On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- All the ways in which Matos is seeming desperate
- Raimondo puts the U.S. next in line
- An RIGOP “debate” in the absence of strategy
- Bartholomew others a Block Island bar
Featured image from Sabina Matos’s campaign website.
[Open full post]
In part to answer curiosity about whether regulation of our elections in Rhode Island (through campaign finance laws) has been reducing participation, Anchor Rising has added an interactive tool to our People’s Data Armory. The page provides a filterable chart (with access to the underlying data) that shows the number of candidates who have qualified for the ballot during Rhode Island elections.
A decrease in candidates is what one would suspect. In business, regulation as a disincentive — a sort of tax — that increases the cost of startup and operation, which reduces incentive to participate at the margins. (That means people who find it a close, “marginal,” decision between starting a business or doing something else will be more likely to do the other thing. Of course, the same calculation applies if the something else is opening the same business somewhere else.)
State and local politics has the additional quality that many such roles are still considered to be an exercise of civic responsibility, so the pay isn’t great and is often nominal or nonexistent. This consideration is suggestive of another area worthy of investigation beyond the scope of this dataset: A candidate can have incentive to take a low-or-no-paying job if he or she can make money by some other means while or after holding that job. Thus, regulation of campaigns has the effect not only of limiting choice, but also of making it more likely the remaining choices will lean toward corruption.
Although such trends in political participation have many contributing causes, Rhode Island’s elections have, indeed, seen a pronounced decline in candidate participation, particularly among Republicans. Taking note of the fact that the line for Democrats tends swing substantially between gubernatorial and presidential years (with the former being higher), Democrats have seen an 8% drop in qualified candidates for public office at all levels.
Republicans’ decrease has been several times more dramatic. Even with a surge in 2022, 22% fewer Republicans qualified for office in 2022 than 2006. The decrease had been 47% in 2020.
Readers can play with the various filters to get as specific to offices or races as they like. In that direction, I’d note that “legislative” offices (General Assembly, municipal councils, and school committees) maintained their candidate bases reasonably well, at least among Democrats; Republicans were on the decline until the 2022 surge. Given that these are typically among the archetypal low-to-no-pay (but powerful) government jobs, I’d repeat my warning above that we could be selecting for people who have some other way to make money from their positions.
The following chart, in contrast, shows the very dramatic drop in the number of qualified candidates for all other local offices. Here, we’re looking at local administrators (mayors, clerks, treasurers, and so on) as well as other boards that are frequently seen as pure civic responsibility roles (budget committees, planning commissions, etc.). Whatever the significance of the offices themselves, they are crucial as stepping-stones for people who are not career politicians or do not benefit through special interest ties (like labor unions), but just get the bug to participate in government.
Again, many factors contribute to these trends. Anybody participating in hyperlocal governance knows that modern life’s many distractions have reduced engagement. Still, the decrease is unhealthy — limiting voters’ choices, tilting incentives toward corruption, and separating We the People from the exercise of government authority. Whatever other factors may be in play, the steadily increasing regulation of political engagement certainly hasn’t helped and should be reformed.
As a starting point, legislators should begin discussing an exemption for some of the hyperlocal offices that are essentially volunteer opportunities for civic-minded Rhode Islanders. This would limit regulation to those with greater responsibility and, probably, a little more experience. Then, if we see recovery in the last chart of this post, we could make a strong case that electoral regulation is limiting our choices and our rights as citizens and balance that reality against the stated benefits of campaign finance.
Featured image by Josh Carter on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Money from nowhere for the stadium
- The latest variation on cross-over voting
- A need for strategy in the Leonard campaign
- McGowan’s Regunberg boost
- Ahlquist illustrates progressives falsity on a Woonsocket park bench
- Morgan’s double race
Featured image from Shutterstock.
[Open full post]
Toward the end of a generally compelling episode of EconTalk, psychiatrist Marcus Ramos slips in a term that may shed a light on some of the discord and lunacy we’re seeing in our society these days: liberation psychiatry, which he explains thus:
There are other ways of looking at mental illness from the past and through history in other settings outside of the United States–like in Latin America as well as Africa in post-colonial context–where mental health has specifically been linked to political and social mobilization, and in certain contexts they would consider it liberation. …
… it starts with a very simple idea, which is that: You cannot be mentally–you can’t have mental health unless you’re liberated from the social structures that are making you sick. And, if that’s the case, then there needs to be this palliative work, as you put it, that you’re talking where you support the person who’s being made ill by these larger social structures. But, there also needs to be political work on the part of the practitioner with their patients, to resist–to liberate them from–the things that are making them sick in society.
… The last, sort of–the way this loop completes, I think in many ways, is that: not only was the political action in many ways effective unevenly so, but in many ways effective in getting certain services for this community that had been affected. But also, psychologically, the process of politically organizing to speak back to the thing that had hurt you was psychologically therapeutic.
It’s unsurprising that the push to turn psychiatry into a form of political activism is originating in South America, which produced liberation theology and the politicized pedagogy of Paulo Freire that is ravaging America’s education system. In the realm of psychiatry, however, the problem is somewhat easier to see: If you build your activity, whether theology, education, or psychiatry, around political activism, you must necessarily find things to blame, and you must assume the solutions you come up with truly address the cause of the problems to which you’re responding. This is obviously vulnerable to both error and manipulation that serves some other political interest. The likelihood is high that neither the patient nor the therapist will have sufficient understanding to identify the real essential problem and prescribe the precise policy to resolve it, yet they must come up with something as a basic requirement of the treatment.
A related problem is that the patient won’t always win. If people feel they have identified an injustice and used political activism as a type of therapy, their condition could worsen if they lose the political fight, which they may very well do, and which they may very well deserve to do if they’ve chosen their cause poorly. Naturally, if they’ve been pointed at a cause for ulterior reasons, this worsening of their condition is a benefit, not a problem, because the cure will be to dive more deeply into the cause.
This approach could easily devolve into nothing but a scapegoating mechanism that generates a stream of impressionable activist troops. Whether one ascribes this inevitable sequence to an ideological conspiracy, the workings of Satan, or simply the random-but-constrained operation of human nature, the incentives line up for a deadly cocktail, undermining our society in a desperate search for the root causes of discomfort. Conspicuously, that destruction reduces stability, and thereby increases both the likelihood of tragedies and the psychological instability of the people.
As EconTalk host Russ Roberts points out, our society has already gone a long way toward undermining sources of belonging and meaning (family, religion, etc.). Now, the deconstructionist forces are attacking even the security of our trust in a stable reality. They’ve done this through fearmongering (“climate change”), identity politics (“trans”), and encouragement to reckless, destabilizing behavior (“pleasure-based sex education”).
The self-reinforcing cycle certainly seems designed, rather than accidental: The movement initiates psychological instability and then prescribes political activism as a combined therapy and solution. All that remains is to choose a political target that serves the special interest guiding the process. To the extent their stated intentions are genuine, academics like Ramos and others rolling the stone toward the hill seem not to be cognizant of the risk. Ramos laments the influence of powerful moneyed interests in psychiatry and elsewhere but doesn’t appear to see that powerful moneyed interests are ideally positioned to manipulate the process he’d set in motion.
The rest of us must challenge this movement at each step and reinforce in our policies and our own lives the necessary solutions — family, religion, limited government, civil rights, and community. As we do so, we’ll have to withstand the attacks on the institutions in which to bond, because the activists will fling epithets and tar them as evil (e.g., “white supremacy”), and they’ll see assaulting us verbally and physically as part of their therapy. But our burden can be made lighter with reminders that, yes, we are sane, and what our attackers need most is the stability we’re seeking to establish.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
[Open full post]
Whether Rhode Island’s health insurers are overreaching in their requested premium increases for the upcoming year is a question I lack the time and expertise to answer, but I can say that a recent news splash from Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha has enough markers of political propaganda to justify suspicion about his findings. Worse, the local news media do nothing but amplify his spin, leaving Rhode Islanders severely underinformed and therefore unable to make reasoned decisions.
Let’s trace the inquiry backwards from a key section of Alexa Gagosz’s Boston Globe article:
Many of these companies have posted enormous profits in recent years, Neronha said. Cigna, for example, requested an increase of 5.9 percent in the large group market, after it reported a total adjusted revenue of more than $180 billion in 2022 and its profit topped $1.2 billion. The company also projected adjusted revenue of $187 billion this year.
Aetna, which is owned by Woonsocket-based CVS Health, requested a 6.6 percent rate increase in the large group market after posting a $91.4 billion revenue in 2022. Aetna ultimately contributed to CVS’s $4.1 billion profit in 2022. On Tuesday, Neronha stressed in a statement that the insurers’ increased financial resources should be “passed on to benefit consumers” by making their coverage more affordable.
The first thing to note is that Gagosz simply repackaged key parts of Neronha’s press release. “Enormous profits,” for instance, is his language, not hers, and she presented his talking points without doing any work to provide context. Although she has updated her article since I brought this problem up on Tuesday on Twitter, she originally didn’t address the fact that revenue is not profits, the latter of which must take into account the level of expenditures. A business can have massive revenue and still experience a loss, which the attorney general — the attorney general! — glossed over in his press release.
That’s only the start of the obvious spin. Following the links in Neronha’s press release to his actual reports brings up more questions. Notably, most of his contentious claims about revenue don’t come from analysis, but from casual online research, which is sometimes analysis of analysis of actual data. By the time we get to the press release and the news articles about it, important context is completely lost.
For the lead example of “enormous profits,” Neronha cites Cigna, but according to his own report, that company covers a single group of 325 people in Rhode Island. The company’s profits — which, according to Gagosz, amount to less than 1% of its revenue — have hardly anything at all to do with the Ocean State.
The other examples have similar problems. Note the carefully crafted language in Gagosz’s article: “Aetna ultimately contributed to CVS’s $4.1 billion profit in 2022.” She cites the profit of the entire retail, pharmacy, clinic, and insurance conglomerate that is CVS as if that is a reflection of its insurance arm! She also skips the information in the first paragraph of her source, which acknowledges that CVS’s profits were down nearly by half from the prior year.
In that context, it’s significant to note that Rhode Island’s insurance commissioner limited insurers to a 1% profit last year. In other words, Neronha’s implicit case is that these companies should redistribute their profits from other states and entirely separate types of business activity to Rhode Islanders in the form of artificially low rates. That’s all well and good as long as the state can force it, but businesses don’t have to offer insurance in our state at all, and the less competition we have, the more political influence the remainders will have.
The most important bit of information we lose in these propagandistic headlines, however, is that Rhode Island’s high insurance rates are more a function of bad policy from the State House, not corporate greed. Mandates limit choice, which drives up price. Squeeze the insurers, and they’ll squeeze the providers, and we’ll get fewer providers… which will drive up the price of those who remain until the market finds an equilibrium. We can be sure, in all this, that Rhode Islanders will lose out on the deal, because as the willingness to spin us shows, nobody’s really trying to keep us well informed or supported.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
[Open full post]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Campaign finance and election cheating
- Regunberg brings in the big guns (his parents)
- CD1 competitors play the race card
- RIGOP’s lack of message
Featured image by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash.
[Open full post]
Update: The RI BOE voted 5-2 today to review all of the signatures on Sabina Matos’ nomination papers. Ms. Matos is on the Democrat primary ballot for the RI CD1 special election and ballots have already been mailed out to military and out-of-country voters. It is unclear if the outcome of the BOE’s review would result in her being disqualified from the ballot.
It is important to note up front that the Rhode Island Board of Elections was in a no-win situation. Either properly certifying candidates for the ballot or meeting process deadlines: they were not going to be able to execute at least one aspect of their important role in finalizing the ballot for Rhode Island’s CD1 special election.
Three local boards of canvassers, followed swiftly by WPRI and NBC 10, had discovered multiple fraudulent signatures on the nomination papers of Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos.
The schedule was too tight for the BOE to properly address this disturbing discovery within the requisite timeframe, as the Chairwoman noted to NBC 10.
“The time between certification and the printing of the ballots is insufficient to address any potential irregularities in nomination papers,” Board of Elections Chairwoman Diane Mederos said.
Correct. Faced with this quandary, however, the BOE chose to comply with a too-tight deadline rather than ensure signature and ballot integrity for the CD1 special election. Despite doubts about the validity of Matos’ 728 “certified” signatures, the BOE declined to review them and declared that she had qualified for the ballot.
This was exactly the wrong priority. Integrity of the ballot and properly qualifying candidates for it is paramount for the BOE and for Rhode Island.
They needed to stop everything and check that Matos had enough valid signatures to be on the ballot. Yes, they almost certainly would have missed the deadline to print ballots. Yes, the dates of the primary and general election would almost certainly have to have been pushed back.
And when they were criticized for this, their response should have been, “Step off. We did our job. Rhode Islanders and CD1 voters can have full confidence that all candidates on the ballot have properly qualified. Don’t look to us about unrealistic deadlines. Get with whoever set them.”
The BOE is meeting now for a second time post-certification about the Matos nomination papers. They also need to re-examine and refocus on their primary mission. It is NOT to comply with unrealistic timeframes.
Image: Sample Ballot from RI Secretary of State’s website
[Open full post]
Do we have a test case, for bringing this session’s Supreme Court’s ruling in Tyler v. Hennepin County to Rhode Island?
In Tyler v. Hennepin County, in a refreshingly short 9-0 opinion, the Court ruled that when local governments seize property over unpaid taxes, they are only entitled to keep what was owed. So after Hennepin County in Minnesota seized Geraldine Tyler’s $40,000 home over $15,000 in unpaid taxes, it had a duty to return the difference of $25,000 to her. Or as the unanimous majority wrote in the conclusion of its opinion:
A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed. The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.
Now move over to Rhode Island and Antonia Noori Farzan‘s story in today’s Providence Journal:
Records show that the City of Providence could be at risk of losing Camp Cronin, its seaside camp in Narragansett, over unpaid property taxes.
The city spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to renovate the long-neglected Ocean Road property last year, but failed to pay the $16,721 that it owed in back taxes.
Consequently, the property went up for a tax sale in October. The lien was purchased for $17,006 by Airway Leasing LLC…
Under state law, Providence can hold onto the property if it pays off the lien – plus interest and any additional fees that the investors tack on – within a year of the tax sale.
If that doesn’t happen, Airway Leasing can foreclose and acquire the 2-acre summer camp, which is valued at nearly $1.1 million, for less than the price of a new Honda Civic.
There are multiple ways this could play out; Providence could pay the back tax bill, which it owes under any scenario, along with some reasonable expenses and close this out by-the-book. On the other hand, under the precedent set in Tyler, Providence could also say to Narragansett, hey we understand, you did what you had to do, and the matter can be settled with a check to cover the $1 million-plus that you now owe us.
[Open full post]
Last week came the good news (for our electric bills) that Rhode Island Energy, formerly National Grid, had declined the Revolution Wind 2 offshore wind proposal.
A week prior, John Kerry, President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, departed from China without accomplishing his mission; namely, to
… use climate co-operation to redefine their [US and China’s] troubled relationship and lead the way in tackling global warming
By having both countries give up their reliable, reasonably priced fuel source, of course. But did you know that Mr. Kerry has stated previously that even if the two biggest emitters of manmade greenhouse gases, China (27%) and the United States (11%) gave up fossil fuels and somehow achieved zero emissions, it wouldn’t stop global warming?
“The United States could go to zero tomorrow—I mean we can’t but if you’re figuratively speaking could go to zero—we’d still have a problem. The world would still have a problem,” Kerry told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart. He continued, “If China went to zero tomorrow with the United States, we’d still have a problem. So every country has to come to the table. This is the single biggest multilateral, global negotiation that the world has ever needed.”
Quite the startling statement by someone whose anthropogenic global warming (AGW) credentials are impeccable. In fact, the consensus among AGW advocates and scientists, including the IPCC, is that all countries must go to zero emissions to avoid catastrophic consequences.
Here’s the problem. In that case, the effort to stop global warming DOESN’T GET OUT OF THE STARTING BLOCK. The biggest generator of manmade greenhouse gas, China, will not participate. So there is no point in any other country, much less the smallest state in the second biggest emitter, abating a single molecule of any greenhouse gas.
Here’s the situation with China. AGW advocates in the United States like to brag about all of the renewable energy that China has recently brought on line. But the reality is that China takes an all-source approach to its power needs, cranking both renewables and fossil fuel production. And in the absence of an inexpensive, reliable substitute, the government of China will never give up fossil fuels, the biggest component of their (and many countries’) energy portfolio.
Is this because the government believes this is in the best interest of its citizens? Well, sort of. More immediate, though, is the implication to its political power. Russian-British comedian and social commentator, Konstantin Kisin, explains this plainly in the course of his remarks to the Oxford Union mid-January. Of the 120 million Chinese people who currently suffer from malnutrition, Kissin succinctly observed,
You’re not going to get them to stay poor.
Because the lack of reasonably priced, reliable energy correlates directly to widespread poverty and malnutrition. Which, in turn, would directly correlate to a loss of political power for the current leaders of China. Kisin continued,
And you know that the main thing you have to do to survive and to stay in power is to deliver the one thing that the people of China want: prosperity, economic growth. Where do you think climate change ranks on Xi Jinping’s list of priorities?
In short, the biggest generator of greenhouse gases will not relinquish fossil fuels because that would mean relinquishing political power.
And we are watching this happen in real time. Far from eschewing fossil fuels, China has increased their coal powered energy production, as NPR reported earlier this year. In fact,
China has six times as much [coal] plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined.
That China has concurrently boosted solar and wind production doesn’t cancel out the effects of their coal plants. Remember, there has to be zero greenhouse gas emissions to stop (hypothesized) catastrophic global warming.
What does all this mean for Rhode Island? Our leaders and legislators have set a goal of 100% renewable electricity by 2030 and zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This spring, Governor McKee announced that the state will promulgate a regulation to implement a phased-in ban of the sale of all gas and diesel vehicles in the state.
They have done so with largely good if misguided and highly misinformed intentions. But have they considered the cost, feasibility and impact of doing so?
As for cost and feasibility: no, they did not consider these two critical matters, as I reported in 2021 on the Ocean State Current.
What about the impact and effects on Rhode Island of giving up fossil fuels and going to zero emissions? Have state leaders and legislators considered this?
Almost certainly not. A smooth transition from fossil fuels to renewables that does not collapse Rhode Island’s electric grid and freeze every water pipe in the state at the onset of the first winter is all but impossible for several intractable reasons up to and including laws of physics. Even imagining the rosiest of transition scenarios, Rhode Island residents, businesses and healthcare facilities would face a costly and unsustainable future struggling to pay their electric and HVAC bills.
But let us be clear-eyed. The most important effect, from the perspective of AGW advocates in the General Assembly, would be none of that. It would be the impact on global warming of Rhode Island going to zero emissions. And that impact would be zero. John Kerry himself has said as much. Because, as Konstantin Kisin correctly notes,
The future of the climate is going to be decided in Asia and in Latin America …
Not by the United States, much less Rhode Island.
Images Credits:
John Kerry – U.S. Department of State.
Coal – Julia Filirovska via Pexels.
Map of China – Lucas George Wendt via Pexels.
[Open full post]
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- GOP’s De La Cruz’s nonchalance about election insecurity and Miller vandalism
- Our uncurious, anti-MAGA media
- The rep and the sip joints
- RI’s socialists’ change their name
Featured image from Shutterstock.
[Open full post]