Justin Katz
Anybody who missed it on Sunday should take a moment to read URI Business Administration Professor Edward Mazze’s “10 steps to right R.I.’s dire financial state“: Any optimism for job creation next month has disappeared as the state, region and national economy slide downward. For years, we have been dealing with a partial truth that…
I’ve been meaning to note — for its sheer shock power — a chart of Rhode Island’s state budget since 1950. Stunning. I’d say there’s room to trim, don’t you think?
We have to stop thinking of education in terms of time-delimited stages. In a world of advanced technology, specialization, and global competition, the old system of markers — with individuals tiered by the name of the highest degree achieved — is becoming both meaningless and expensive, as each degree level deflates and the education industry…
The ways in which communities congeal are comprehensible, and although we should lament the development unto primacy of identity politics, it is understandable that people get sucked into them. That said, I still have difficulty empathizing with this sort of thing, said (this time) in response to the governor’s recent moves against illegal immigration: “Are…
It was one thing when Representative Art Handy (D, Cranston) decried the injustice of the little known diaper-service tax shelter during his testimony supporting his Economic Death and Dismemberment Act. We could at least give him the benefit of the doubt that he was speaking extemporaneously. But he apparently liked the image so much that…
But let’s not lose sight of a principle that looms pretty large in conservative philosophy: that social pressure is often the appropriate means of guiding individuals toward behavior that is healthy for society. This concept puts conservatives at the obvious political disadvantage of giving liberals cover to declare that they judge nothing but judgement and…
Forgive me if this post has a patchwork feel to it, but I’ve had a dreadful day. Here’s a telling time line for you: 6:12 a.m. (just before I begin getting ready for work) — A post of mine hits the Internet. 7:21 a.m. (just about the time I’m pulling into my boss’s shop) —…
Providence Journal photographer Kathy Borchers (and her editor) lobbed a softball out there to accompany Steve Peoples’s predictable coverage of the other night’s State House events (PDF), and Matt Jerzyk hammered it into the ground: In one corner we have MEN IN SUITS who are longtime advocates for lowering taxes on the richest millionaires and…
The essential argument behind that dreadful tax legislation (whose name we dare not speak) is, as Tom Sgouros put it in testimony last night: The state takes “too much money from people who can’t afford to give it, and not much money from those who can.” Or, as those who are less worried about the…