Here are some annotated excerpts of Governor Donald Carcieri’s explanation of his budget .
1. Cuts are necessary because, under the existing structure of Rhode Island government, spending is growing twice as fast as revenues…
[Open full post]Here is the problem we faced in putting this budget together. Although our revenues were projected to grow at the healthy rate of 4.3 percent, state spending was expected to grow by over 9 percent. In other words, we were scheduled to spend twice as much as we hoped to earn.
In my budget, I have reduced the growth rate in spending from that original 9% projection, to just over 3%, after factoring out a few one-time adjustments.
The Governor has just releases his State budget proposal for next year. Scott Mayerowitz of the ProJo chose to highlight the “several accounting tricks, one-time sources of revenue and other gimmicks to balance his tax and spending plan,” (sheesh, no in-story editorializing there, Scott) and glossed over one major source of cuts (state workers). Ray Henry of the AP (via the Boston Globe) was more detailed in explaining the nature of those cuts:
Hundreds of state workers would be laid off and social spending programs would be slashed to close a $350 million budget deficit under a budget proposal released Wednesday by Gov. Don Carcieri.
The Republican governor’s $7.02 billion spending plan also taps into the state’s rainy-day fund to help close the gap. But it avoids tax increases and pumps money into education initiatives backed by Carcieri, a former math teacher, including expanding nursing programs and modestly increasing education assistance for cities and towns.
“The decisions contained in this revenue and expenditure plan were not easy ones to make, but they were made with careful consideration for the best interests of all Rhode Islanders,” Carcieri wrote in a letter to lawmakers.
His budget staff justified cutbacks by warning that expenditures were projected to grow 9 percent for the 2008 fiscal year starting in July. Revenue was only projected to increase around 4.3 percent. By law, Rhode Island must pass a balanced budget.
State workers are among the groups hit the hardest. Carcieri’s plan calls for saving $9.8 million by firing 168 state workers, both unionized employees and management. Carcieri’s plan would also privatize the food service and housekeeping staffs at a state hospital and veteran’s home, eliminating an additional 214 workers.
All nonessential employees would have to take three unpaid days off scheduled around the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays, a move that he estimated would shave $4.8 million off the deficit…
And just like last year, the Governor is targeting both RIte Care and Child Care subsidies (I can hear the shrieking now).
As required by a new federal law, Rhode Island health officials will begin demanding more proof of U.S. citizenship, for example a birth certificate or passport, before allowing people to enroll in subsidized health care services.
Those changes could force an estimated 5,700 people off RIte Care, the state’s insurance program for the needy, said Gary Alexander, the acting director of the Department of Human Services…
One of the larger social spending cuts would tighten the eligibility requirements for families that use state-subsidized child care programs, probably eliminating about 3,800 children from the program. Those children would largely come from families that already contribute some money toward their child care, Alexander said.
Of course, there’s much more and a lot of it won’t make many people happy. I don’t like that the Governor has chosen to freeze the car-tax reduction, has proposed several fee hikes and I don’t like the stop-gap measure of getting another tobacco settlement buyout. There’s a lot to go over, and I’m sure we’ll hear all sorts of whining from many quarters (including here). The lesson: don’t spend more than you take in and you won’t have to worry about “cuts.” Now we ALL will have to make some sacrifices to pay for our fiscal largesse.
[Open full post]Kate Brewster, executive director of the Poverty Institute at Rhode Island College:
“This is not a State of the State,” Brewster said, “but a state of denial. There was no mention of thousands of working families who are struggling with stagnant wages and skyrocketing costs of living.”
Hmmm. From the Governor’s State of the State Address:
No state can prosper without a growing economy! Without growing employment, increasing wages, and improved profits, tax revenues cannot grow. Between 2002 and 2006, Rhode Island ranked second in private-sector job growth among all New England states.
And we ranked first in job creation since the end of the national recession in 2001. This slowed considerably in the last year – but ebbs and flows are inevitable.
Our per-capita income is among the fastest growing, and our median family income is $61,000, the 11th highest in the nation.
In recent years, we have developed an aggressive strategy to create an innovation economy that will grow higher wage jobs, and help provide a better quality of life for all Rhode Islanders.
Last year, the General Assembly joined with me and the Science and Technology Advisory Council to invest $1.5M in collaborative research. This research will support our economic development strategy.
A major economic development success this past year was the move of Alexion.
With us tonight is Jim Rich. Jim is the Site Director for Alexion Pharmaceuticals in Smithfield. The company moved to Rhode Island from Connecticut when they purchased the former Dow Manufacturing facility in Smithfield. They will begin operations in the spring of 2008, and just received FDA approval to produce Soloris, which will treat a very rare blood disorder. Initially, they will employ 80 people. Join me in welcoming Jim and this wonderful addition to our biotech community.
There has been a great deal of conversation about Quonset lately. Eclipsed in that debate is some exciting news about developments happening inside the park:
* There are more than 150 companies located at Quonset, with nearly 8,000 employees
* In 2006, Quonset saw $26M in expansions and job growth. The new, world-class manufacturing facility built by Hexagon/Brown & Sharpe was a major addition to the Park
A recent exciting announcement is that NOAA is evaluating Quonset as the home port for the nation’s first ocean exploration ship, the Okeanos Explorer.
Combined with the Graduate School of Oceanography, it’s research ship, the Endeavor – and the Inner Space Center – the Ocean State will become the nation’s leading center for ocean research. This will bring more jobs and investment to Rhode Island.
Economic development will be an untiring, and relentless focus of my administration.
Nope, no good news here. I mean, how could “working families” benefit from economic development that makes the state more attractive to business? Pushaw!!! Instead, from its all-good-things-must-come-via-the-government mindset, the Poverty Institute would like to see more taxes:
1) “Reform Tax Expenditures”, which are “credits, deductions, exemptions, exclusions or preferential tax rates that reduce tax liability for selected firms or individuals.”
2) “Revive the Corporate Income Tax”
3) “Broaden the Sales Tax”
4) “Rescind scheduled elimination of 5% tax on capital gain income”
5) “Freeze the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax Phase-Out”
Yes, I’m sure that “thousands of working families” would be very happy to see the car tax stick around and see the sales tax “broadened.” And increasing the tax burden on business sure will help out with “stagnant wages,” won’t it? And, finally, some of those “skyrocketing costs of living” wouldn’t have anything to do with Rhode Island’s already heavy tax burden–that Poverty Inc…er… Institute would like to make heavier–would they?
{My apologies to a certain Brown U. alum with cat-eye glasses}
…and, in fact, their Iraq Study Group document always has, according to this report from the Weekly Standard’s international affairs weblog…
Earlier today, James Baker endorsed President Bush’s plan to surge troops into Baghdad, as did Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the bipartisan Iraq Study Group with Baker. Baker told the Senate Foreign Relation Committee that “the president’s plan ought to be given a chance . . . Just give it a chance.” Said Hamilton, “If we can put this together there is a chance we can reasonably succeed. But we realize that is a very, very daunting challenge.”[Open full post]
The Iraq Study Group’s final report did recommend “a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad, or to speed up the training and equipping mission, if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective.”
I’d heard of the Medieval Warm Period (for a good, sensible analysis, I’d recommend “The Global Warming Two-Step” by William Tucker), but the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was a new one to me until I received an unbidden issue of Inside Smithsonian Research in the mail the other day. In it was an article on how fossils hold clues to predicting how plants will respond to global warming. Here’s a portion specifically concerning the PETM:
[Open full post]Mona Charen was the first of several speakers over the course of the NRI Summit to offer up this important point: The United States is now at the point where about 50% of the population pays no income tax. Therefore, tax-cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of an effective national Republican platform, because half of the population has no taxes to cut. (Unless cuts in payroll taxes are put on the table).
This has some very practical implications for state politics in a place like Rhode Island. For instance, when Rhode Island Democrats talk about property tax-reform, are they really talking about reform, or is the real goal to shift even more of a tax burden to the upper 50% of the population, so that just half of the population is paying for all Federal and state services, and through education-aid and municipal aid funding formulas, for most local services too?
I should also note that, despite the concern about taxpayer demographics, there seemed to be very little enthusiasm for “big” ideas like replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. I’m not sure if that is because of concerns about politics or policy.
The first speaker at the NRI Conservative Summit this past weekend was former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The former Speaker offered a challenging take on the state of conservatism…
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: Always talk personally first, historically second, and politically last. This is the number one problem with the consultant class. The get up every morning and read Hotline, and then they go to Drudge, and then they talk politics all day, and then because they have no idea what the average American thinks or does, they try to write a clever attack commercial because they haven’t got anything positive to say. That is fundamentally wrong.
What people want to know first is what are you going to do for me? This does not mean that you have to be for liberal bureaucracies. Freedom is one of things I am going to do for you. The right to have a work ethic and keep most of what you earn is something I want to do you for. The right to have larger take-home pay is something I want to do for you.
This is a fight over policies. Do you want policies that strengthen bureaucracies, or policies that strengthen entrepaneurs? Do you want policies that strengthen Washington, or policies that strengthen families? Do you want more choices for the cabinet secretary or more choices for the secretary back home? It’s very straightforward. It’s a policy fight.
People want to know, first of all, how are you going to make my life better? And at $3.00 a gallon for gas, they began to go maybe this Republican Congress isn’t working. When health prices rise up unendingly, in most cases faster than take home pay, they go maybe this isn’t working. When they see the Detroit School system graduate 21% of incoming freshmen on time and cheat 4 out of 5 children, they say on a practical level maybe this isn’t working. When they learn that an African-American male who drops out of school has a 73% unemployment in his 20s and a 60% likelihood and going to jail, at a personal level, it’s not working.
We don’t know how to talk that way, because we, frankly, came out of an ideological movement that was then transformed by a Hollywood actor who had been FDR Democrat. And so we sort of loved Ronald Reagan, but we didn’t study him.
This is not about ideology. Ideology is a process of thought designed to produce better results. The question is what are the results. And why aren’t we and the liberal Detroit arguing on the side of parents and their children against the machine that’s destroying them?
Totally different model. So just practice every day. What are you going say that’s personal first, historical second, and political last…
…and was strong and direct on the subject of the Iraq war, and the unacceptability of defeat…
NG: I had said as early as the fall of 2003 we had the wrong policy and had gone off a cliff. That did not mean I thought we should withdraw. It meant I thought we should get the right policy. We are at the edge of maybe getting the right policy with General Petraeus.
But Iraq is a mess. We have to start with that understanding. I never defend the mess in Iraq. What I do say is this. Everybody who believes that defeat is an easy alternative needs to explain the consequences of defeat.
We have tried weakness once before under Jimmy Carter. We had a 444 day hostage crisis in Iran. We had the American embassy burned in Pakistan. We had the American ambassador killed in Afghanistan. We had the Soviets invade Afghanistan and have proxy forces in Cuba, Mozambique, Angola, Grenada, Nicaragua and El Salvador. We had the Soviets financing over a million person demonstration in Europe. People forget how much anti-Americanism there was when Ronald Reagan was defending freedom and defeating the Soviet Union.
So we’ve tried weakness. We’ve tried weakness at home with liberalism. It got us 13% inflation and 22% interest rates. Some of you are old enough to remember when you had to know the last number of your car-tag to know which days you we allowed to sit in line to buy gasoline. Remember how the Carter administration and liberals had totally messed up. It’s perfectly appropriate for [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi to appoint [Congressman Edward] Markey to head an energy committee because he represents precisely the values that destroyed the energy system last time. So we’ve done all this.
The debate has to be over Iraq in context. Tell me about the North Korean bomb. Tell me about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Tell me about the public statements about defeating America from Chavez and Ahmadinejad. Now, in that context, tell me why you think a policy of weakness and defeat is a clever next step. And that doesn’t mean that we are in an easy place. I think we are in as hard a place as Lincoln was in 1862, I think we are in as hard a place as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in 1942, and I think we had better figure out how to win, because sooner or later we are going to have to beat these people.
The Baker-Hamilton commission exactly reversed what we need to do. [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin understood that the key to making peace with the Arabs was to be able to stop the Iranians. Baker-Hamilton said why don’t we invite the Iranians in to help us out with the Arabs. That is like saying if only Adolph Hitler had been friendly, Munich wouldn’t have been nearly as bad.
I think this is a serious moment in American history, and I think at some point in time we will run a real risk of losing 2 or 3 cities to nuclear weapons, and I think it’s a lot better to act now, before we lose a city, then to wake up an appoint a new 9/11 commission saying “gee, why didn’t we know”.
And how’s this for a bit of rabble-rousing…
NG: One of the things that would tempt me this fall would be the prospect of 7 or 10 or 12 dialogues next fall, with Hillary, because I don’t believe the left could survive an open, honest dialogue about the difference in values of the two systems.
Providence Phoenix reporter Ian Donnis has ventured forth with a new Phoenix blog, Not for Nothing. He’s been a great resource as a journalist, and I’m sure he’ll continue to be so as a blogger, as well.
I can’t help but note, however, this line from Ian’s blog announcement:
Political activist Matt Jerzyk, a friend and occasional Phoenix contributor, has probably done more than anyone else to build the Rhode Island blogosphere.
I guess this characterization is true, inasmuch as Jerzyk is an insider bringing blogging to insiders, but then again, I’ve always thought that blogging is uniquely valuable mainly as a venue for the voices of outsiders. Be that as it may, I’ve a sense that Ian will tend toward integrity with respect to the distinction between bringing the outside in and pushing the inside out.
[Open full post]Marc notes the latest in modified conservatism, put forward by the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte (director of the institute’s Center for American Common Culture). The piece strikes me — to be honest — as the latest parry in the somewhat ridiculous battle over conservatism that the Republicans’ ineptitude has ussured in — the latest attempt to declare, “my conservatism is the conservatism!” Fonte asks, “what stirs the blood?” And his answer is, essentially, nationalism.
Well, to each his own, I suppose, but I think Fonte greatly overestimates the degree to which the field of self-identifying conservatives is united in the prioritization of “American national cohesion.” To me, conservatism represents a broad philosophy, describing a temperament and a strategy for deriving core beliefs. If that all boils down to my country’s “right to concentrate [my] affections,” then my first reaction is to assume that I’ve been played.
I will credit Fonte with creating a reasonable statement of principles under which conservatives of various stripes could unify. However, if in his construction he hopes to stack the deck in favor of his own colors, then I’d suggest that it is as doomed as any explicit and intellectual attempt to offer a universal conservatism that sublimates more precise — and therefore less encompassing — definitions.
Marc’s previous post on “civic conservatism” prompts me to give my report on the national-state of another conservative brand, “compassionate conservatism”. It’s finished as a political label, but it’s rooted in better ideas than you might think.
At the NRI Conservative Summit, Professor Marvin Olasky, the individual probably most responsible for bringing the term “compassionate conservative” into mainstream public discourse, expressed disappointment with President Bush’s version of compassionately conservative social welfare policy. His complaint was that President Bush has invoked the term “compassionate conservatism” without implementing the underlying ideas on the scale that is necessary.
According to Professor Olasky, compassionate conservatism should involve a radical simplification (my term) in the way that government delivers social welfare benefits to its citizens. He named two specific examples: a) an expanded child tax-credit and b) vouchers that public aid-recipients could use to seek help from social service providers of their choice — faith-based providers included. In contrast, President Bush’s big domestic initiatives, like No-Child-Left-Behind and Medicare part-D, have been attempts to reform and expand existing bureaucracies. Dare I say that on the homefront, President Bush has governed more as a “Rockefeller Republican” who believes that big bureaucracy works, if you just find the right set of managers, and not really as a “compassionate conservative” who believes that something is irretrievably lost when personal efforts to help one another are replaced with government regimentation?
Of course, many mainstream conservatives bristle at the suggestion that “compassionate” can ever be a proper qualifier for conservative, wary that the implication that there is something compassion-neutral about conservatism does more perceptual harm than the modifier heals. This unpopularity with conservatives, combined with compassionate conservatism’s association in the mind of the general public with President Bush and his in-the-thirties approval ratings has already settled the taxonomical argument — “Compassionate Coservatism” as a defining paradigm is not going to catch on. This most emphatically does not mean that the merits of Professor Olasky’s ideas about the role of government in providing social services and individual opportunity should be dismissed.
