Interpretive Charts

Leave it to WPRI’s Ted Nesi to drop a siren chart in the ultra-busy last days of the session.  (Yes, “siren” can be an adjective.)

Click through to observe it for yourself, but what the chart purports to show are two lines — one for unemployment rate and one for employment-to-population rate — converging.  Here’s Ted’s conclusion:

That’s why it’s helpful to look at another measurement: the employment-population ratio, which measures how many Rhode Islanders have a job out of all the state’s residents ages 16 and up (unless they’re in the military or behind bars). And for the first time in years, Rhode Island’s employment-population ratio is looking up.

The improvement isn’t as speedy or significant as you’d hope to see in the wake of such a devastating recession, but the trend is clearly in the right direction. As this chart shows, the share of the Rhode Island population with a job has risen from a low of 58.9% in October 2011 to 60.1% last month.

I’ve stared at the chart for a little while, with eyes crossed and uncrossed.  Truth be told, since population is a relatively steady measurement on this scale, the employment ratio line is similar to the absolute employment charts that I produce every month.

The bottom line, for me, is that it takes some optimistic interpretation to see that line as improving.  It oscillates, as all graphical representations of human behavior will, but per Ted’s chart, it’s been pretty much between 59% and 60% for four full years.  Sure, during 2012, it was on an upward slope, but in the past six months or so, it’s pretty much stalled.  When Rhode Island’s employment unstalls, it may resume its agonizingly slow climb back toward where it was when it plummeted six years ago, but it may not.  Employment jumped in 2010, as well, but it fell back down.  As of May 2013, in other words, we just don’t know.

The larger context, though, is that these are ratios, with two variables each. Unemployment is the number of people who say they are unemployed over the number of people who are employed plus the number who are unemployed.  Employment-population is, obviously, the number of people who say they are employed over the state’s population.  Obviously, each of those lines can be affected by both variables included.

The unemployment rate has been falling not so much because the denominator (mostly employment) has been going up, but because the numerator (those bothering to look for work) has been going down.  That’s not a healthy trend.

The employment and population variables are much larger, so they aren’t as dramatic, but we should note that, from 2010 to 2012, Rhode Island was the only state in the country to lose population for two years in a row.  That’s not an indication of health or recovery, either.

User Fees and Being Used

By way of intellectual exercise, imagine if I had written, somewhere in the above section: “Of course, Ted’s analysis is probably more strategic than that; his job is to sell news, and shining Rhode Island’s economic apple makes the news more salable.”  What would that have told you about my opinion of Ted and my inclination to address his analyses as an intellectual, rather than political, challenge?

I continue not to understand why the writers on RI Future are invariably unable to address opposing ideas without inferring some ulterior motive or moral deficiency in the people expressing them.  I suspect it’s partly political, as an ad hominem invalidation of speakers, rather than logical take-down of ideas, but I suspect it’s also partly laziness.  It’s easier, after all, to wave one’s hands and say, “Well, there’s some irrational reason behind the argument,” rather than to try to understand how a sincere person could connect what appear to be can’t-get-there-from-here notions.

At any rate, today it’s editor Bob Plain, himself, writing about the Sakonnet River Bridge toll controversy:

That’s why it’s absolutely delicious political irony that our leading libertarian pundit Justin Katz, who lives in Tiverton, would prefer taxpayers fund the infrastructure rather than users. While it smacks of socialism for me and austerity for thee, it’s probably more strategic than that: his job is to suggest ways to shrink the public sector, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as being a libertarian.

Never mind that I spent more than a decade writing about getting taxes under control and shrinking government as a hobby, before anybody thought it worth paying me to do so (on a full-time scale).

Human beings have emotions and biases, of course, but we have intellect as a check on them.  So, sure, on an emotional level I don’t want to pay a toll to cross the Sakonnet River Bridge up to eight times a day.  But does that self-interested emotional response accord or contradict my intellectual understanding of Rhode Island’s economy and public policy?  (The irony is that progressives understand very well that the emotional response somebody has from their unique perspective can often be the smoke that alerts one to a policy fire. When it comes to racial minorities, for example, self-interested emotions are taken to be pure signs of How Things Are.)

Yes, a system in which government is funded by fees for its services (like a business) would be preferable to the current system in which government collects a whole bunch of money, well, because it can, and then figures out how to spend it… sometimes on useful things.  But the word “system” is not just fluff.  If we want to transition from what we have now to something different, we have to analyze the best way to do it.

Who are the users?  They’re local people for whom the bridge is more of an overpass than a highway.  They’re commuters who work on one side of the bridge and live on the other.  And they’re tourists visiting some of the state’s most prominent (and profitable) attractions in and around Newport.  How will a toll affect each of those groups?  How will it affect other groups?  Obviously, if a toll will generate X dollars but result in a loss of 10X in sales tax revenue, it would be more intelligent to dedicate one-tenth of the locally generated sales tax to bridge maintenance.  (Or better yet, eliminate the sales tax so it’s worth paying more to get to those stores.)  If it will halve property values, then it would be preferable to find some way to shift the overall tax burden a little bit onto property taxes, instead.

Those are exaggerated estimates and solutions, but the point is that, when one is thinking about problems sincerely (rather than with a political intent), the facts on the ground matter.  And the facts on the ground make it more than clear that new tolls on a bridge in Rhode Island are not an indication of a newly libertarian political philosophy.

They’re a way to increase taxation now that systemic waste, fraud, and abuse are baked into the corrupt system of government in Rhode Island.  In this particular case, they’re a way to impose that new taxation on an area with relatively little political power that folks in the urban core (who don’t seem very familiar with their own state) think is filled with the well-to-do.

The more important point, however, may be that it’s awfully difficult not to conclude that this has been the plan all along.  That is, tolls were always intended, but the government systemically lied to the people of the area and just finished some elaborate political prestidigitation to try to give partisan loyalists cover so the only political response from the people of the East Bay would be impotent gasps of rage.