Justin Katz
I know there’s no direct connection, but I couldn’t help but think of those complaints about the cost of the Iraq war to the state when I read this bit of rare positive news: A California aerospace company is scouting locations in Rhode Island in order to open a facility to build armored boats by…
PROEM: We’d like to encourage this sort of conversation, so commenters will have a very short leash for ad hominem with this post. Matt Jerzyk’s response to my post about the rich giving their money to we in the working class strikes me as so tangential as to raise a wholly separate topic, and as…
Falling through cracks has always been a specialty of mine. Wrong time. Wrong place. Not quite a fit. Too much of this for that. Too much there for here. Exceptions to the rule move to the back (or the front) of the room, please. Not that I’ve minded, particularly. It becomes sort of definitional, and…
This is a point worth making over and over again: [Iraqis] were willing to help us, but they are not a stupid people. They know that if they commit to the American side and the Americans abandon them as we did in 1991, it means death for them and their families. They know this, and…
Over on Kmareka, David Jaffe suggests that, thanks to those awful ultra-rich, working-class Americans have every reason to be bitter. Joins in commenter Miami Mama: If those ultra-rich would spend just a fraction of their wealth to help the poor and middle-class instead of selfishly splurging on themselves, it would be a much better world.…
Every couple of years, it seems, a student from Brown will contact me for comment in an article about blogging for the Brown Daily Herald. It’s traditionally been a unifying topic: although we’ve got different emphases, we Rhode Island bloggers will all agree about the value and opportunities that the medium offers, not the least…
In response to my recent column on Rhode Island’s economy and taxes, I’ve received email asking whether it’s merely the economy to blame — nothing unique to Rhode Island. Well, let’s see: Rhode Island was one of only five states nationally and the District of Columbia to post a higher unemployment rate in February than…
Anybody who’s truly interested in the immigration debate should skip Charles Bakst’s typically useless column in yesterday’s Providence Journal and turn instead to the Money & Business section, in which one can read John Kostrzewa’s inquiry into the difficulties that the E-Verify mandate imposes on businesses: To try to sort out some of the issues,…
What a jumble has politico-economic thought become in America! It’s as if so much access to information (and ability to propagate it) has served mainly to allow us all to slip into ruts of prepared thoughtlines. Consider this interesting comment from Evan, at RIFuture (emphasis added): What most “free market” bozos ignore is that most…
Not unlike other wealthy faux-populists who wish to manipulate poor and working class citizens for their own aggrandizement, Barack Obama apparently thinks that the change that will bring unity will entail an optimistic lunge past some of those wicked security blankets… you know, like religion: You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania,…
