Justin Katz
In addition to mentioning Anchor Rising’s breaking of the news of Joe Trillo’s gubernatorial candidacy, Cynthia Needham offers some details and an example of healthy longer-term perspective: Trillo has $60,000 in his campaign coffers — that’s more than most legislators, but thousands less than his potential Democrat opponents including General Treasurer Frank T. Caprio, Attorney…
This quotation from the Providence Journal‘s latest story on Gov. Carcieri’s tax panel pretty well highlights the philosophical differences at play: … under proposals involving the personal income tax, lower-income and many higher-income taxpayers would generally pay less, but middle-income taxpayers — and the state’s highest-income taxpayers — would generally pay more. This is partly…
Here’s some significant audio from last night’s school committee meeting in Tiverton, as I described on scene. A key take-away from the evening is that almost half of the $300,000+ that the school district must cut from the 2009-2010 budget to stay within the state spending cap is a direct result of this contract’s approval.…
The new teachers’ contract is up for approval again in Tiverton, and inasmuch as the agenda item is “approval of arbitrator’s interim award (NEA contract),” it looks likely to go the other way. Apparently the latest info is that the state is only reducing their funding by 5%, so they’re confident giving away over $300,000.…
Stanley Aronson writes reasonable, interesting columns for the Providence Journal, but I often get the impression of an underlying scientism. By that relatively new coinage, I mean the tendency — a system of belief, really — to treat scientific answers as complete grounds for defining one’s life. So, in context of an essay about doctors’…
As regular readers know, I’m not a supporter of specifically targeted economic development. For one thing, I lack confidence in our leaders’ ability to define such far-reaching strategic plans. Moreover, as we see with on the casino issue, if businesses think a particular government activity or change will be profitable, they’ll lobby for it, making…
So how is it that I can walk in, at 7:02 p.m., to a public meeting that’s advertised (PDF) for a 7:00 start, and the town council is already through the first page of its agenda? It’s typical — the meetings really start at 6:30 p.m. [see footnote] — but this evening, I walked into…
No doubt thinking of that right-wing conspiracy to fool Rhode Islanders into believing that our state is facing a dire economic situation requiring drastic change in policies, Russ Conway asks why nobody’s talking about this (emphasis added): While Massachusetts’ share of the venture capital economy dwarfs that of other New England states, Rhode Island and…
