I’d like to believe that people can see right through obvious nonsense like Samuel Bell’s op-ed in today’s Providence Journal.  The reality probably is, however, that Rhode Island’s condition is not due to conservative policies, as he alleges, but by the susceptibility of Rhode Islanders to the sort of propaganda that he’s peddling.

I guess the best place to begin is with the fundamental delusion of Bell’s argument.  The topic is Rhode Island’s sorry economic condition, and he claims it’s a result of conservative policies.  The evidence that the General Assembly is conservative?  It’s not as pro-abortion and anti-Second-Amendment as the far-left progressives in the state would like.

Even if I take my thumb off the scale and allow the leftist euphemisms of “pro-choice” and “pro-gun-control” into the mix, and even if we let him get away with the assertion that not being a far-left radical is the same as being conservative, does anybody really believe that these two issues are to blame for Rhode Island’s failed economy and fleeing population?  Kinda makes you wonder whether Bell believes what he’s saying or just hopes gullible readers will.

Of course, he does mention taxes, but he layers in the sleight of hand so frequently that it’s difficult to believe he hasn’t slipped the card into his pocket.  I’ll have to take it point by point:

1. “[National] Democrats were firmly united against George Bush’s income tax cuts, which benefited the rich.”  Yes, tax cuts during the Bush years “benefited the rich,” but they benefited everybody.  A bullet list toward the bottom of this post from the Congressional Budget Office shows that, at the end of the Bush years, the top 20% of taxpayers (by income) paid 67.9% of federal taxes while the bottom 20% paid 0.3%.  When the disparity is that huge, it’s difficult for tax reforms not to benefit those with upper incomes more.  But if you scroll up to the line graph above the list, labeled “By Income Group,” you see that the average federal tax rate fell for all income groups during Bush’s terms.  In fact, based on the graph, the last “tax cut for the rich” that didn’t affect anybody else came during the Clinton years.
2. Having noted Democrats’ national opposition to Bush tax policy, Bell tries to make it seem as if Rhode Island Democrats moved in the other direction by simply switching from federal tax policy to state tax policy. “Yet a few years after Bush’s tax cuts, Rhode Island Democrats pushed through their own set of tax cuts that benefit the rich.”  The first thing to note is that the tax cuts that were enacted in the early part of the last decade were all halted or discontinued.  The capital gains tax phaseout disappeared.  The supposed “tax cut for the rich” in 2010 was actually a reversal of the alternative flat tax.  That is, it made taxes higher for upper-income households.  It was designed to be “revenue neutral,” but it wound up increasing income tax revenue.  Some tax cut!
3. Next, Bell asserts a negative result from his altered history of tax policy: “To pay for these tax cuts, Democratic lawmakers slashed the budgets of cities and towns, forcing them to compensate by cutting jobs and services and raising already high property taxes even higher.”  The reality is that personal income tax revenue grew steadily through 2008 (at a 2.33% compound annual growth rate [CAGR]).  It dropped the next year, but that was a result of the recession.  After the supposed “tax cut for the rich” in 2010, the CAGR jumped to 6.53% (roughly three times inflation) through 2013.  If we look at GDP growth, I’d argue that Rhode Island’s tax reforms were actually working and ending them proved to be a terrible mistake.  Going in the other direction, as Bell and his fellow progressives would like to do, would be devastating.

As for the idea that the General Assembly is conservative, at least one academic study has found that, while state-level Democrats aren’t as far left as the Democrats in Congress, the entire General Assembly is left of center.

If that’s a divergence from the people of Rhode Island, it’s not to the political right.  Rather, it’s evidence that state legislators are too far left.  In a poll that the Friedman Foundation conducted in cooperation with the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity last summer, only 21% of respondents identified as “liberal or progressive,” while 29% identified as “conservative.”  According to a recent Gallup poll, 70% of Rhode Islanders believe that state taxes are too high.

One thing Bell doesn’t have to deceive about is the reality that Rhode Islanders voted by a huge margin for President Barack Obama, and the range of our congressional delegation is from quietly liberal (Sen. Jack Reed and Rep. Jim Langevin) to hyper partisan (Rep. David Cicilline) to far-left wacko (Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse).  I’d propose that the reason (beyond the Democrats’ facility with gaming the electoral system around here) is distorted rhetoric like Bell’s.

If Rhode Islanders stepped back a moment and looked past progressives’ propaganda, they’d see that the Obama era has been characterized by a Rhode Islandification of the national economy.  They’d also see that the people whom they’ve elected are wildly out of step with their values and with their common sense.