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Basketball relies on superstars and soccer on a solid team; RI’s progressive establishment likes the basketball approach, but the economy functions more like soccer.
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.
Via Gary Sasse’s Twitter stream comes a post from the left-wing Brookings Institution suggesting that the evidence is mounting that universal pre-K may not only do no measurable good, but might actually do harm:
By the end of kindergarten, the achievement test boost for treatment group children in the consenting subsample [who had been in a government pre-K program] had disappeared. By the end of first grade, teachers rated the same children’s work skills and preparation as weaker than the control group; the effects reversed. By the end of second and third grade, control group children did better on academic tests than treatment group children.
As always, the question is why. In this case, the study’s authors, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Ron Haskins, speculate that pre-K might make kids just too darn prepared for school, so they get bored or otherwise distracted when mixed with children who aren’t as well prepared. In June, another study put forward the alternative speculation that the organized pre-K is actually worse for a significant portion of students than the alternative care that they would have received from parents, grandparents, or some other care provider who’s in it for the relationship.
Maybe the answer is some blend of the two. It wouldn’t exactly be surprising if the best education for children at very early ages is extensive interaction with people who love them and mildly guided free play, which then becomes gradually more focused on learning as they progress through kindergarten and elementary school. The pre-K kids might do better early on in kindergarten because they’re already trained in the basic classroom techniques that kindergarten teaches, but once the non-pre-K kids pick up those simple skills, their own developmental advantages begin to make the difference. Or maybe it has more to do with parents, who’ve begun the natural emotional separation earlier.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, perhaps we should consider the possibility that this is an area too individual and personal to families for government to be meddling. Of course, that would put an end to public-sector labor unions’ push for more government-mandated members.
Does anyone trust that an elite cabal of political cronies should centrally engineer our economy? Or do we place more trust in the great people of Rhode Island to be able to unleash their suppressed capacity in a fair and free-market economy, via major tax and regulatory reductions across the board? The top down ideas being presented in the upcoming election would be harmful to our state. It is up to voters to decide for themselves if Rhode Island will be a place where our families can prosper.
There are many examples. We have proven in our Freedom Index that the status quo is moving our state in the wrong direction. Led by Rep. Patricia Morgan and Sen. Elaine Morgan, only 11 of 113 lawmakers earned positive scores on our 2016 Freedom Index. The Sheeple Index, released in partnership with WatchdogRI, shows that there is a dangerous pattern of lawmakers blindly following the leader.
The specific controversies of a particular corporate welfare applicant are of little significance compared with the disturbing details about the Commerce RI process revealed in a GoLocal article, today:
GoLocalProv.com has learned from multiple sources that Rhode Island Commerce Corporation board members — and Board Chair, Governor Gina Raimondo — were not fully briefed on the past track record of California developer Lance Robbins, when they were asked to vote on $3.6 million in tax credits at the Board meeting on September 26.
In fact, only two documents [] were handed out to the Board prior to the vote, according to Commerce — a GoLocalProv.com article, and what was presented as an “internal review” — which proved to be from the grant recipient, Urban Smart Growth. …
GoLocal has received confirmation that besides the initial article by GoLocal about the House race and the memo from the member of Gazdacko’s team, no independent review was conducted by Early or his team.
Early is Darin Early, the $170,000 president and COO of the quasi-governmental Commerce Corporation. The article does not list the names or salaries of his “team,” but its total cost is surely much greater. Note, too, that Early “oversaw the selection of the vendors for the failed RI tourism campaign.”
The clear and predictable lesson, here, is that when bureaucrats are handing out massive amounts of other people’s money in an environment of limited accountability (i.e., the state government of Rhode Island), due diligence is apt to consist of not much more than a quick Google search and a phone call, maybe with a conversation over lunch. Moreover, an organization called “Urban Smart Growth” is like a taste morsel to serve up on a list of grant recipients for the sorts of people whom Commerce RI functionaries are seeking to please, perhaps worth a relatively small portion of a massive program on that basis alone.
This is not the way to pull our state out of its death spiral. We need huge reforms in taxation and regulation that leave people more free to invest their own money, willing to take the risks associated with such investments, and able to devote their own energy to economic development. Otherwise, we’re just spinning wheels and wasting money while politicians and bureaucrats hope for economic winds to blow some chance improvement our way for which they can take credit.
For example, the $80 million that the state is spending on Commerce RI every year is actually 60% larger than the $50 million that the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity estimated it would wind up costing the state to reduce the sales tax to 3%. Such a reform would produce real and lasting economic development, as compared with the Raimondo, Commerce RI, Brookings, RI Foundation approach of picking winners and giving out money. Even if the latter produces some benefit, it’ll be only empty calories that leave us all less nourished in the long run.
Not to be harsh, but how would Rhode Island Kids Count’s pitch for more money for public pre-K programs be any different if it were nothing more than a front organization for teachers unions?
“We know that investments in high-quality early learning are among the best investments you can make,” said Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of Rhode Island Kids Count, a state policy and advocacy group committed to children’s well-being. “The question is one of scale. In the past, we have had to patch together a system of programs that don’t serve all of our kids, especially those from low-income communities.”
No, Ms. Burke Bryant “we” don’t “know” that. Brookings has found that simply giving families money has better effects for their children than putting that money toward early childhood programs. Meanwhile, Heritage has found that government pre-K and preschool programs have no effect on academic results and may, in fact, harm children academically and behaviorally.
Both results can be explained, in part, by the possibility that subsidized early childhood programs do more harm by drawing children away from healthier arrangements with their families or other close-knit groups than they help by placing children from unhealthy environments under the protective wings of government and its helpers. One could ask for no better evidence of the soulless flaws in the government-centric mentality than the metrics and solutions Kids Count deploys for its argument:
Research has shown that the first five years of a child’s life are crucial to his or her success. And yet Rhode Island spends much less on early childhood — $9,641 per child in a state-sponsored pre-K class compared to $20,000 per child in a K-12 class. …
Kids Count, in its report, offers several recommendations to improve both access to early-childhood classes and the quality of those classes:
Pay teachers in Rhode Island’s pre-k programs more money. Pre-K teachers, all of whom are state-certified, earn an average of $43,458 in community childcare settings compared to the average elementary school teacher, who makes $66,000. Sixty percent of family childcare workers earn $30,000 or less a year.
Put aside the obvious response that public school teachers in general are overpaid and consider the mindless devotion to giving a special interest group more money. There is no discussion of what pre-K programs would use the money for if they had twice as much. There is no comparison of the tasks involved in such programs or the training necessary to conduct them. What concerns RI Kids Count is that the government isn’t taking twice as much taxpayer money to pour into a school environment of questionable value.
But that’s how it works when we allow government to become the state’s key industry and the locus of all of its economic development plans.
Three Brown faculty members traffic in questionable statistics in an apparent push to end the deadly scourge of days that are “merely warm.”
There must be space for reciprocal altruism, which means government must do less.
A headline that just hit the Providence Journal Web site may (unwittingly) capture with perfection the progressive, Brookings, CommerceRI, Gina Raimondo approach to economic development:
Makers of “The Polka King” paid $3,000 to use R.I. State House
You have to read the article to find out who paid whom, because while one would expect a for-profit enterprise to pay for the use of some public resource, under the progressive, Brookings, CommerceRI, Gina Raimondo approach to economic development, the public very often pays for-profit enterprises to do something that makes it look like the government is actually fostering a healthy economy.
Relationships between Washington think tanks (including RI government favorite, the Brookings Institution), corporations, and government leave two paths to resolve corruption, one of which will make it worse.
The Providence Journal headline proclaims the positive news that “R.I. ranks high in advanced industries job growth,” and it’s only a matter of time before Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo declares that her failing, big-spending, government-picks-the-winners strategy for moving the state’s economy “faux-wood” is working. Even granting the entirety of the Brookings Institution’s methodology and the importance of these so-called “advanced industries,”some perspective on Rhode Island’s results is important.
The key is that this ranking is for growth, not relative size:
When comparing states, the researchers found Rhode Island ranked 17th in the nation for its rate of job growth in its advanced industries — better than all other New England states and the national rate of 2.46 percent. The Ocean State’s annual average growth rate for 2013-2015 was 2.7 percent, on a compounded basis, up from 0.7 percent for 2010-2013, based on Brookings’ analysis of Moody’s Analytics data.
To be precise, based on Brookings’s numbers, Rhode Islands compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the two years (using 2013 as the baseline) was 2.70%, which is all of 0.24 percentage points above the national average. One factor that has to be considered is that Rhode Island’s baseline was relatively low, with 38,008 such jobs in 2013. Massachusetts, for comparison, had 386,837 (or 10 times) more.
Thus, Massachusetts added 18,560 and came in below the national average percentage increase, at 2.4%, while Rhode Island’s 2,083 is cast as a “high” rate of growth. Just 190 fewer jobs (1,893 total), and Rhode Island would have been at the national average.
That brings up the fact that Rhode Island lags the average in the percentage of these jobs in its economy. Brookings says 8.1% of all RI jobs count in this category, which is 27th in the nation. Massachusetts’s share is 11.5%, or 4th in the nation.
So, while increasing numbers of jobs in any area (particularly one with relatively high pay) is a good thing, proper context is important. The Projo’s positive story requires us to talk about the growth rate of a narrow collection of jobs determined by an organization with which the state has been working as a consultant, and the absolute size of the good news amounted to fewer than 100 jobs per year for two years — low enough that massive amounts of new government spending to subsidize specially targeted industries (that Brookings recommended) could have had an overly significant effect.
Whether that’s unadulterated good news or an example of gaming the system, I leave to readers to decide for themselves.
Grover Whitehurst of Brookings has made an attempt to compare research findings concerning the effects of different programs on the test scores of young students, and the findings conflict with the progressive preference for increasingly moving responsibility away from people and toward government:
Whitehurst suggests:
The results illustrated in the graph suggest that family support in the form of putting more money in the pockets of low-income parents produces substantially larger gains in children’s school achievement per dollar of expenditure than a year of preschool, participation in Head Start, or class size reduction in the early grades. The finding that family financial support enhances academic achievement in the form of test scores is consistent with other research on the impact of the EITC showing impacts on later outcomes such as college enrollment.
The most important takeaway from this is that it reinforces conservatives’ contention that government should not seek to displace parents, relieving them of responsibility for raising their children. Government policy should seek to strengthen families.
Of course, the fact that this would tend to reduce the influence of government and (therefore) progressives leads me to expect Whitehurst’s research not to have a significant effect on progressive policies. Indeed, in his subsequent discussion, Whitehurst endeavors to speculate that imposing restrictions on families’ use of the funding would be even more effective than simply improving their financial standing. However, if giving parents money is so much more effective than public funding of pre-school programs, one might question Whitehurst’s belief that letting the public funding stop in the parents’ accounts for a moment would be better than both approaches.
Note, too, the limits of Whitehurst’s consideration. The first and irreducible assumption is that government must do something to bring about specific social outcomes. If supporting families through broad welfare that is largely free of strings is so much more effective than building government programs, one might expect even greater rewards from getting government out of the way of families. Let people act in the economy without the weight of high taxes and oppressive regulations; allow communities and states to determine their own economic and social policies; allow the society, broadly, to follow cultural traditions that have proven, over time, to be the healthiest for human society (such as the traditional institution of marriage).
Unfortunately, it’s much more difficult to test for and make charts of the effects of progressive redistribution on the whole society. Researchers can’t know (to simplify) that taking EITC money out of the economy wound up hurting other families, resulting in worse test scores. Still, taking in all of the evidence, the weight of it suggests that leaving people free is not only the most moral approach, respecting civil rights, but is also likely to prove to be the most effective system by any standard apart from the wealth and power of government.
Should Rhode Islanders silently accept the corrupt political climate that has failed so many of us? Or should we, as free citizens in our uniquely American democracy, be encouraged to freely speak-out and engage in a battle of ideas so as to help make our state a safer and more prosperous place to live, to raise a family, and to build a career?
It is the Center’s primary mission to stimulate such rigorous public debate about important policy issues. However, the most powerful and wealthy nonprofit organization in our state is asking you to shut up.
As part of its own 100th year celebration, the Rhode Island Foundation this week published and promoted a video, which, in essence, encourages people to remain silent and to accept that the political elite know best about what’s in your and my best interests.
In what initially seems to be a video for kids, it is shameful that the Foundation hides its adult message behind children. With the frequent backdrop of our State House, it is obvious that the video is intended to be political. Under the pretense of “be nice or be quiet”, the Foundation is clear in its message that is directed to all of us – that we should just “stop complaining”.
Stop complaining about Rhode Island’s 48th place ranking on the national Family Prosperity Index?
Stop complaining that so many of our neighbors cannot find or have given up looking for meaningful work?
Stop complaining about the political corruption that continues to embarrass our state?
Stop complaining about the lack of bold and decisive action to do anything significant about it?
I don’t think so.
It is also despicable that the Foundation forces these children to read text that has to be bleeped.
Happy Independence Day from everyone at the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity! As we celebrate the Fourth with our family and friends, it is important to reflect the principles that led to the American revolution. On this anniversary of the original Brexit, we must remember that “US-Away” happened because free people stood up to an imperial power and demand that their rights be respected. In our own time, people are standing up against the elites here in Rhode Island that want to micromanage our lives.
We should all be proud of our fellow citizens working to advance freedom here in the Ocean State. The recent opposition to the Brookings agenda is a good example. Because Rhode Islanders spoke out against RhodeMap RI and central planning, many of the crony corporate welfare deals were squashed before they could begin. The stadium deal and the superman building are two more examples of stopping corporate welfare in Rhode Island. There are reasons to hope. However, we must remain vigilant and continue to speak out. The political elites will continue to try to give special deals to their cronies.
When will the insiders learn? We are warning the status quo against seeking to devolve Rhode Island into a dependent appendage to the Boston economy, or to some other form of regional governance. The citizens of our state demand local control. Centralized plans are not the answer for the Ocean State. We urge lawmakers to reject the concept of a centrally controlled, regional bureaucracy that will infringe on the authority of locally elected officials. Rhode Islanders do not want intrusions into their own lives.
There are better solutions than the central planning of economies and the loss of local control. It is time to end the insider culture where the little guy suffers. As we saw in the recent Brexit vote, citizens are demanding more from their leaders. How many of us would say that the status quo public policy culture in Rhode Island is making anything easier on the average family? For too long, the political elites have thought they’ve known how to better run your life than you do. I encourage you to speak out against the status quo and remember that things can change here in the Ocean State.
And once again, Happy Fourth of July.
[Mike Stenhouse is CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity.]
One thing conspicuously missing from Kate Bramson’s article today, titled, “GrowSmartRI summit: Speakers share revitalization success stories,” is any statistical evidence that the stories are, indeed, about successes. Oh, sure, when government agents and activists push hard enough, they manage to fund projects and (eventually) bring them to completion, but when most people hear the phrase “revitalization success stories,” they are likely to expect that the areas were revitalized. The fact that three “relatively new” restaurants open their doors each night in Attleboro doesn’t tell us much.
This lack of substantial evidence relates to another giant omission in the article — namely, further explanation of this disturbing opening:
Patterns emerged Tuesday as government leaders from three smaller, northeastern cities shared success stories about their revitalization efforts.
Longevity — of elected leaders and employees working for them — was one of several themes that arose before an audience of about 200 business and civic leaders at a summit hosted by the nonprofit GrowSmartRI.
So, “revitalization” requires that voters elect the same officials repeatedly and that the bureaucrats keep their jobs, too? Well, how convenient.
It’s also obvious. The entire motivating philosophy of GrowSmartRI, the Brookings Institution, the RI Foundation, the Raimondo administration, and the broader society of progressive elites is that one of government’s central functions (probably the central function) is to plan out the future and enforce that plan so the grimy masses aren’t really free to shape their communities.
When your organizational motivation is to tell other people what to do and how to live, you can’t really abide such disruptive things as individual freedom or the inevitable change inherent in representative democracy. The goal is to take the permanence that we used to apply very narrowly in a Constitution and Bill of Rights and apply it expansively to minute details of how all we should live.
My main beef with the proposed Pawtucket train station is that it is completely absurd to spend north of $40M to accommodate only eighty nine (89) net new riders.
But in its weekly look at Best and Worst Bills of 2016, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity (disclosure: I am their Communications Manager) raises another unfortunate aspect of the proposed station. They point out that it offers a disturbing insight into the economic development philosophy of state officials who are pushing for the station, which is that it
… perpetuates a submissive philosophy that the State of Rhode Island should be considered a suburb of Boston and should rely on the Massachusetts capital’s economy to achieve growth. The Center strongly disagrees and for years has advocated that broad-based reforms can transform the Ocean State into a vibrant and independent economy of its own that will benefit all families and businesses, as opposed to the insider few industries targeted by the Brookings plan.
Whatever politicians may say, Rhode Island’s employment situation is stuck, which means losing ground against its Southern New England neighbors and the country as a whole.
Is it me, or does it seem as if Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo and her collection of well-paid communications and public relations personnel have been sticking with the “stay positive and move forward” line a bit too much? Whether the subject of controversy is tolls or a botched marketing campaign roll-out, it seems the line is, “We’re excited to be doing what our talking points say we’re doing, and we’re not going to hold back the state by responding to people with legitimate concerns now that we’ve won the political fight.” In this case, spokeswoman Marie Aberger put it this way:
The Governor is excited we are moving forward with a coordinated, statewide, marketing effort to get our state in the game, drive tourism, attract business, and grow our economy.
She then goes on to suggest that all of the attention the mess-ups have brought to Rhode Island is a “bright side.” After a year of having this face turned to it, the Rhode Island public would be justified in feeling as if the governor doesn’t quite subscribe to the “the people are the bosses” philosophy of representative democracy.
In fact, the public’s impression should go a bit farther. Addressing the marketing controversy with Dan Jaehnig, Raimondo’s response about the outright error of using Icelandic video in the Rhode Island advertisement was inadvertently telling:
Look, [the production firm] made a mistake. People make mistakes. We’re going to hold them accountable. It was a local firm.
As if it would be unreasonable to expect a local Rhode Island firm to do its job. That’s the sort of redirection of blame one would give to investment bigwigs outside of the state, who might be sympathetic that the governor had to use some small local businesses for political reasons, and that some sacrifice of quality was to be expected.
That’s not leadership. Leadership is not blaming the firm for failing to follow “explicit instructions.” Leadership would be stating that mistakes happen and acknowledging that the bigger responsibility falls on the managers within the governor’s administration who didn’t check that their “explicit instructions” were followed by requiring the production company to explain from where in the state each and every clip originated.
But that sort of leadership might draw even more attention to Raimondo’s out-of-state hires, and it’s beginning to appear that Rhode Island’s governor is more invested in the competence of the national and international elite that puts her on a top-50 world leaders list than the competence of the people of her state.
This perspective permeates not only her public relations approach, but also her attitude toward policy. The economic development vision of the Brookings Institution/RhodeMap central planners, for example, is for state, national, and international “experts” to design our communities for us and then push us toward careers that suit their peers in the private sector. It starts with them, their beliefs, and their visions, forcing us to fit as best we can rather than starting with our dreams and capabilities.
It was good to see the House Finance Committee demonstrate some healthy skepticism late last week towards the $20 million bond that the Governor wants to put on the ballot for a – cue one of her favorite buzz words – “Innovation Campus”.
And it was on display Thursday as lawmakers questioned administration officials about the initiative, which would use that $20 million as seed money for a winning team of companies and universities to build a research campus, or campuses, somewhere in the state.
It was irresponsible and bordered on dishonest that, in pointing to a state with a good economy, Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor mentioned the presence of an innovation campus but not the hospitality of its business climate.
In support of the Innovation Campus plan, Pryor came armed not only with the Brookings Institutions’ report that recommended it, but a list of places across the country where government, academic and corporate dollars had been used to build something. At the top of his list was Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research in South Carolina, which was built with assistance from BMW and a $40-million bond.
Both lawmakers and voters should say “no” to this bond proposal. The very last thing that Rhode Island’s economy needs is yet another vague initiative inspired by a buzz word and funded by ever more borrowing on the taxpayers’ already maxed out credit card.
Today brings the General Assembly’s role in the faux process of implementing a Washington think tank’s questionable economic development plans to make Rhode Island great again.
A brief forward-looking story describing a positive vision for all Rhode Islanders.
Want to help the poor and foster income equality? Do the opposite of what progressive Democrats push through their policies.
Poll findings about trust in government at different levels and in different states might reveal a contradiction for progressives and a dark future for Rhode Islanders.
Things are getting surreal in Rhode Island. I have in mind, at this moment, a Providence Journal article about some kind of well-funded experiment in public transportation that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo plucked from the recent Brookings Institution report and lavished with $1.5 million:
“It is not extremely convenient to get from Boston to Providence by train,” [Rhode Island Commerce Corporation spokeswoman Melissa] Czerwein said by phone. “Something like this would help create more interchangeable connectivity between the [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] and Amtrak. The hope is you would be able to get back and forth more quickly and conveniently.”
Beyond that, travelers will have to wait and see.
Czerwein could not say whether the $1.5 million in the budget is seen as going toward discounts themselves or development of the app, or whether the discounts would be open to anyone traveling between the two cities or select businesses for which Commerce wants to provide an incentive.
They don’t know what the money will be used for. They don’t know who, exactly, it will target. They just know that when they take your money and use it as they want, good things happen.
Add this to the outrages under the Raimondo-Mattiello administration. This little piece of her plan take the equivalent of almost 50 times the annual per capita income of the state and might give it to some folks who work for a quasi-public agency to play around with developing an app that nobody investing their own time and money has thought it worthwhile to develop. Or they might use the money as a slush fund to give to preferred companies. (Cough, 38 Studios, cough.)
They want money with no real plan and, therefore, no means of accountability. They want to take money from all of us to give to high-paid semi-government employees, perhaps to hand out to the high-income residents of a different state. How could anybody, Left or Right, support this kind of behavior?
Honestly, we’re still the better part of a year away, but the upcoming election is beginning to have the feel of a last chance… a really, truly, I-mean-it-this-time last chance. If Rhode Islanders don’t wake up enough at least to send a message and rattle the State House’s cage a little bit in November, we’re done.
One really has to go out of one’s way not to see evidence that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo and the rest of Rhode Island’s political establishment is not interested in coming to correct answers so much as saying anything to get their insider deals over the (ostensibly) legal finish line. In today’s Providence Journal, Steven Frias notes that Raimondo’s friends at the Brookings Institution proclaim that “Massachusetts and New Hampshire show the way forward,” but gloss over the degree to which cutting taxes made a difference:
In 1979, the Massachusetts High Technology Council (MHTC), a trade association of high-tech companies, declared that the “single most important step to stimulate the growth of the high technology industry in Massachusetts is real tax relief.” MHTC explained that the “higher cost of living and doing business in Massachusetts can no longer be offset by the proximity of MIT or Boston’s active venture capital market, or the cultural and environmental amenities.” Instead, MHTC insisted “Massachusetts must reduce the tax burden,” particularly for property taxes and income taxes.
MHTC and Citizens for Limited Taxation, an anti-tax grass roots organization led by Barbara Anderson, joined forces to support a voter initiative known as Proposition 2½. Proposition 2½ was designed to reduce property taxes and limit future property tax increases to 2.5 percent per year. To control spending, Proposition 2½ also repealed state laws that gave school committees fiscal autonomy and mandated binding arbitration for police and firefighter unions.
In passing, we should observe that Frias has hit on another of Rhode Island’s problems. Whether because of the state’s size or its long history of corruption, the “business backed” groups that should offer a counterweight to state government as the MHTC did in Massachusetts — think chambers of commerce, business associations, and RIPEC — have simply been bought into the insider system. In RI, they are now almost completely controlled by people with high (often six-figure) salaries who are more worried about losing access to the political font than losing ground for their members.
More relevant to the governor’s budget, though, is the tax-limiting reform: “Proposition 2½ was designed to reduce property taxes and limit future property tax increases to 2.5 percent per year.” Raimondo is headed in the opposite direction.
As I noted last week, her Funding Formula Working Group suggested getting rid of the legal requirement that local taxpayers must pay at least as much toward education each year as they did the prior year, instead requiring them to increase taxes every year for inflation and/or for enrollment increases. (The report did not suggest that this ratchet should go in reverse in times of deflation or dropping enrollment.)
I didn’t see confirmation in the governor’s budget documents that this provision made it in, and the budget legislation isn’t available, yet, but Lynn Arditi has reported that it is, presumably as part of the governor’s effort to make the districts’ complaints about charter funding go away by throwing more money at them.
Bottom line: The Raimondo-Brookings plan is an attempt to work around the problems we all know are destroying the state.
UPDATE (2/3/16 7:58 p.m.):
Well, there it is on page 167. Local taxpayer funding of schools must go up by the greater of inflation or the increase in student enrollment. Municipalities can still calculate the increase per student (to account for decreased enrollment), but inflation must still be included. (Of course, this per-student approach is tricky, because it’s not clear what number counts. If the district projects an increase, for example, even after years of decreases, does that mean the budget must go with the district’s estimate? In RI, the safe bet is that the answer is “yes,” if the district challenges the number.)
Anyone who thought Rhode Island had reached its peak for governing in favor of special interests learned from Governor Gina Raimondo’s budget, released last night, that a whole new level exists. The overarching assumption is now that a few connected insiders in the state government, in nonprofit groups, from private companies and investment firms, and from Washington, D.C., think tanks and agencies can and should map a course for our shared future and spend our money to make us get in line.
“Nearly every item is directly targeted toward a particular narrow group of recipients,” said Justin Katz, research director for the Center. “It’s the kind of budget a chief executive puts forward when she doesn’t trust the people of her state to make their own decisions.”
In ways small and large, the vision of the budget is what one might expect to be crafted in the halls of the progressive Brookings Institution, with its recent report funded by private interests (mainly Raimondo donors), and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which got its hooks into the Ocean State through the RhodeMap RI plan.
Governor Raimondo’s approach to economic development is to force a lower-skilled, lower-income population to subsidize jobs for higher-skilled, higher-income people from other states.
This paragraph from Ted Nesi’s weekend column, Saturday, deserves reading and clipping for future reference:
Tapping unusual funding sources to pay for public initiatives has become a hallmark of Gina Raimondo’s political career since she took office five years ago, and this was the week it backfired on her rather spectacularly. Raimondo has always had an easy time harnessing cash, as was widely noted as far back as 2010, when she set a blistering fundraising pace in a sleepy campaign for treasurer. Then in 2011 she courted controversy by encouraging anonymous donors – later revealed to include the hedge-fund billionaire John Arnold and his wife – to drum up support for her pension overhaul through EngageRI. Soon after she became governor, Brown created a new policy shop to advise her office, funded with nearly $3 million from Arnold. Then there was the Brookings study, commissioned by Raimondo to guide public policy but paid for by private donors (including Rhode Island native Mark Gallogly, whose old firm, Blackstone, just bought Wexford Science + Technology). And now there’s the contretemps over tapping the RIC and URI foundations to pay for, respectively, a chief innovation officer and a trip to Davos. In each case, Raimondo allies say she’s saving taxpayers money while doing things that are good for Rhode Island. But continuing to go the non-traditional route will also continue to raise questions about whether Raimondo’s methods skirt normal rules and accountability.
“Always had an easy time harnessing cash.” That’s something to watch in and out of government. In the ’80s, the design-the-world Greenhouse Compact failed when a required bond gave the people a vote, so now we get Raimondo funding her economic development schemes through a fancy debt refinancing deal and seeking to fund transportation infrastructure through a revenue bond based on tolls.
There was a time when even progressives and journalists were suspicious of the alchemy of creating money from air. Now, we get Rhode Island’s useless, navel-gazing, and corrupt Ethics Commission blithely noting that the chief innovation officer Raimondo hired through the private nonprofit Rhode Island College Foundation isn’t subject to its review because he doesn’t actually work for the state. Nesi hedges too much, because it’s absolutely clear that “Raimondo’s methods skirt normal rules and accountability.”
Remember, too, in this context, that certain legislators — notably Democrat House Whip John “Jay” Edwards and Republican House Minority Leader Brian Newberry — apparently believe the real threat to representative democracy in Rhode Island isn’t a governor who can bring a cauldron to a boil and produce a shadow government with private money, but regular Rhode Islanders who put down $100 over the course of a year to push back on the special interests that dominate local government.
At least when it comes to economic development, Rhode Island appears to be designing itself as a playground and laboratory for Ivy Leaguers.
The Brookings Institution study recommending steps to reinvigorate Rhode Island’s economy conspicuously leaves out suggestions about how to overcome state government’s addiction to spinning the people.