll leave in a footnote.
Option Two:
Yet repeal and replace now seems almost as unlikely, because it means taking something away from voters — stuff that polls really well, such as, er, prohibiting insurers from looking at pre-existing conditions.
Option Three:
Of course, the last option — doing nothing while the individual market flames into a tailspin — doesn’t look all that hot, either.
McArdle states that she’d probably go with a variation of the third:
I’d announce a blue-ribbon commission designed to study the matter and propose a comprehensive alternative. I’d give it plenty of time to study and make recommendations. Then I’d wait and see if 2017 brings more premium hikes and insurers pulling out of smaller counties — disasters that could then be blamed on Obama…
The key point, here, is that we’re in this situation — with our healthcare system, economically, and politically — because President Obama and his fellow partisans who controlled both chambers of Congress felt they had to, and had the power to, push through something big (as the vice president put in vulgar terms at the time). But the American people didn’t want what the Democrats were pushing, so a party-line Congress created a system destined to fail and hoped its failure would teach Americans to want the socialized medicine that the party wanted to provide.
November made that possibility so unlikely that McArdle doesn’t even mention it.
So when do problems in healthcare stop being the fault of the proverbial greedy insurance companies and start being an indication that the system is too socialized already? Maybe when it’s more than 50% reliant on government? Consider this from a Ted Nesi report on WPRI.com:
Care New England also said more than half its gross revenue from patient services came from the two major government health programs in 2015-16, with Medicare accounting for 32% and Medicaid accounting for 28%. The share from Blue Cross was roughly steady at 20%.
At this point, Care New England is essentially what I’ve been calling a “government satellite.” Given heavy regulations, it’s essentially a quasi-public agency that has some independent revenue.
Keep this in mind, too, the next time you hear about how government is going to hold reimbursement prices down for Medicare and Medicaid. If you ran a business and your biggest — indeed, majority — customer (which also happened to have regulatory power over you) dictated prices for the services you provided to it, your only option would be to reduce services to other clients or find ways to soak those clients for more.
This is just one way in which government involvement in the healthcare industry is making things worse.
The populism of Trump puts pressure on conservatives to propose a comprehensive revision of their typical playbook, and the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity may have a helpful suggestion.
Even if he fails in office, President-elect Donald Trump — merely by promising to behave as if it’s possible for the people to push back against the government-expansionist march — will do much to expose the workings of the government plantation. Consider comments from Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo in an article by Lynn Arditi of the Providence Journal:
Gov. Gina Raimondo said Tuesday during a meeting at The Providence Journal that she “loses sleep” over the prospect of a hasty unrolling of the Affordable Care Act and its Medicaid payment system. “It could be devastating for us,” she said.
Such a change would mostly be “devastating” if it portends a new pattern in which the federal government stops paying state governments to provide services. That is increasingly the business model of Rhode Island’s true major industry, government.
The Beast needs customers for its services, and it needs a mechanism to make other people pay the bill. The federal government is critical in that transaction because it’s able to take money in so many ways and without people’s having a clear view of what it’s paying for or a straightforward way to decline the bill year after year.
There is something very wrong that the State of Rhode Island has to actually pay someone an eye-popping $6,400,000 per acre in order to get prime land in the capital city developed.
Obviously, I agree with the thrust of the ACLU’s lawsuit against the state of Rhode Island over its poorly conceived and implemented Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP). You don’t get much more anti-UHIP than me.
However, in the interest of asking questions nobody else is asking in order to keep us always thinking, I can’t help but wonder: What is the purpose of this lawsuit?
The Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) announced Friday the details of a lawsuit it’s filed against the state over its new benefits eligibility system.
The class action lawsuit claims the state has failed to timely provide benefits to needy families due in part to its troubled transition to the Unified Health Infrastructure Project – otherwise known as UHIP.
Honest question: If the incentives of politics, pressure from the federal government, and basic human decency aren’t driving bureaucrats and elected officials from the State of Rhode Island to do everything they can to resolve these problems, why would the expense and distraction of a lawsuit from the ACLU make the difference? If the ACLU is simply piling on, the organization would arguably be making the problem worse.
Yes, it’s arguably unfair to react to the phrase I’ve italicized in the following quotation from a recent article by Christine Dunn in the Providence Journal without the context of a longer, more subtle conversation, but it did jump out at me:
More than 13,000 people applied for housing vouchers in less than a week in November, when Rhode Island Housing and the Providence Housing Authority jointly opened their waiting lists, the Rhode Island Housing Board of Commissioners was told Thursday morning.
The online application process was a success, and most people were able to apply on their mobile telephones.
It’s a truism of the welfare state that, no matter what the government is technically subsidizing, taxpayers are actually subsidizing the least-necessary goods and services the recipient purchases.
Of course, used properly, smartphones and the related data plans can be valuable tools helping people to advance in their lives. Absent some structural incentive, though — or even just a little bit of stigma to being on the public dole — the public must wonder whether we’re subsidizing technology mainly for entertainment and so that beneficiaries can better access more public benefits.
Treating welfare recipients as consumers of packages of public products leads to the government plantation.
Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse often refers to the value of “a paycheck, not a welfare check.” Rich Lowry suggests President-elect Donald Trump is on the same page:
Trump hammered away at the true bottom line of the economy for most people. Mike Konczal, a fellow with the liberal Roosevelt Institute, went back and listened to Trump stump speeches after the election to better understand how the mogul pulled off his upset. Konczal notes that Trump “never mentions poverty. And while he talks a lot about reducing taxes, he never talks about increasing transfers, redistribution, or access to core goods. He talks about wages, full stop.”
And that’s the key to Trump’s economics. If you squint just right, you can see a strategy. It is to increase growth through traditional Republican means (i.e., tax reform and deregulation) at the same time, he aims to directly create a tighter labor market through soaking up labor via an infrastructure program and reducing foreign competition by discouraging outsourcing and squeezing immigration.
Related principles applied to Rhode Island would focus on workers both by decreasing the incentive for them to enter into dependency on government programs and by increasing the resources and liberty at their disposal to expand their work and, if they choose, build their own businesses (that is, reducing taxes and regulations). Instead, the champions of the status quo in the Ocean State are striving to make more of us dependent on government (through, e.g., UHIP and continually expanding social welfare programs), to attract people to the state who will require government assistance (for the government plantation), and to give government-selected businesses an edge against their local competition by taxing others more to tax the favored companies less.
This is unambiguously the choice Rhode Islanders face, and it has to be made again and again. For example, infrastructure projects to “soak up labor” are sorely needed, both for jobs and for public safety, but the choice is whether to increase the tax/toll/debt burden or to redirect funds that currently foster dependency to help independent workers.
Well, this raises some questions (emphasis added):
[RI House Fiscal leader Sharon Reynolds] Ferland expressed concern about how the troubled rollout of the Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), the state’s new $364-million computer system for benefits programs, will impact the budget going forward. She said her office has been unable to obtain its usual monthly enrollment reports since just before the system launched in September.
So the human services folks are claiming to be catching people who are ineligible, but they don’t have a total count? Honestly, how does an improvedly digital system fail to provide reports? That’s kind of like the key function of digital systems.
One suspects they’ve got reports, but that there are so many cases processed manually (and perhaps with so many adjustments having to be made to the automatic data) that they’ve got to figure out some way to combine their various sources.
What a mess.
An AP story by Philip Marcelo, formerly of the Providence Journal, raises the familiar question of whether Western liberals or progressives understand the world well enough to lead us through it and to protect us from its dangers.
The article is about a “federally backed effort to stem the rise of homegrown extremists” in Massachusetts that is supposed to work by increasing funding for social-welfare-type services for targeted immigrant groups. Here are two of the three programs Marcello describes:
United Somali Youth, which operates out of New England’s largest mosque, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, was awarded $105,000 to help Somali, African and Middle Eastern youths build critical life skills through afterschool programs, counseling, college readiness assistance and other efforts.
Empower Peace, which was founded by a communications and marketing executive, was given $42,000 to teach high schoolers statewide how to develop social media campaigns promoting tolerance and combating bigotry so that they can produce them at their schools.
The blindness to circumstances is what shocks. “College readiness” will stop terrorism? One of the Boston Marathon bombers was a student at UMass Dartmouth.
Teaching media campaigns on “combating bigotry”? The Somalia-born Ohio State attacker appears to have been enrolled in a course on just such a subject. Here’s the syllabus. Indeed, the lessons taught may very well have been key to radicalizing the young terrorist, which means these programs, small as they are, may actually increase the chances of radicalizing American Muslims.
Of course, impeding education would be folly, but that some people — who are empowered to take Americans’ money through taxes and implement laws restricting our rights — see such things explicitly as anti-terror measures is worrying.
Pay attention to this tidbit from a Providence Journal article by Alisha Pina:
The majority, said Cindy Machado, chief human service policy and system specialist, were here because they want to know why their benefits were cut. Of the 97,000 receiving food assistance, 3,000 have been deemed ineligible or didn’t give the required paperwork in time to keep getting help.
Another 500 people on Thursday had their state health insurance cut for similar reasons. UHIP has a program that allows the state to check monthly if residents are still eligible for the insurance. Notices were sent to those in question, and time was given before benefits were ended. Officials had hoped that the program would save about $16 million this fiscal year, but delaying the launch by two months decreased the projected savings by $2.4 million.
Right now, it sounds like a money saver that 3,500 welfare beneficiaries were found to be ineligible, but we’re on an economic upswing, and all of the state’s welfare programs aren’t fully integrated, yet. When the upswing stops and, more importantly, when all government programs are linked for this month-to-month assessment, UHIP will become a way to maximize payments, not minimize them.
Through a creepily invasive “program” that keeps a monthly profile of all Rhode Island residents — at least those below some income threshold that we might call the “dependence line” — the plan is for the government to actively sign up new “clients” as they become eligible, sucking a maximum number of people into the system. Again, we’re all either potential produce or tax-money laborers for the government plantation.
Ted Nesi has changed his Saturday quick-hit column back to “Nesi’s Notes.” I wonder if one of the items on his list in today’s edition was the inspiration. Writing of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s proclaimed savings from Medicaid initiatives:
The governor’s office frequently touts roughly $70 million in state-level savings from her Medicaid initiatives in 2015-16. But most of that money didn’t come from changing how care is provided; $19 million was from lower payment rates to hospitals and nursing homes, $13 million was from higher taxes on hospitals, $9 million was from cuts to managed care, $7 million was from maximizing federal funding, and so on. There were plenty of other 2015-16 initiatives, some of which achieved their promised savings and some of which didn’t, but that’s where the big money was saved.
As I noted last February, Raimondo’s “Reinventing Medicaid” seems to have a clear news-coverage advantage over the reforms championed by Republican Governor Don Carcieri (with help from the Bush administration), to which it bears a marked similarity. The main difference was on emphasis, with the Republican looking for accountability from consumers while the Democrat has turned more to increasing revenue and shifting costs to private insurance, where the government is less likely to take any heat.
Or maybe the difference in how the program is treated isn’t so much a partisan thing as simply a better name…
So as you probably know, Rhode Island’s new computer system (UHIP) for qualifying applicants and disbursing social program benefits is a mess. The problems have been well publicized to the point of infamy: a backlog of applications; benefit payments delayed; nursing homes (who have no easy way to stop their expenses) wracking up serious amounts of uncompensated care; even a security “glitch” that could have exposed the personal information of 200-1,000 customers.
It has gotten to the point that the feds were compelled to step in again – this time, breathing fire.
The agency continued to warn that the DHS could soon lose federal funding for administrative costs because of the system’s “failure to meet FNS statutory and regulatory requirements.”
And a Rhode Island House committee held its second hearing into the matter on Monday.
The question is, who is responsible for all of this? Was this a failure by the vendor setting up the new system, Deloitte Consulting? Or did the Raimondo administration force a transition to the new system from the old too quickly? (This, in fact, was a blunt warning by the feds to the Raimondo administration in early September.) If so, why?
In order to shed some light on the matter, the Providence Journal’s ace reporter Kathy Gregg sent the Raimondo administration an APRA request on September 7 for
all correspondence between the state and the company that designed it: Deloitte Consulting.
We pause here to go back, review and note that the subject of Gregg’s request was “correspondence”.
Gregg reports in yesterday’s Providence Journal that six weeks later – on the night before Thanksgiving, to be precise – the Raimondo administration gave her a thumb drive that purported to respond to the request. It contained only reports from Deloitte – and those only through September 6. Critically, the thumb drive contained no correspondence whatsoever between the Raimondo administration and Deloitte.
To reiterate: Gregg asked for correspondence. What she got was reports. (In the same way, Gregg might ask a Raimondo-operated fruit stand for a bag of oranges and receive, instead, a small bag of turnips.)
This non-responsive response by the Raimondo administration would appear to conform to neither the letter nor the spirit of Rhode Island’s APRA law. Nor is it the action of a Governor who, in an interview with Rhode Island Public Radio thirteen months ago, claimed to be “deeply committed to transparency”.
I asked the CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity (full disclosure: I work with the Center), Mike Stenhouse, if he had a reaction to this. He responded,
A curious, honest, and relentless free-press is vital to preserving democracy in our free society and in holding elected officials accountable to the people. In this case, the administration’s pitiful non-response certainly makes it appear as if they have something to hide.
When a reporter like Kathy Gregg asks questions, she isn’t just asking for herself and her newspaper, she makes the request on behalf of all Rhode Islanders. Something went wrong with the launch of a major new state computer system – a system, remember, that has come in at over triple the originally budgeted cost. We are all minimally owed answers about the why and how of all of this. It is time to move from the dodgy non-responses to the straight answers and transparency to which the Governor herself has indicated that she is “deeply committed”.
Having lured another 117,000 people into Medicaid, the state government of Rhode Island is going to plug them into an experiment that the progressive faction can use as “ammunition” in its political fight.
Without the motivation of the government plantation, Americans would find their comfort point and compromise on immigration.
Did you have empty chairs at your Thanksgiving dinner table? We all know people who have left Rhode Island for greener economic pastures. The Ocean State’s poor business climate is forcing our people out. For too long, there has only been one voice in the policy discussion in Rhode Island. What if Rhode Island’s political leaders were to realize that policies that focus only on the material needs of individuals were actually harming our state’s families? It is time for Rhode Island to adopt the family friendly policy reforms that can transform our state into a place where people can achieve their hopes and dreams.
We need to empower families, businesses, and all of the people of the Ocean State to make the calls, instead of a small group of insiders. Our state ranks 48th on both the Family Prosperity Index of the American Conservative Union, and the Jobs & Opportunity Index created by our Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity. We have virtually no population growth, and have suffered the embarrassment of many other near-bottom rankings. Despite all this, our Rhode Island political class appears happy not to make the significant changes that are needed to turn our state around.
The Ocean State needs to dare to disrupt the status quo and boldly evolve itself into a regional outlier so that we can become a magnet – on our own – for businesses, jobs, and families. Will the elitists in Rhode Island learn the biggest lesson of the election? It is time to remember forgotten families. Both President-elect Donald Trump, and Sen. Bernie Sanders have said for a very long time that the system is rigged against regular people. While other states are decisively moved in a new direction, Rhode Island is doubling down on a failed agenda.
Rhode Islanders have had enough of the insider machine. It is time to make a complete turnaround. We must adopt the family friendly reforms that can make our state a place where our families can be prosperous. You are powerful. You do not have to tolerate the cronyism and elitist attitude any longer. Don’t be on the sidelines. The rigged system in the Ocean State has kept too many people out of the process. Now is the time for you to speak out and demand that the status quo changes.
The explanation for Brexit and Trump is not reactionary, in the sense of wanting to turn back the clock, but rather a reaction to the harm of self-serving progressive narratives.
Will the political class in Rhode Island learn the lesson of the election? It is time to remember forgotten families. As President -elect Donald Trump, and Sen. Bernie Sanders have been claiming for a long time, the system is rigged. While other states are decisively moving forward, Rhode Island is falling in the wrong direction. The Ocean State needs to dare to disrupt the status quo and boldly evolve itself into a regional outlier so that we can become a magnet – on our own – for businesses, jobs and families.
The biggest election impact in the Ocean State is status quo politicians may no longer have their government-centric schemes funded by the federal government! We want a government that works for all of us, not just the chosen few. We understand that if the Ocean State is to become a better home destination, we must offer a better life for American families by creating an environment that will organically produce more and better businesses so as to create more and better jobs.
Rhode Island has the worst business climate in the nation. It ranks 48th on both the Family Prosperity Index of the American Conservative Union and the Jobs and Opportunity Index of our Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity. It has virtually zero population growth, and it has suffered the ignominy of dozens of other near-bottom rankings. Despite all this, our Rhode Island political class appears content not to rock the boat. We need to empower entrepreneurs, families and all of the people of Rhode Island to make the decisions for our state.
Unless we want our home state to continue with failed rankings, we must switch tracks and focus on policies that broadly help families and small businesses. Haven’t you had enough? Rhode Island has been crippled by a rigged system for far too long. Big spending, high taxes, and insider handouts have led us to where we are now. Unfortunately, in far too many cases, there are empty chairs at our holiday dinner tables. We all know people forced to leave Rhode Island. Your voice is powerful. Continue to speak out and the wave of change will come to the Ocean State.
[The Gaspee Business Network just issued the following statement/exhortation.]
We are incredibly sad to announce that amid the long standing depressed job market in Rhode Island as well as the worst business climate in the nation, hundreds of moms and dads, struggling young adults, and professionals were laid off today at the CVS corporate office in Woonsocket. The members of the GBN family wish to extend our deepest condolences to those who must now find some means of making ends meet right before the holidays amid one of the worst economies in the country.
The people to blame for these layoffs are the politicians that have run Rhode Island into the ground for decades.
Nothing will change until each and every career politician is removed from office on Smith Hill.
These government bureaucrats have made the cost to employ the hard working men and women in Rhode Island so expensive, companies have no choice but to outsource their labor to other countries.
UHIP waiting lines illustrate state government’s harvesting of human beings and prove how low the minimum wage really is in a system of government dependency (even as elites throw awards at an unpopular governor).
The Rhode Island Democrat Party and other left-wingers have been trying to make a big deal out of the fact that conservatives aren’t entirely sitting on their hands during this election cycle:
On Thursday, former Democratic party chairman William Lynch, now senior adviser, issued a news release calling on voters to “reject special interest money” from “outside right-wing organizations” trying to influence the election.
He pointed to $90,294 in combined independent expenditures from the Roosevelt Society, led by former Republican Providence mayoral candidate Daniel Harrop, and the Gaspee Project, founded by activist Mike Stenhouse, and suggested they were being secretly funded by the trucking industry.
That’s two organizations spending on a range of candidates and issues. A GoLocalProv article out today actually puts the groups’ combined spending at $60,850, but either way, the idea that this represents some invasion of voter sanctity by self-interested parties is absurd. Just look through the bigger spenders on GoLocal’s list:
Anybody who’s concerned about the use of government to take away people’s property and rights should be much more concerned about money for debt and left-wing policies. Voters should also be concerned about a party and ideology that tries to make it seem scandalous that those who disagree with them have the audacity to participate in the political process. They’d rather be able to take your property and your rights without any opposition.
Rhode Islanders should take a closer look at the organizations pushing for $80,000,000 in affordable housing debt, to learn how well-paid advocates harvest the needs of the poor and force-sell it to taxpayers.