RI Democrats have been promising some tax relief recently, and now they’ve apparently realized that spending reductions are a good idea, too:
Senate leaders yesterday offered what they hailed as a “property-tax reduction plan.”
. . . Senate Democrats — led by Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano and Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed — suggested the legislature instead take steps to rein in future growth in state and local spending. . .
The senators are proposing to lower, over six years, the current ceiling on annual city and town spending increases from 5.5 percent to 4 percent of the tax levy, starting in fiscal year 2008. . .Similarly, the senators are seeking to lower, by 2012, the cap on state spending increases from 5.5 percent of total appropriations, including federal funds, to 4.5 percent of all state taxes and fees.
After years of nudging from school superintendents across the state, they also pledged their support to a bill, introduced by Sen. Maryellen Goodwin on March 9, that would prohibit the state from imposing any new mandates on local school districts “without the provision of adequate and commensurate funding by and from the state to insure that the city or town is able to pay for such mandate.”
…the senators pledged “to continue to work on reducing the property-tax burden of Rhode Islanders” by launching a new study of school financing, and accumulating information on all current tax treaties, exemptions and freezes granted across the state.
The story is devoid of any specifics as to what type of spending is going to be reduced. Instead, we are left with a promise to reduce unfunded mandates, to decrease the amount of annual budget increases via a new spending cap and the commissioning of various “studies.”
This seems like a nice conceptual and structural change, but what exactly, pray tell, do the Democrats plan on cutting? Do they really need more time to “study” the problem? It’s a bit disingenuous to lambaste the Governor for his proposed budget cuts and then–instead of countering with your own specific cuts–issue a vague, non-specific promise of reductions. Anyone can get behind the idea of cutting government spending, I’ll take the Democrats seriously when they actually put forward some specific cuts.
Here is the meat and potatoes of what the Giuliani group found in their audit of Beacon Mutual [the whole report is here (PDF)]. First, we have the in house problems:
Beacon executives maintained a VIP list of about a dozen companies, some of which received favorable treatment resulting in lower workers’ comp rates. Solomon denied the list’s existence to Giuliani’s investigators, but told another Beacon executive to delete it from his computer.
Beacon paid some insurance agents “significantly greater” commissions than required under their contracts — about $2.5 million from 2001 to 2004.
Beacon’s longtime chairman, Sheldon Sollosy, who resigned in February, misused his position by refusing to provide the insurer with payroll records for a company he owned, Temporary Manpower Services. His refusal, “ignored” by Beacon management even though it violated Beacon policy, made it impossible to determine whether Sollosy’s company paid the rates it should have.
Beacon’s president, Joseph A. Solomon, had granite countertops installed in the kitchen of his East Greenwich house by a company that received undocumented breaks on its workers’ comp insurance. An executive of the stone-working company told investigators that the $10,000 Solomon paid for the kitchen work didn’t cover the total cost. Solomon said in an interview that the cost was only slightly higher, but the contractor honored his original quote of $10,000. The report found no evidence of a “quid pro quo.”
Solomon and three Beacon insurance agents used Beacon funds to help pay for a trip to the exclusive Carnegie Club at Skibo Castle in the Scottish highlands three years ago. Solomon said in an interview that Beacon spent $19,000 on the trip.
The report also found “weak or non-existent” policies at Beacon regarding corporate governance, ethics and internal auditing, as well as “inadequate” financial checks and balances that invited potential, and actual, abuse.
Controls are so lacking, and special deals so prevalent among the limited number of policies reviewed, the Giuliani review found, that several Beacon employees said that “two underwriters given the same information will come to two different conclusions” regarding the rate that a company should pay.
Then there’s a bit more on those “special” deals:
The Giuliani report cites several instances in which companies may have paid lower rates as a result of misclassified workers.
The report cited evidence of “misclassifications of payroll” at Temporary Manpower Services. Over a nine-year period ending in 2002, just before Sollosy sold the company and canceled his policy, Beacon lost money on Manpower six years, paying out more in injury claims than it collected in premiums.
The report also quotes an internal Beacon analysis in 2002 highlighting “numerous areas” in which Manpower received “preferential treatment,” including credits that normally go to companies (based on their safety records, and a lower volume of claims), but which Beacon didn’t normally grant to temp agencies. But nothing changed.
Investigators expressed concern that while Sollosy’s company received “special treatment,” Sollosy, as head of Beacon’s compensation committee, recommended board approval of “excessive” compensation packages for Beacon executives, including Solomon, who has a $490,000 salary and a $3-million severance package.
Sollosy was also the lone person to approve Solomon’s travel expenses, and did so after the fact, including the trip to Scotland, the report said.
The Giuliani team tried to interview Sollosy, but he declined, on the advice of his lawyer, Peter A. DiBiase. (DiBiase could not be reached for comment.)
In the case of Paul Arpin Van Lines, the report found credits that were “unearned and unwarranted due to a history of losses,” as well as “incorrect” classifications of workers.
During an overlapping period, from 2001 to 2005, Beacon reimbursed Arpin $450,000 for its use of a luxury box for New England Patriots football games. Solomon has said that Beacon used the box to entertain valued clients and insurance brokers, but discontinued the practice early this year to avoid controversy.
An Arpin official did not return a call seeking comment.
Investigators also found evidence that the Cardi Corp. did not have any employees classified as bridge workers, even though there is “ample evidence” that Cardi is involved in bridge construction, including the company’s own Web site and “at least one claim” involving an injury related to bridge construction.
Beginning in 2003, the report says, Beacon loss-prevention employees “began to insist” that bridge workers be included in Cardi’s policy, bolstering their case with an auditor’s visit to a Cardi construction site and photos of Cardi employees performing bridge work. But to date, Cardi does not pay any premiums for bridge workers.
A Cardi spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.
The report also questioned Beacon’s due diligence in checking the payrolls and job classifications at Lifespan, by far its largest policyholder, with nearly $5 million in premiums last year. Lifespan’s three-year guaranteed rate was “highly unusual and not customary,” the report said.
Jane Bruno, a spokeswoman for Lifespan, said the company was above-board in its dealings with Beacon, and would not have done business with the insurer without a multiyear guarantee.
And all of this even though the Beacon Mutual guys weren’t that forthcoming. Imagine what will be found when the state insurance investigators–who have subpoena power–get in there. Of course, the fact that they can’t look at those hard drives isn’t very helpful, is it?
[Open full post]I’ve been meaning to comment on RI Populist’s apparent satisfaction over Sheldon Whitehouse’s receipt of the carpenters union endorsement. As a non-union carpenter whose job site has recently been within sight of Whitehouse’s Newport summer home castle — nestled between, I’m informed, his brother’s mansion and his mother’s chateau and a short drive from his grandparents’ controversial estate — I’d suggest that Whitehouse’s interests align with those of the average Rhode Island worker’s in about the same degree as an ocean’s with a puddle’s on a hot day.
Somehow, through my dust-tinted work goggles, I can’t help but observe cynical posturing in another of RI Populist’s recent posts:
This letter to the editor is a testament to… the shame of politicians like Don Carcieri and Steve Laffey who made their millions at the top of the mountain of big corporations and who now use their elected office to chip away at the mole-hill of power that workers have won through unions. Without unions, only an exclusive few would have the quality of life that so many Americans now enjoy. It’s as simple as that.
Personally, in my simplicity, I prefer to construct my mole-hill of satisfaction of the moments during which I’m privileged to enjoy scenery to which the ultrawealthy are privy, but of which, one suspects, they are rarely appreciative. It’s all a matter of perspective, of course, but I find the daylight a bit more crisp out from under the shadows of Rhode Island’s Everest of organized labor and those exclusive few who’ve never worked a “[bleep]ing day” in their lives, to quote another of our state’s pampered supposed populists.
[Open full post]At National Review Online, Ramesh Ponnuru offers his analysis of the Massachusetts healthcare plan, and offers a few suggestions to Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney…
The governor has the ability to make modifications to this legislation through a line-item veto. He should use it to eliminate the mandates on coverage, strike the business taxes, and get rid of the individual mandate to buy insurance. (Or at least soften that mandate: His original proposal gave individuals more options in insuring themselves — some of them pretty creative — and did not rely on fines for enforcement.) Even if the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature rejects his changes, conservatives will appreciate his having made the effort.Ponnuru notes that Governor Romney’s original preference included a wider range of catastrophic insurance plans…
Romney proposed eliminating laws that made it hard to sell cheap, no-frills, high-deductible catastrophic insurance policies. (Make insurance more attractive to healthy young people, and you might not need to force them to buy it.) But the legislature refused to eliminate mandates on coverage, and required zero deductibles for the new plans for low-income people.The legislature’s refusal to create more insurance options should remind people that much of the source of our healthcare “crisis” is not implacable macroeconomic forces spiraling out of control, but bad government decisions that can be undone. We would face an “automobile ownership” crisis — many people unable to buy cars — if laws were passed making new BMW’s the only type of car allowed to be sold. There’s a place in the market for Ford Escorts as well as BMWs.
It’s important for the citizens of Rhode Island to be aware of both this overriding principle and of the details of the Massachusetts plan, because Rhode Island may try to implement something similar in the near future. This is from a Felice J. Freyer article from Monday’s Projo�
Rhode Island health-care leaders are watching with intense but wary interest as Massachusetts launches a landmark plan to provide health coverage for nearly everyone in the state…Unfortunately, if history is any guide, our state legislature is likely to Rhode Islandize the Massachusetts plan, implementing the features that maximize revenues collected by the government, whether or not they lead to an effective health insurance program. [Open full post]
“People have already approached me — ‘what would it take to do something like that here?’ ” said Christopher F. Koller, Rhode Island’s health insurance commissioner. “There’s an appetite for looking at this. There’s a lot of potential applications for Rhode Island”…
Our goals are the same,” said Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, a candidate for governor. “We want to see all our citizens have health insurance. . . . If we make it a priority in Rhode Island, I think we can do it. . . . We may not be able to do it in one giant step as they did in Massachusetts”…
[State Senator Elizabeth] Roberts, like others, said she wants every Rhode Islander to have health insurance and is eager to learn the details of the Massachusetts law. She pointed out that many Rhode Islanders work and obtain health insurance in Massachusetts, so there will be “a lot of transfer of information and experience.”
David Boaz, the Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, recently wrote these words about why lobbyist reform initiatives will fail:
When you spread food out on a picnic table, you can expect ants. When you put $3 trillion on the table, you can expect special interests, lobbyists and pork-barrel politicians.
That’s the real lesson of the Abramoff scandal.
Jack Abramoff may have been the sleaziest of the Washington lobbyists but he’s not unique. As the federal government accumulates more money and more power, it draws more lobbyists like honey draws flies.
People invest money to make money. In a free economy they invest in building homes and factories, inventing new products, finding oil, and other economic activities. That kind of investment benefits us all — it’s a positive-sum game, as economists say. People get rich by producing what other people want.
But you can also invest in Washington. You can organize an interest group, or hire a lobbyist, and try to get some taxpayers’ money routed to you. That’s what the farm lobbies, AARP, industry associations, and teachers unions do. And that kind of investment is zero-sum — money is taken from some people and given to others, but no new wealth is created…
The number of companies with registered lobbyists is up 58 percent in six years. The amount of money lobbyists report spending has risen from $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion in that time…
And why not? After all, federal spending is up 39 percent in the same period. That means another $640 billion a year for interest groups to get their hands on.
With federal spending approaching $3 trillion a year — and even more money moved around by regulations and the details of tax law — getting a piece of that money can be worth a great deal of effort and expense…
Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek explained the process 60 years ago in his prophetic book The Road to Serfdom: “As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power.”
The United States is not Russia or Nigeria, states where government power really is the only thing worth having. But when the government has more money and power, then more of society’s resources will tend to be directed toward influencing government…
Abramoff specialized in manipulating regulations, especially the licensing of casinos. If gambling wasn’t so tightly licensed and regulated, then it wouldn’t produce extraordinary profits and lavish lobbying…But his efforts were small potatoes compared with the hugely expensive and complex programs of the federal government and the lobbying generated by all that spending and regulation.
During the 1970s, when Congress created massive new government regulations, businesses had to invest more heavily in lobbying. Some of it was defensive — to try to minimize the cost and burden of regulation.
But of course some of the lobbying was more cynical, to ensure that costs fell more heavily on competitors. One study in 1980 showed that 65 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies came to Washington at least every two weeks. That was up sharply from 1971, when only 15 percent of CEOs visited Washington even once a month…
Meanwhile, the taxpayers have little voice in the halls of Congress. The National Taxpayers Union spent less than $175,000 on lobbying in 2004. And the NTU is one of the very few organizations whose lobbying is aimed at decreasing the size and overall reach of government.
As long as the federal government has so much money and power to hand out, we’ll never get rid of the Abramoffs. Restrictions on lobbying deal with symptoms, not causes.
Boaz’ thoughts build on the thoughts of Walter Williams and Frederich Hayek, as highlighted in this posting. Follow the link in that posting to another posting with multiple examples of how both political parties are guilty of increasing the size of government at the expense of working families and retirees all across America.
The issue is the engorged size of government, which only benefits the powerful – be they corporations, unions or any other significant special interest.
Why do we tolerate this?
Mark Krikorian makes a couple interesting points related to the current illegal immigration debate, which both touch on the “wisdom” of the so-called “elite.” First:
…our elite has so completely erased the distinction between citizens and foreigners, devaluing the meaning of Americanness to merely working and paying taxes on American territory, that the illegals (and legal non-citizens) actually have come to believe [that they’re Americans] — and are simply demanding the fulfillment of what they consider to already have been promised. Obviously, the point is not to excuse the foreigners’ will to power, but rather that you teach people how to treat you — and we’ve taught foreigners to make these aggressive demands against us.
Just as illegals are marching in the streets demanding not just amnesty but, let’s face it, open borders, the intellectual elite is increasingly coming to consensus that mass immigration is bad for America’s poor. After Bob Samuelson and Paul Krugman recently came out of the closet, Nicholas Kristof did the same in yesterday’s N.Y. Times:
An influx of hundreds of thousands more unskilled laborers would impoverish them [America’s poor] further — and to me, that does not feel like compassion.
This last is a compelling argument. Of course, what do we mean by “poverty” in contemporary America? Also, if there was more incentivizing on both the worker end and the employer end to help employ more of our poor citizens in those jobs that “only” illegals would do, I’d be more willing to accept this liberal argument.
Many anti-poverty groups are quite “inclusive” in their championing of the poor (public health care for illegal immigrant children) and walk hand-in-hand with “immigration” advocacy groups (they never say they’re “illegal” immigration advocacy groups) that help illegal immigrants get public aid.
Thus, the liberal groups have it right: the public entitlement debate (welfare reform, social security reform) is intertwined with the illegal immigrant debate. I don’t think that an attempt by liberal “elites” to draw a distinction between American poor and the poor in America will be very attractive to their otherwise fellow-traveller, pro-illegal immigrant and redistributionist, anti-poverty brethren.
Finally, (and I shouldn’t have to say it) I’m not “for” poverty and don’t want to see poor kids abandoned on the streets, but more tax dollars money for more programs isn’t the answer. I think we Rhode Islanders can atest that the easier we make it for people to live with the help of public “assistance” the more people we’ll find doing just that, whether they’re American citizens or not.
In Sunday’s ProJo, education columnist Julia Steiny explained how Rhode Island has attempted to use a theory of “equity” education funding. In this model, money from higher income districts goes to the poorer districts in the hope that the academic levels of poor students would improve to that of the better-off kids in rich and middle-class districts. However, this hasn’t seemed to work so a new theory–adequacy–is being studied.
Rhode Island, along with many other states is now commissioning an “adequacy study” [link to a word document] to get a handle on how much money it would take — minimally — to get most kids to proficiency. Rhode Island’s proposal defines it as “the amount of per pupil funding necessary to support an effective and efficient educational system.”
Like Steiny–who wrote, “I confess the word ‘adequacy’ gives me the chills, because it does not sound like it includes music or art, nor any shred of creativity.”–I’m a bit skeptical about what will be deemed “adequate,” too. Nonetheless, the goals of the study are worthwhile:
State Rep. and adequacy-study committee co-chairwoman Edith Ajello says. . . says that the committee’s charge is to identify the “lowest cost option” for educating each kid henceforth, without regard to how the money has been spent so far.
Commendably, they are studying how to exploit some obvious economies of scale of which this tiny state rarely avails itself, such as redesigning 36 different healthcare and transportation contracts and systems to be on a statewide basis. (Finally!)
But, Steiny points out some holes in their approach:
[Open full post]In an earlier posting, I introduced a book entitled The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today by Steven Malanga and a review of the book in the Claremont Review of Books. The core theme of the book was described by one reviewer as “American politics is not about [political] parties, it is about special interest group against special interest group.”
Expanding on that comment, here are some excerpts from the Introduction: Tax Eaters versus Taxpayers, where the author writes:
…A new political dynamic has slowly been emerging over the past forty years, a face-off between those who benefit from an expanding government and those who must pay for it – the tax-eaters versus the taxpayers…coalitions of public employees, staffers at publicy funded social-services programs, and the recipients of government aid have emerged as effective new political forces…
This increasingly powerful public-sector movement results from the joining together of two originally distinct forces. First are the government-employee unions…
For years, government employees had no right to organize, on the grounds that there was no competition in the delivery of government services and that therefore public unions could hold cities and states hostage by going on strike and denying essential services to the public…that began to change in the mid-1950’s…
…In 1960 the American Federation of Teachers mapped out a controversial strategy to win collective bargaining rights for teachers around the country, using…labor-friendly New York City as a test case…
…most of the warnings voiced about public-employee unions in those tumultuous years have proven accurate. Political leaders and labor experts predicted that government-employee unions would use their power over public services to win contracts with work rules far more generous and undemanding than in the private sector; and that without the restraints on salaries and benefits that the free marketplace imposes on private firms, unions would win increasingly meaty compensation packages that would be impossible to restrain or to roll back…
But what critics did not anticipate was how far public-employee unions would move beyond collective bargaining to inject themselves into the electoral and legislative processes…
Reinforcing the public-employee unions in the powerful new coalition of tax-eaters are the social-services groups created by the War on Poverty. Nominally private, they are sustained by and organized around public funding…This flood of money transformed many formerly private welfare organizations into government contractors, and their employees into quasi-public workers. It also spurred the creation of vast new networks of such organizations…
This social-services funding vastly expanded the publicly supported workforce almost overnight…
Almost from the War on Poverty’s inception, these social-services employees and their clients began to show themselves as a powerful political force…
The gradual government takeover…has transformed…institutions, executives, and workers into unremitting lobbyists for ever greater public monies and expanding programs, and tireless foes of efforts to restrain costs…
The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition of tax eaters – public-employee unions, hospitals and healthcare -worker unions, and social-services agencies – has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country’s national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy…
Increasingly in cities around the country, the road to electoral success passes through the public-employee/health/social-services sector…
One reason why these politicians have succeeded electorally is that those who work in the tax-eater sector clearly have different voting priorities from private-sector workers or business owners…
….public-sector workers, who realize they are going to the polls to elect their bosses, make sure to remember to vote…
With so much of their economic future at stake in elections, the tax eaters have emerged as the new infantry of political campaigns, replacing the ward captains and district leaders of old-time political clubs…
Although it started out as a romantic but wrongheaded idea, the War on Poverty was the child of idealists who really believed that a benevolent, paternalistic government could offer solutions that America’s private economy couldn’t provide for the poor. But the most cherished ideals and programs of the movement have turned out to demonstrably wrong…
By the mid-1990’s, Americans were eager for reform, and they got it…
In the face of such results, the new urban left has emerged as an increasingly cynical coalition, ever more focused on goals that benefit its members and their allies, even thought it retains the jargon of “social justice.”…
Regardless of how transparent its aims now seem, this new coalition will remain formidable because the tax-eater sector is now so large in many cities and states that it can easily thwart reforms aimed at undermining its programs. With much of the legislative agenda merely concerned with expanding programs and enacting laws that add to its own numbers, the New New Left may be in the ascendancy for a long time to come.
A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled GM, France and Albany: What the declines of all three have in common (available for a fee) states:
[Open full post]At first glance, they seem to have little in common. But the riots in France over labor reform, the slow-motion suicide of General Motors, and the continuing decline of the New York economy all share one defining trait: entrenched and unchangeable union power.
These columns have always favored the right to collectively bargain…we should [not] fail to appreciate the consequences when unions become entrenched inside any organization…unions do not provide individual job or income security. On the contrary, they undermine security by contributing to broader business and economic decline.
At the national level, the French example is clear enough. While the French private sector is less unionized than America’s, it must cope with mandated work rules that make it all but impossible to fire someone; so naturally companies are also reluctant to hire. The jobless rate is double America’s, while youth unemployment is 23%. More significant is that the political clout of public-sector unions has blocked all but minor changes in these rules. Public-sector workers account for more than a quarter of the entire French work force (6.4 million of out 24.6 million), and their salaries and pensions made up 45% of the entire state budget as recently as 2003.
The current French protests are in response to a modest change that would allow employers to fire people under age 26 more easily. So entrenched has the politics of union entitlement become in France that even at the onset of their careers these young protesters are demanding security over opportunity. In the global economy, this means they will end up with less of both.
France remains a wealthy country, and its economic decline can be masked for a time as it lives off accumulated capital. But already the promises that its unions have extracted from the government seem unlikely to be kept. A growth rate of between 1% and 2% a year won’t be enough to finance the pensions and health care of an aging nation. And facing up to those facts will require an increasingly painful political reckoning.
Here in the U.S., the same burden is slowly crippling New York…Power in the state capital of Albany is shared by Republicans and Democrats. But both parties bow before the public-sector unions, especially the teachers, and the health-care workers…
…New York’s Medicaid costs are higher than those of Texas and Florida combined; a health-care insurance premium for a young family of four is roughly six times what it is across the border in Connecticut; and high-deductible health-savings accounts that can help the self-employed afford insurance can’t even be offered in the state…
Another union-driven business cost is workers’ compensation, and in New York the average cost per claim is second highest in the nation (after Louisiana) and 72% higher than the national average…
…upstate [New York] is a different story, with jobs and young people fleeing to better business climes. New York manufacturing employment fell by 41% between 1990 and 2005, or double the national rate.
Even Eliot Spitzer recently referred to upstate New York as “Appalachia.” Alas, the Attorney General shows no sign of understanding that the heart of the problem lies in Albany…
As for GM, its management mistakes are legion and its weak product line well-known. But the root of its problem is that it long ago became a corporate version of the welfare state, with the same entrenched union interests…the size of its market dominance going back to its heyday 40 years ago allowed its managers to avoid confronting its uncompetitive wages, benefits and work rules even as they saw Toyota and Honda gaining in the rearview mirror.
In retrospect, GM management should have provoked a union showdown. Yet only a very brave CEO would have been willing to risk a potentially catastrophic strike on his watch for the sake of making the company more competitive after he retired. In any case, would the United Auto Workers really have budged? In 1998, young executive and future CEO Rick Wagoner endured a 54-day UAW wildcat strike at two plants in Flint, Michigan, after GM had tried to change some production rules. The strike shut down most GM production in North America and cost the company some $2 billion. In the end GM caved and the UAW escaped, having made virtually no concessions.
Even now at auto-parts maker Delphi–which is already in Chapter 11–the UAW is declaring it will take a strike that could destroy both Delphi and GM rather than agree to Delphi’s proposed job cuts and work changes. As in France and New York, these union leaders would rather sink the company than make concessions that would reduce their own power.
This pattern has repeated itself again and again–in the steel and textile industries attacked by foreign competition, or the unionized grocery chains routed by Wal-Mart. The union answer has rarely been to work with a company to allow more job flexibility to become more competitive. The answer has typically been to seek a ruinous strike or lobby for political intervention that might stave off disaster for at best a few more years.
We recount all this because, even amid GM’s decline and France’s economic turmoil, most of America’s liberal elites refuse to draw the right lesson. They cling to the belief that if only the Democrats can retake Congress, or the union movement can once again organize more of the American labor force, the old economy of union-backed job security and egalite will return. Or, worse, they propose seceding from global competition via protectionism. It is all a delusion. Down that road lies France–a nice place to vacation, but you wouldn’t want to work there.
This is the central problem the liberal wing of the Democratic Party faces as it plots what to do if it does regain power this year, or in 2008…to govern for the long haul they need better ideas than trade barriers, a tax hike to increase the size of government, or the defense of the entitlement status quo.
They need to champion reforms to help individual workers better secure their own futures in a competitive global economy, rather than relying on the false hope of restoring the age of Walter Reuther. They need to promote portable pensions, cheaper health insurance and education choice. So far all we see is Jacques Chirac in American drag.
Here’s some more background on the new apparent GOP candidate for governor, Dennis Michaud. (And here’s the audio link of Dan Yorke breaking of the story). First is an academic article he co-wrote with Kaitlyn A. Murphy about the Quonset Development Corporation. (The article is available for a fee). Michaud made reference to his work on the QDC in a ProJo Op-Ed (July 2005) he co-authored with other Brown University professors in support of Beacon Mutual’s bid to privatize. The piece was aimed at showing how Governor Carcieri was inconsistent in approving the QDC’s privatization via separation from RIEDC but opposing the privatization of Beacon Mutual. (As previous posts have shown, it’s not quite that cut and dried). Finally, Prof. Michaud wrote about the responsibilities that the boards of public companies have in performing oversight on company management in the April 2005 edition of the Michael A. Kelly “Alert” (PDF). (He was also credited as being director of Brown University’s Corporate Governance Initiative at that time).
[Open full post]Ben Leubsdorf interviewed me for an article about Rhode Island blogs that appeared in yesterday’s Brown Daily Herald. The resulting piece makes for interesting reading, although I probably didn’t express my idealism about blogs as well as I might have. I did, however, try to stress that Anchor Rising is not mine alone, nor can I take total credit for its genesis. Sometimes, though, the restrictions on such pieces ween out the credit spreading.
[Open full post]