Justin Katz
A recent op-ed by House Finance Committee Chairman Steven Costantino (D, what else) further illustrates the game playing that our legislators apparently intend to perform instead of fixing Rhode Island’s deep and structural problems: RHODE ISLAND’S fiscal crisis is also our moment of opportunity. By finding ways to make our tax dollars go further, we…
Members of the General Assembly were setting up a lie even before their first meeting of the year (if you can call it that). From Sunday’s Providence Journal: The legislature and the governor promise no tax increases. Legislative leaders repeat: “Everything [else] is on the table.” Interest groups fear the coming session will be “the…
What a sad, sad commentary that the first baby born in Rhode Island during 2008 was child number three to a nineteen year old girl. The picture of the mother with the baby and the father (different name; no mention of whether the other two are his) is worth a thousand words. Mom expressed hope…
I’m glad I wasn’t in the midst of a gulp of coffee when I read this yesterday: “We are not here today to cast blame on anyone,” House Speaker William J. Murphy, D-West Warwick, said of the huge back-to-back deficits. “The time for finger pointing is over.” Uh, yeah. I’d say there’s still a-plenty of…
Julia Steiny has a good column explaining one area in which the union model is a poor fit for teachers (the best parts aren’t quoted): Traditional “defined benefit” pensions motivate some teachers to become deadwood. Teachers who have lost their appetite for the work must continue to put in their time, however half-heartedly, to qualify…
Not to make light of others’ hardships (even if those hardships are relative), but this line from Local 1033’s “business manager,” Donald Iannazzi, on the layoffs of his walking-guard clients truly deserves highlighting: “Here we have 18 people from working-class families who are members of the Warwick community,” he said. “They care about our kids,…
I lack the interest to investigate every claim that Chairman and CEO of Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) makes about teenagers, and some of them are indubitably positive, but this sort of thing is of dubious value: A survey of more than 2,700 middle and high school students revealed that most young people have a…
Of course, I’ve got to highlight the good sense of my townsman Stephen Miller (whom I don’t believe I know, by the way): The many issues facing Rhode Island today are not problems, they are symptoms of the real problem — us! Our extremely liberal, entitlement-based attitude permeates everything we do in Rhode Island. The…
My previous post cites the environment — global warming, specifically — as a religiously founded cause that allows believers to dismiss complications to their unrelated aversions, especially business. National Review‘s Rich Lowry argues that John Edwards is seeking to capitalize on that underlying impulse: It is rare indeed to hear a politician brag about his…
Paul Driessen’s op-ed in the first Providence Journal of the year is certainly worth a read. Regarding the U.N. Bali meeting on global warming: Meanwhile, respected climate scientists were barred from panel discussions, censored, silenced and threatened with physical removal by polizei if they tried to hold a press conference to present peer-reviewed evidence that…