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Senator Whitehouse’s notion of expanding the application of RICO suits might point the weapon in the wrong direction.
Environmental regulation and “sustainable development” may not cause income inequality, but they sure do correlate well with it.
During the days following its release, reporters, analysts and observers worked to unpack the budget that Governor Raimondo sent to the General Assembly — and found some unpleasant items therein. Here is a bullet list of some of the bigger ones.
Proposed Statewide Property Tax
… aka, the Taylor Swift tax.
Justin got clarification from Governor Raimondo’s office that the INTENT is not to include apartment buildings as properties to be taxed. This conforms to Governor Raimondo’s attempt to sell this tax as having only a narrow list of targeted properties. (So, gosh, don’t worry about it. And, anyways, we only want to tax those icky rich people.)
Intent, however, is completely secondary. If this tax passes into law, the door will be opened wide for future – and current! – governors and General Assemblies to tax apartment buildings (of all classes and sizes); commercial buildings; second homes of less than one million dollars; PRIMARY homes of more than one million dollars; primary homes of $750,000 – $1,000,000; et empty state cetera. The critical issue is not that the initial list of targeted properties is short. It’s that the list comes to exist at all. To subject just one property classification to a new, statewide tax would set the precedent to subject virtually all real estate in Rhode Island to a statewide property tax via an easy tweak of the targeted property list.
In a perfect bit of timing, RIPEC released an analysis right before the governor released her budget of just how much Rhode Islanders are already taxed. By one measure, Rhode Island already has the fourth highest property taxes in the country. The governor is seriously proposing to raise that ranking? In fact, the one thing above all that our elected officials should not do is exacerbate this burden.
Further, there’s the matter of Rhode Island’s already undesirable reputation as a high tax state. On Twitter, Gary Sasse correctly asks,
When Tax Foundation.et. al.rank tax climate will new statewide property tax impact rankings w resulting reputation risks?
Further to “reputation risks”, WPRO’s Gene Valicenti pointed out Friday morning that the governor’s mere proposal has made the national news via the AP’s feed. This is exactly the kind of publicity that Rhode Island needs to avoid, not curry.
Governor Raimondo’s Proposed Statewide Property Tax Redefines Ownership of Real Estate as a Privilege
This one was a great catch by Justin.
The interesting part of PolitiFact RI’s review of an income-inequality statement by labor heavyweight George Nee isn’t that the reporters gave him a Mostly False (or couldn’t bring themselves to give him a full-on False), but the line that it draws for the 1% in Rhode Island (emphasis added):
Nee also directed us to a Jan. 26, 2015, report and data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute, another Washington, D.C.-based liberal economic think tank. It compared each state’s highest earners — the top 1 percent — with everyone else.
The institute reports in Table 2 that in 2012, the average income of Rhode Island’s top 1 percent was $966,071 . That’s less than the $1.3 million U.S. average. …
(That report, by the way, concludes that your income needs to be at least $314,647 in Rhode Island to be in the top 1 percent.)
One wonders what sort of people make up this group of roughly 10,000 Rhode Islanders. Investment types, successful business owners, lawyers, doctors, and so on, probably. According to the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s RIOpenGov payroll application, it also includes the University of Rhode Island’s basketball coach and university president. One surprising member of the 1%, apparently, is Neil Steinberg, the President of the Rhode Island Foundation.
Most folks think of the RI Foundation as a mainly charitable organization, but it’s also been investing in socialistic enterprises, like RhodeMap RI, and other political manipulations of the state’s economy. It’s odd to find that effort headed by somebody with (in the Economic Policy Institute’s words) “outsized” income.
It isn’t clear from the liberal think tank’s report whether it’s measuring household income or individual income. If it’s the former, of course, Rhode Island’s government and its satellites would account for many, many more members of the 1%. I mean, even some retired state workers have pensions that would suffice as half of a 1% income level.
Commenting on a recent post on this site, “Mangeek” expresses the socialist planners’ rationalization for undermining democracy:
Politicians generally prefer votes over growth, because votes are useful right away, whereas decisions to maximize growth often take longer to materialize; sometimes longer than an election cycle.
“How… do we suddenly get “good planning”?”
By insulating the planners from the voters and politicians, and recruiting/retaining good ones? I guess I’m a bit of a technocrat. If things like RhodeMap, Obamacare, and the EDC are properly done, they’ll have better outcomes than the hyperlocal model Justin seems to champion, because they’ll be backed by research and statistics instead of popular opinion and votes.
As I commented briefly in reply, just one more step in reasoning and a little more historical knowledge would bring this faith in government crashing down. Stalin, for example, was a master planner insulated from voters and politicians. How’d that work out?
Even if you think it’s too much of a leap from Rhode Island’s Kevin Flynn to Stalin, it raises the question: Once we’ve “insulated” the planners from public accountability, what do we do if we happen — by some horrible twist of bad luck — to have bad (even wicked, self-interested) planners in place?
The disconnect may be the incorrect sense that mere planning is a benign, passive, objective activity. That’s the substance of Mangeek’s subsequent reply, in which he supposes that only the state government has the resources to pay people to do the research, so planners should be insulated to do that, but local governments should be free to ignore the plans.
That misconception, too, would fall quickly upon scrutiny. First of all, local volunteers appointed to planning boards do plenty of research, and political opponents do more, between which the public must judge.
More importantly, what’s the point of insulated planners if their suggestions have to be ratified by the popular will anyway? No, if we’re going to create a technocratic class of planners, then it must be assumed that their “good plans” will be implemented. That’s why RhodeMap RI includes plans on how to get communities to adopt the plan.
As Glenn Reynolds summarizes, while posting an excerpt from an essay by Alicia Kurimska, “urban planning is about control.” As Kurimska argues, Soviet planning designed communities in a manner intended to force people to structure their lives as the planners wanted… with the values that the planners demanded.
Reynolds follows the excerpt with this: “The planners promise more than they can deliver, time after time. And someone else pays the price, time after time.”
We must stop accepting the pretensions of the planners simply because they claim to have expertise and good intentions.
The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development is very concerned about fairness, and its definition falls within Mike Stenhouse’s characterization of it.
Progressivism is a recipe for a new aristocracy, relying on distractions about racism and abstract bogeymen in order to herd us all into boxes.
At some point, reality doesn’t need anymore evidence, and anybody who doesn’t like it has to figure out what to do about it. One such reality (proven long ago, to my satisfaction) is that the Providence Journal is a newspaper written for the progressive Democrat audience. Yes, there’s a journalistic drive to present some form of opposing arguments, but that’s the paper’s target audience.
The objects of the reporters’ suspicion are not those who have the power to take away your money, restrict your freedoms, and even lock you up at gunpoint. Rather, the villains are those who argue on behalf of your freedoms.
To expect its reporters to cover issues of ideological concern as if conservatives might be right would be to expect PolitiFactRI to choose a Pants on Fire statement to check from among far-left U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s inflammatory screeds against people who are ostensibly his constituents.
PolitiFactRI is much more tuned to digging into statements such as one made by RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse on the Dan Yorke Show. Having followed the progression of RhodeMap RI for some years, with a substantial degree of related research, Stenhouse offered Yorke his “interpretation” and “belief” about the ideological position of the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Alerted that the PolitiFact kangaroo court was in session on his comment, he sent a long list of evidence that had helped to lead him to that interpretation and belief.
PolitiFact reporter Katie Mulvaney skimmed the evidence and contacted a few people who could be trusted to disagree with Stenhouse’s interpretation (professionals in the central planning industry), and PolitiFact presumed to rule his interpretation and belief false. That’s laughable by any non-partisan, non-ideological standard for public discourse. But the Providence Journal dominates the local news market, so there you go.
Or take Kate Bramson’s news story about the meeting at which the state Planning Council approved RhodeMap. She quotes Stenhouse as warning that RhodeMap eases the way for eminent domain takings of private property. Bramson’s follow-up sentence isn’t so much an addition of context as it is a debating point from somebody on the pro-government side: “The term ’eminent domain,’ in which governments may seize private property for broad economic purposes, appears nowhere in the plan.”
Well, sure. Neither does the term “freedom” or “property rights.” Bramson appears entirely ignorant of the foundation for Stenhouse’s understanding of RhodeMap, including the fact that his statement on eminent domain is absolutely true.
So how should we proceed? The problem, ultimately, is not that the Providence Journal is biased. It’s that there’s no alternative. Accepting reality, those who have been marked by the news department as the enemy should stop responding to the paper (and especially PolitiFact) as if it’s a neutral arbiter.
I’ve been running into barriers against transparency, lately.
When I requested its correspondence with ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber, HealthSource RI redacted significant paragraphs. The Town of Tiverton recently spent something like $30,000 on a report about problems in the fire department, and when I asked for a copy, I received one that redacted every word of the interviews the investigator conducted with past and present firefighters about “unfairness, favoritism, bias, hazing, and harassment.” (I’ve heard the rumors, and it sounds like the problems are at least a contributing factor in an overtime bill that might approach a half-million dollars, this year, possibly involving injuries due to hazing.)
And when I asked the Division of Planning for a breakdown of its payments to outside vendors, I heard back from Peter Dennehy, the Deputy Chief Legal Counsel in the Department of Administration, who runs defense for the administration on public-records requests, and he sent me just the totals:
In response to your request, Kevin Flynn informs me that the total amount of Partnership for Sustainable Communities grant fund expenditures by the recipient/vendor, as set forth in September 30, 2014 federal reporting period, amounted to $1,259,886.88.
For other RhodeMap RI related costs and for the period from July 1, 2012 through June 30, 2014, Kevin Flynn informs me that approximately $359,566 of non-Partnership for Sustainable Communities grant funds have been expended by the Statewide Planning Program.
When I pointed out that my request was for the individual vendor payments, he replied:
I don’t believe that we have such a record, particularly since there are multiple vendors and subcontractors.
To which, I asked, “Planning doesn’t know to whom they paid money from a federal grant?” After all, as you can see on RIOpenGov, the state keeps extensive records on vendor payments. Either the Planning vendors are in there, or the state is hiding something. I’m told that Flynn may or may not get back to me with further details.
All these barriers that I’ve encountered as I dig more deeply into progressive schemes and public-sector malfeasance may just be a coincidence, but it feels like a cloud is descending. Some people are hopeful that the incoming Raimondo administration will clear them away.
We’ll see.
The general disinterest of Rhode Island’s mainstream media in a wide variety of controversies never ceases to amaze. With the racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, we get multi-page spreads on racism in America, but the racial slurs that members of a government board spat at audience members at a recent RhodeMap RI meeting didn’t even make it into Kate Bramson’s related Providence Journal article. Jonathan Gruber, the MIT ObamaCare architect who has been caught on film multiple times rejoicing in the fleecing of Americans, and who did work for HealthSource RI that may have contributed to its unrealistic estimates of customers, has hardly been noticed by local journalists.
One of the many threads of thought that unwind from such observations is voiced here by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger:
A friend of mine wrote me this morning saying that he feared Republicans would not “put the genie back in the bottle.” Obama has now broken free from our political process. Republicans will feel unhindered, when they have executive power.
I don’t believe it. First, I don’t think Republicans in general want to abuse their power (though some do, for sure). They have a constitutional conscience, or a semblance of one. But second, the “culture” won’t let them. The media, the professors, the entertainment industry — they won’t allow anti-constitutionalism for conservative or right-wing ends. They will allow it only for “progressive” ends. If a conservative result threatens, they will be gung-ho for the process.
If nothing else, rapid juxtaposition of the media’s hostile treatment of the Bush administration with its coddling of the Obama administration has been instructive — almost in a way that would be too obvious for a novelist to get away with.
Actually, it brings to mind a cluster of chapters in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, The First Circle. Two pairs of political prisoners outside of Moscow are using their Sunday evening respite for conversation. In one pair, the peasant character Spiridon is telling his life story, in which his decisions always had him working with whoever happened to hold local power, because his real priority was his family. Asked for a guiding principle against this apparent relativism, he states, “wolf-hounds are right and cannibals are wrong.”
Meanwhile, one of the two other prisoners, having a more intellectual argument, accuses his opponent of having no intellectual consistency because the ends justify the means. Rubin, the accused (a devoted Marxist), insists that’s false “on the personal plane.” However, in the Soviet Union, “For the first time in the history of mankind we have an aim which is so sublime that we can really say that it justifies the means employed to attain it.”
One question for Rhode Island and America, I suppose, when judging its political class and the “culture” (in Nordlinger’s sense) is whether progressivism is a sublime aim or we’re the wolves to the progressives’ wolf-hounds.
Aaron Renn’s belief that “the Greenhouse Compact was right” shows the missing piece in progressive analysis, and in Rhode Island governance.
The future of the state Division of Planning’s RhodeMap RI scheme is suddenly in question. The state Planning Council may not meet on December 11 to review the plan. If it does, it may not approve the plan. And legislators may step in before or after that event to pull the statutory legs out from under it.
If RhodeMap does become an official plan of the State of Rhode Island, nobody is really sure how it will operate, or even what mechanisms the state will put in place to continue advancing it. One subsidiary question is what the state Division of Planning will do with the Social Equity Advisory Council (SEAC), which was tasked with defining and pushing the “diversity” piece of the plan.
According to the state’s three-year planning plan (yes, these weeds are very deep), the SEAC is generally intended to continue on in one form or another. The descriptive part of section V.B. of the three-year plan ends as follows:
The intent of this process is not only to guarantee that the RPSD [Regional Plan for Sustainable Development] accurately reflects the vision and needs of the state’s underserved and underrepresented populations, but also to produce relationships that will become the building blocks necessary for completing and implementing the RPSD. At the conclusion of the grant period, the SEAC will propose next steps for continuing their work, as it is imperative that these community leaders are committed not only to the completion of the RPSD but also to the successful implementation of the identified strategies.
A bullet point under “Products/Outcomes” calls for:
A guidance document for the State Planning Council on improving procedural and distributional equity in planning activities, including potential future engagement of SEAC.
Translated, this means that State Planning should soon have a document explaining how the SEAC can continue helping the council find ways to redistribute wealth in Rhode Island.
RhodeMap RI puts the Ocean State on a path to lost control and lost freedoms, but some legislators are moving to stop it.
A key question in the RhodeMap RI debate is whether The Plan is merely advisory or carries the force of law. The answer is both: It is implemented with only the civic protections necessary for “advice,” but the burden is shifted to citizens to prove that they don’t have to follow it.
RhodeMap RI gives social equity advocates easy access to federal mandates in order to thwart local control without regard to property values or residents’ concerns.
The last-minute candidacy of Moderate Moose Bob Healey gave Rhode Islanders an excuse not to take their gubernatorial votes seriously.
Mike Stenhouse responds to Lincoln Chafee’s opinion essay promoting the RhodeMap RI plan.
This story is worth reading as a small outcropping of a massive subterranean network:
Are tax dollars being channeled through the Environmental Protection Agency to Democratic activists working in the nonprofit sector?
A comprehensive new report released Wednesday by the Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee makes clear that the answer to that question is yes. The report is entitled “The chain of environmental command.”
It would be reasonable to expect that this sort of thing goes on throughout government. For another example, I’ve noted before how the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been funneling money to PolicyLink, a group whose previous work involved plotting to shift the United States to an economic system to the Left of European socialism. That money stream flows not just directly from the feds, but also via grants given to lower-tier governments (including for the RhodeMap RI initiative).
Throw in the actual activism of government agencies (such as the IRS targeting of conservatives) and the taxpayer money that flows through labor unions back into activists’ and Democrats’ coffers. It’s just another indication that government in the United States no longer serves the people as its primary mission in any meaningful sense.
Jason Becker poses some questions to Justin on tax policy, government services, and the migration of Rhode Islanders.
The opening chapters of Huxley’s Brave New World resonate uncomfortably with observations of the state of education and popular culture.