Justin Katz
Maureen Martin’s got it right: If the [lead-paint] verdict is upheld, every dwelling in Rhode Island constructed before 1978 (about 240,000 total) will have to be inspected for lead-based paint, regardless of whether the owners agree to that inspection. Residents will be forcibly relocated if their homes need an “extreme makeover” to remove and replace…
One wonders whether Senate Democrat Doyenne Teresa Paiva Weed feels that this came out wrong: But while House leaders have declared themselves in support of the move [to require legislators to contribute to their healthcare costs], which has both financial and symbolic significance in a year when the state is facing a huge deficit and…
A few important considerations are missing from Tom Sgouros’s comment of his “review” of state tax revenue statistics: I was reviewing some statistics about state tax revenues last week, and looked at business taxes. Along with the income tax and sales tax, business taxes were once the third important leg of funding state operations, but…
Andrew makes a central observation in the comments to his latest post on the pension deficit: If politicians making bad fiscal decisions are the entire story of the pension funding crisis, that is a strong case against defined benefit plans, because there is no reason to believe that current and future pols are going to…
Perhaps no practice is a better distillation of the blight that is teacher unionization than bumping. I’m with Julia Steiny in thinking that it ought to end, but the suggestions of the Business Education Partnership that she describes in her column, yesterday, are worth considering as half-way measures: To professionalize education personnel practices, Blais and…
So proud of this little snippet from a Providence Business News piece is Patrick Crowley that he’s mentioned it multiple times: But what about the rest of us? After all, nearly 50% (48.7%) of the returns filed were for incomes BELOW $30,000 a year. And while this group pays 4% of the state’s income tax…
An odd tangential statement from a Rhode Island Catholic article (not yet online) about the need for young adults and children to be careful online: “You’re at the most difficult period of your life,” Quirk began, describing the leap from childhood to adulthood as a “hard” period. “It’s challenging to make it through in one…
Only in the deliberately abstruse logogriph of same-sex marriage advocacy could such a statement be made: “Divorce can be a more fundamental principle than marriage because it has to do with the due process that’s the bedrock of American jurisprudence,” Fox said before the hearing. Prohibiting it effectively denies “a fundamental principle of democracy.” Ah,…