Marc Comtois
With the stories about teacher’s buying their own supplies and student athletes having to pay participation fees in North Smithfield, I wondered: Why? Recent Census Bureau data showed Rhode Island’s cost per student was #8 overall in the U.S. Where is that money going? Well, as I discovered, 85% of that cost went to compensation…
Kids paying for school sports. Teachers paying for their own supplies. The PTOs and PTAs being asked to do more and more every year. According to the Census Bureau (2007 data published in 2009), Rhode Island is 8th in the nation in per pupil spending at $12,612. Where does all of that money go? Of…
Dana Loesch has some pictures of the “angry mobs” showing up at the Health Care Town Halls (you know, where there is supposed to be an open discussion, yada yada yada). Here’s an example: Scary! Peggy Noonan: The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned…
Apparently, the Obama Administration thinks the transparency requirements for labor union leadership are too stringent: John Lund, the newly appointed deputy secretary in the Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS), told The Examiner that Obama Administration officials will conduct a thorough review of financial disclosure requirements in response to complaints from labor officials that Bush-era…
Peter Berkowitz reviews Patrick Allitt’s The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History in the latest Policy Review. Berkowitz explains that Allitt helps explain the “paradoxes that constitute conservatism in America.” The questions that guide his study are straightforward: “Where did conservatism come from, what are its intellectual sources, and why is it internally divided?”…
Updating my post of a couple weeks ago (and confirming a comment by WJAR’s Bill Rappleye at the time), the RI Department of Education has issued a statement that school districts can’t charge fees for interscholastic sports (via ProJo 7to7): School districts cannot, under current state law, charge fees for interscholastic sports, and if a…
Polls continue to indicate President Obama’s and the Democrats’ health care reform is in serious trouble. And the Dems are worried…and paranoid. They haven’t been able to drum up support with their much-touted netroots apparatus and are instead encountering protests against their proposals. But it couldn’t be that their grand plan is wrong…instead, the Democrats…
Dan Yorke had former State Rep Nick Gorham (R-Westconnaug) on to discuss the General Assembly’s 2010 “Rub-and-tugs”. Like those last year and the year before, the list is long….The dollars spent are about half of that spent in 2008 (around $19 million versus $8.6 million), but just about the same as last year ($9.1 million).…
As I was commuting to work via Airport Road in Warwick the other day, the light turned red and a single UPS truck pulled out of the T.F. Greene Cargo terminal. This normal everyday occurrence got me wondering about how this was a really inefficient way to get cargo from airport to the highway. If…
From Reason: Unlike the federal government, states can’t simply run deficits indefinitely. For that reason, they have a powerful duty to pile up surpluses during fat years, which would allow them to make up the revenue that goes missing during lean years. But for many lawmakers, the future extends only to the next election. So…