I’ve been engaging in a back-and-forth discussion with a childhood acquaintance concerning the costs of public schools, trying to convey that the system is set up like a ratchet.
When operating costs go up — for electricity, say — school districts insist that they cannot absorb the hit and pass it along to taxpayers. It’s just how the budgeting is done. But when those same costs go down, the districts use the money for other purposes, like giving raises, starting new programs, and so on. Maybe their budgets don’t increase as much that year, but they never go down. Thus, when the cost goes back up, even if it only returns to its previous high, the districts have to increase taxes to cover the increase again.
This dynamic comes into play with other government policies, as well, notably around the environment.
When Democrat governor of Connecticut Ned Lamont announced his withdrawal of support for the Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI) last week, he explained, “The consumers are getting squeezed; right now they want to break.” Massachusetts’s Republican governor, Charlie Baker, was not as politically blunt about his reason for pulling back, but one needn’t be very cynical to assume he agrees with Lamont. For Rhode Island’s Democrat governor, Dan McKee, the reasoning simply seems to be that it looked foolish to be the only state in a “regional” compact.
Under Republican President Donald Trump, fuel became less expensive. The United States was energy independent and was even beginning to become an energy exporter. In that situation, some politicians calculated that voters would tolerate a little bit of an increase to fund another environmentalist scheme. Unfortunately for them, organized opposition arose, and the activists in government couldn’t get the deal done in time to lock in the ratchet before the fuel price increase blew up all their sunny estimates of the real effect on drivers.
One of the underappreciated tools in my van as a carpenter was a heavy-duty ratchet strap. In that line of work, it had all sorts of uses for straightening walls, bending plywood around curved structures, and more, but most people will be familiar with them as a more-robust alternative for bungy cords. You put an item up on your vehicle’s roof rack, wrap the strap around it, and crank the ratchet until it’s tight, tugging on the item until you can’t move it at all, but being careful not to click so many time it crushes your precious cargo.
Annual government budgeting and policies like TCI are like that, only we’re the ones strapped to the rack. Every time we exhale, the special interests and ideologues click the ratchet, making it harder and harder to breathe, and they don’t seem concerned with our pain so much as the possibility that we’ll know that they are the ones to blame.
Featured image by Gabriel Cote on Unsplash.
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This morning, I wondered out loud what the public narrative would have looked like had somebody taken action to stop the driver from plowing into a Christmas parade in Wisconsin yesterday.
Writing about Kyle Rittenhouse, David Burkhead may provide a hint of the answer:
“He shouldn’t have been there” is a stupid argument. As a free citizen in a free country on publicly accessible property he had every right to be there. As a free citizen in a free country he had every right to be armed for his own protection. As a free citizen in a free country he had every right to move to stop an incipient disaster (a burning dumpster on its way–never mind how for the moment–to a gas station where it might well set off a conflagration that could kill hundreds).
Burkhead goes on to detail that a burning dumpster when combined with a gas station could have resulted in many more deaths, and certainly much more destruction that night. It appears that Rittenhouse stopped that. Unfortunately, in this life we’re not always able to take credit for the bad things that would have happened had we not intervened.
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Bob Walsh, the head of the National Education Association of Rhode Island teachers union, perfectly illustrates the problem with so much insider thinking in the Ocean State with this comment:
Perspective: If you supported the extra $600 per week that unemployed workers received during the pandemic but are critical of a $3000 stipend (less than $40/week) for those who spent the last 80 weeks working during the pandemic you need to think hard about your values.
The government stepped in to help people who were thrown out of work, often because the government forbade their employers from opening. Walsh thinks that entitles government employees who were never forced to stop working and who may even have had an easier time at work, inasmuch as their offices closed down at times without stopping the paychecks, they were able to work from home, and/or their clients’ access to their offices was severely restricted.
So, government workers are insulated from the effects of economic challenges, and still they want an added “equity” benefit mirroring help that was offered to those who suffered.
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Unfortunately, it’s a familiar sequence.
A video hits social media showing a few seconds of some shocking incident. At first it is universally passed along with expressions of horror, but very quickly, browsing users can begin to see most posts groping for political relevance.
Facts begin to emerge, and if they serve a progressive narrative (anti-racism, anti-gun, anti-Israel, anti-pro-life, anti-Republican, et cetera), the news media amplifies the story to make it a national, or international, scandal. If the facts are ambiguous, the clip will circulate for another day or so for its shock value. And if the facts undermine a progressive narrative, the story will actively be downplayed and vanish quickly.
Last night, a red SUV plowed through a crowd of people marching in the street in Waukesha, Wisconsin. (The multiple videos are easy to find.) The first detail that complicated any of the predictable narratives was that it wasn’t a protest, but a Christmas parade. Now that police have taken a man into custody, and he’s black, the likelihood is that this story will fall somewhere between the “ambiguous politics” path and the “undermines progressive” path.
The video is just so shocking that it has some monetary value to the news media, and if the detained man turns out to be the culprit, he doesn’t thoroughly stain progressives, so there’s no downside from collecting those eyeballs.
Heavy.com has proven reliable with the information it quickly provides in these cases, and the picture its coverage paints is of a generally thuggish criminal. More information is needed, but early indications are that he was fleeing the scene of some sort of knife attack, and the parade got in his way. Unsurprisingly, his social media accounts swim in the “anti-racist” waters, but he probably wasn’t motivated by politics; progressivism is more of a fashionable outfit people put on.
The shame of it all is that we prevent ourselves from sharing in each others’ grief, as well as shaping our understanding of what’s going wrong in a healthy way, by filtering everything through a narrow lens. Moreover, because the narratives are so predictable and, at this point, so powerful as to end lives and cause riots, they affect our decisions.
Imagine, for example, a police officer or armed citizen had had the opportunity to take this guy out just before he accelerated into the parade. What do you think the social media posts of politicians, activists, and journalists would have said about that?
Pause to think about it for even a moment, and the truck has already maimed or killed dozens of people.
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Mental Health Issues and Concerns 11-8-21 from John Carlevale on Vimeo.
J. Clement “Bud” Cicilline, former CEO of Newport County Mental Health Center, joins host Darlene D’Arezzo to discuss major issues and concerns facing mental health practice today. With many years of experience, he walks us through the history of mental health services in Rhode Island and talks about what is needed to improve services and meet the growing need for mental health services.
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It adds up, of course, but when government is trillions of dollars in debt, a hundred million here and there seems hardly to count. That may be part of the reason that news of grants like the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Program doesn’t typically question where the money will come from. The tone is always one of opportunity and community building:
Five Rhode Island communities were awarded funding totaling $750,000.
“We are committed to providing police departments with the resources needed to help ensure community safety and build community trust,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said. “The grants we are announcing today will enable law enforcement agencies across the country to hire more than 1,000 additional officers to support vitally important community oriented policing programs.”
So, we learn that North Providence, Richmond, Scituate, and Smithfield will each receive $125,000 to hire one officer each, while Tiverton will receive $250,000 for two. We get a little bit of a sense of what initiatives will be the focus of new hires. Half of all recipients will work on “building legitimacy and trust” in their communities. One third will try to address “high rates of gun violence” or “other areas of violence.” The remainder will turn their attention either to responding to “persons in crisis” or (Warning! Warning!) “combating hate and domestic extremism.”
Conspicuously, the less PR-friendly aspects of the awards are not mentioned. The Department of Justice will pay up to 75% of the cost for new hires for three years, for a maximum total of $125,000 each. The town has to pay the rest. In Tiverton, the cost of an entry-level officer is around $75,000, for a three-year total of roughly $225,000. That means the cost of these awards to the communities will be something like $100,000 over three years, except for Tiverton, which will have to come up with $200,000 it otherwise wouldn’t have spent.
When the three years are up, the municipalities have to cover at least another year, bringing the cost of the grant closer to $200,000 per officer hired. However, the likelihood that a town would actually decide to reduce the force because the grant is over is next to zero. The real cost is therefore an additional employee (plus pension) forever.
Maybe it’s still worth doing, and maybe it’s not, but shouldn’t these details be part of the public discussion? And should the feds really be using tax dollars lent to us by future generations to manipulate current taxpayers in local governments’ hiring decisions?
Featured image by Bermix Studio on Unsplash.
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“Am I the only one who quit singing along,
Every time they play a Springsteen song.”
Hat tip Lara Logan.
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Something about the way Ted Nesi puts this question about possible hospital mergers in Rhode Island strikes me as odd:
Will Rhode Island and its residents be better off with roughly 80% of hospital services controlled by a single powerful entity?
One wonders how many of the people who fear that “an institution so large would be effectively uncontrollable” are just fine with a single powerful entity having nearly 100% control over healthcare, provided we call it a government?
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Competition is stiff for the most revealingly shocking social media commentary from public figures in Rhode Island and its surrounding environs. Travis Andersen captured a bunch for the Boston Globe, including this frontrunner from U.S. Democrat Congressman David Cicilline:
Bringing a gun to a peaceful protest and chasing people down is not self defense. This acquittal is a stain on our justice system.
This is a plain lie, and the congressman must know it, meaning it’s simple, disgusting demagoguery meant to stoke resentment and division, which is likely to lead to violence.
Also in the running has to be this straight-up racism from Democrat state senator Tiara Mack:
My standards for white people was always high AND it just got higher. If you aren’t actively confronting how you uphold white supremacist systems I don’t have time for you.
Of particular importance, here, is how revealing the statement is not only of Mack (from whom such racism is to be expected), but of Rhode Island’s entire political and media establishment. Nobody in the mainstream will challenge her on this… or even politely ask if it might not be exactly appropriate for an elected official to be so obviously racist. They’re either scared, in agreement, or too interested in maintaining political hegemony.
The most-shocking tweet, however, is probably the one shown in the featured image of this post. It’s from the non-profit organization Rhode Island Kids Count:
When we talk about structural racism & white privilege— here’s an example below.
How often have *assumptions* about Black boys and Black men resulted in death?—and yet, #KyleRittenhouse was not guilty on all charges.
This is what white supremacy looks like. This is not justice.
The “example” is a graphic created by the progressive propaganda organization Path to Progress drawing a direct comparison between the heart-breaking shooting of Tamir Rice, seven years ago, and Kyle Rittenhouse. The two cases have almost nothing in common, except that they involved boys and shootings, and putting them side-by-side serves no purpose but to stir people up and push them toward action, which the past decade proves often turns violent.
Plenty of more-relevant comparisons could be made. In April, a Maryland police officer shot 16-year-old Peyton Ham, a white boy, who was carrying the same sort of gun Tamir Rice had. The CNN story at that link leads to similar stories involving whites, blacks, Hispanics, boys, girls. Children. According to a 2016 Washington Post report, during two years, 86 people were “shot while carrying fake guns” in America. Most were male. More than half were white. Four were under 18. It’s horrible, but in a country of over 300 million people, it happens.
What’s particularly shocking about the RI Kids Count tweet, though, isn’t the comparison. It’s that an organization like RI Kids Count would consider this appropriate use of its official Twitter account. It’s a respected organization whose mission is to provide reliable information about children in the Ocean State to help citizens and officials make better decisions on their behalf… at least that was its mission as recently as April:
The mission of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT is to improve the health, safety, education, economic well-being, and development of Rhode Island’s children.
According to the organization’s own most-recent factbook, it’s still the case that 71% of Rhode Island’s children are white (with some portion of that number are Hispanic). Yet, at some point since April, RI Kids Count changed its mission statement as follows:
The mission of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT is to improve the health, safety, education, economic well-being, and development of Rhode Island’s children with a commitment to equity and the elimination of unacceptable disparities by race, ethnicity, disability, zip code, immigration status, neighborhood, and income.
Rhode Island KIDS COUNT engages in information-based advocacy to achieve equitable public policies and programs for the improvement of children’s lives.
Apparently, the “anti-racism” wave means organizations can no longer simply advocate for children as children. Missions have to be changed to advance the radical cause of equity, even if that means spreading dishonest propaganda to stoke division, which can be relied upon to harm children most, particularly disadvantaged children of all races.
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As winter nears here in the Northeast, it sure is nice to know that part of the just-passed-the-House “Build Back Better” plan is a tax increase on natural gas. As Eric Boehm of Reason reports:
Buried inside the “Build Back Better” plan that cleared the House of Representatives on Friday morning is a new tax on natural gas production that will likely translate into higher heating bills for American households.
The new tax is aimed at curbing methane emissions and will apply fees to companies that produce, process, transmit or store oil and natural gas starting in 2023. The specific fees will depend on where the natural gas is produced and will vary depending on how much methane is released into the atmosphere during the process. Overall, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new “methane fee” will generate about $8 billion over the next 10 years.
The natural gas industry says that money will end up coming directly out of consumers’ wallets.
This must have been the brainchild of some west coast environmentalist who doesn’t have to worry about cold winters. Or not.
The proposed methane fee is based on legislation introduced earlier this year by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D–R.I.). In a statement when the bill was introduced, Whitehouse said the new fees would slow climate change and improve air quality.
And make his own constituents pay more.
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