Keep an eye out for weeds that have purple-spotted stems and white, umbrella-like flowers:
[Open full post]Poison hemlock has made its way to all 50 states, including Rhode Island, except for Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, and Mississippi, so it’s something we’ll all likely deal with at some time or another.
Commonly found in yards and fields, on the sides of roads, and near waterways, poison hemlock is easy to spot. Towering between six and 10 feet, the deadly weed sports purple spots on the stem and white flowers that resemble a tiny umbrella.
For all the talk about equity and living wages in the Ocean State, we hear surprisingly little about the lack of opportunity and earnings growth for working people. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial understandably focuses on larger states, but Rhode Island makes an appearance, nonetheless:
Earnings nationwide rose 5.4% on average between the first quarters of 2022 and 2023, but much less in New York (2.6%), Indiana (2.6%), California (2.9%), Connecticut (3.4%), Rhode Island (3.6%), Maryland (4%), New Jersey (4.3%), Oregon (4.5%) and Illinois (4.6%). Apart from Indiana, these states are run by Democrats—and most have been for years. They boast high taxes and a high cost of living, which along with Covid lockdowns spurred increased out-migration during the pandemic.
The case that stagnant wages result from greedy bigwigs’ hoarding the money would seem difficult to make when the places with the most redistributive governments show the slowest growth in wages.
Wages provide only one of the discouraging trends Rhode Island is experiencing. Take a look of this map of states’ change in the number of children under five from 2020 to 2022. With a 3.9% drop, Rhode Island is well above the national average of a 3.3% drop. Few states are on the positive side of this trend, but those that managed to increase their numbers of young children are conspicuously the places that Rhode Islanders often mention when they talk about getting out of here: notably North and South Carolina and New Hampshire. For its part, Florida was only slightly in the negative.
Cause and effect is subtle on such questions, and states can adjust their policies in many ways depending on their circumstances, but Rhode Island is going in completely the wrong direction. We need economic opportunity so young families looking to exchange their work and talent for money and a future have reason to stay here. We’ll get that when we reduce government involvement. This is true not only because the competencies and incentives of government are poorly suited to the task, but also because their central activity is proving to be protection of special interests in the face of new generations and a changing technological and economic landscape. Those are Rhode Island’s greedy bigwigs — the very same ones driving an inflatable big and “fat cat” around the state in the hopes Rhode Islanders don’t realize that the union organizers are actually the real life manifestations of the ugly caricatures.
When opportunity abounds, we’ll all find ways to serve one another, which will naturally spread the wealth. In the Ocean State, we’re using politics as our means of fighting over a shrinking pool. One of these decades, a Democrat administration in Washington isn’t going to swoop in with a surge of borrowed money to save the day.
Reorganizing to the degree necessary to save Rhode Island is probably not feasible all at once, but as a start, we must begin talking about our very real problems to form a clearer picture of what’s being done to us and where we’re being taken.
Featured image by Ivan Vladimirov on WikiArt.
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Homelessness may be the most striking issue on the table in the degree to which proposed solutions conspicuously ignore causes. The attitude of the advocates and journalists seems to be that homelessness falls like an original cause on a metro area and can only be addressed through direct government reduction. That’s a careless approach; an extreme circumstance like homelessness in a modern city is some combination of personal, individual challenges and the local economic conditions.
In Rhode Island, one suspects the reluctance to focus on either contributor results from fear that the solutions that emerge will cut directly against the progressive grain of our state’s policies.
For a bit of test dye for this proposition, consider the fascinating and progressively counterintuitive study by University of California San Diego professor Seth Hill that justifies the title of this post. The abstract:
America’s cities continue to struggle with homelessness. Here I offer a fac-tor, the minimum wage, that adds to existing individual and structural explanations. If there are negative distributional consequences of minimum wages, they most likely harm the lowest-skill workers many of whom already face housing insecurity. To evaluate this argument, I study minimum wage changes in American cities and states 2006 to2019. Using difference-in-differences methods for staggered treatments I find that minimum wage increases lead to increased point-in-time homeless population counts. Further analysis suggests disemployment and rental housing prices, but not migration, as mechanisms. Scholars and policymakers who aim to understand and combat homelessness should consider labor market opportunities. Distributional consequences of minimum wage laws also merit further inquiry.
When the subject of the minimum wage comes up in policy debates, those who oppose it frequently insist it will reduce employment and force prices up. Being a human-natural system, the economy doesn’t usually do such things in a direct line. Effects are distributed. To keep his or her own costs down as much as possible in the face of government-imposed increases in the price of labor, the retailer leans on wholesalers and service providers, conserves commodities and utilities, and reduces the amount of employee time used. Meanwhile, those in the economy whose customers now have higher wages (like landlords) find the market price for their goods and services has gone up.
Depending on the size of the increase, minimum wage hikes won’t always jam the entire economic system, but they’ll gum it up over time as such regulations accumulate. The changes are too subtle and dependent on circumstances to capture starkly and immediately (especially in the face of political disagreement), but as Hill notes, the effect rolls downhill. Thus, the increase in homelessness; the real minimum wage is always zero. Hill finds that municipal areas that saw minimum wage increases of $2.50 over the five years from 2013 to 2018 experienced a 14% increase in homelessness. Higher wage raises averaged a 23% increase in homelessness.
Minimum wage regulations forbid workers from agreeing to take jobs at pay rates they otherwise would accept. Whether the correlation to homelessness is as direct as Hill suggests will hopefully come into focus with future research, but it’s certainly the sort of question we should be pondering as it becomes a greater social problem. Unfortunately, many of the loudest voices in politics (often for self-interested reasons) will refuse to believe that any such conclusion is even possible, whatever the numbers show.
Featured image by Matt Collamer on Unsplash.
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Returning to a longer once-a-week segment on WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Matos campaign signature saga
- Activists begin claiming oceanfront property
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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A lot going on, I know; e.g.,everybody good with their nomination signatures to get on the CD1 ballot …?
But I didn’t want to let this go by without flagging. Citing “higher proposed contract costs”, Rhode Island Energy, formerly National Grid, announced Tuesday that it declined the Revolution Wind 2 offshore wind proposal, the sole bid received in the most recent offshore wind solicitation.
Commonwealth Magazine calls this development “ominous”. No, actually, it is good news for our electric bills, at least short term. What is ominous is that the project may come back around, like an even more expensive bad penny.
… developers hope to rebid the contracts in the state’s next procurement in 2024, presumably at much higher prices.
“Much higher prices”?? Yikes, even before that, federal subsidies; installation and maintenance costs; its intermittency requiring either back up generating capacity or expensive battery storage; and state mandates for ratepayers to purchase it make wind power significantly more expensive than fossil fuel and nuclear. And looking ahead, wind power is projected to cost three times natural gas power, per the US Energy Information Administration .
The other major downside of offshore wind, as referenced above, is that it is “highly intermittent”; a.k.a., unreliable. The solution almost blithely proposed by renewables advocates is for the grid to purchase industrial battery storage; on the tab of the ratepayer, we should note. But battery storage is costly and the mining of a key component, lithium, is highly toxic.
It is important to identify the party responsible for this madness. It is not Rhode Island Energy. While they reiterated their support for “expansion of offshore wind in Rhode Island” in their statement Tuesday, they are just carrying out orders.
Culpability for the mandate to move Rhode Island away from reliable, reasonably priced fossil fuel energy sources towards expensive, not-ready-for-prime time energy sources rests entirely with the state’s leaders and legislators. They harbor intense, gauzy illusions about the feasibility and necessity of transitioning 100% to expensive, not-ready-for-prime time energy sources. They seem, at least at this point, comfortable – a little too comfortable – with saddling state rate-payers with exorbitantly high electric bills that will result in zero benefit to the planet and the state.
But for the moment, let us just dwell on Tuesday’s modest win and add a few other items of “good news”. Speaking of wind power, in case you missed it, someone has made the ground-breaking, greenhouse gas-busting discovery that ships can be propelled across the water … oooo, by wind. And it turns out that the Terminator, thank heavens, has been on the global warming case for a while. Don’t miss his new-fangled, zero emission way for you to dry your laundry, not to mention his … umm, novel carbon-capture method for tailpipe emissions. (Do NOT try this at home – or anywhere – kids.)
Still to be determined is whether the above newly-discovered wind method of propelling ships can be adapted to power Arnold’s private jet.
[Image: Nicholas Doherty via Unsplash]
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Kathy Gregg reports in the Providence Journal that the person who collected the nomination signatures for Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos’s congressional run that are being scrutinized as fraudulent in multiple communities is Holly Cekala McClaren, who is the Holly with the (found to be exaggerated) Rhode Island accent in Governor Dan McKee’s dark and disgusting “you’re not from here” commercial.
A quick Internet search finds a woman appearing to be the same Holly tangled up in controversy in New Hampshire for mismanagement of a drug recovery center in 2017, with one angle having a similar feel to the election-signature matter:
She and others I spoke with tied a lot of problems to former Executive Director Holly Cekala.
Parenteau says Cekala pushed employees to become certified recovery support workers – something required in order to allow HOPE to bill insurance companies.
But Parenteau says Cekala signed off on that certification for her and others without actually doing the necessary supervision.
“I needed 500 hours supervised in order to get that and within two weeks they gave me my 500 hours,” she said.
Another interesting detail comes from the state of Rhode Island’s campaign finance database. Unsurprisingly, Holly Ceckala donated $75 to McKee’s campaign across March and June last year. That investment was hugely overbalanced by the money she subsequently received from the campaign.
Starting in July, the governor’s campaign paid her $1,500 a month, with a final, $200-heavier payment in September. During this time, Cekala took in another $1,910 from Anastasia Williams, who lost her race for reelection to the General Assembly in the Democrat primary, and $400 from Democrat Providence City Council member Shelley Peterson, who won. House District 5 candidate Diana Garlington, who also lost in the Democrat primary, paid a Holly Cekala $585, although the address of the payee is different.
That’s at least $7,010 over three months paid to Cekala for “Consultant & Professional Services” and “Employee Services” (on Williams’s report).
For what was she being paid? Collecting ballots, perhaps? And is she on the payroll of Matos’s campaign?
Featured image by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash.
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A crucial bit of advice in our quick-communication, social-media age is to force yourself to leave space between reading something that bothers you and responding to it. Usually, this tactic will help you avoid responding heatedly to things that simply don’t matter that much. Sometimes, you’ll avoid unforced interpersonal errors. But sometimes, giving things further thought will lead to the conclusion that they’re worse than you’d originally thought.
A tweet from Michael DiBiase, director of the “business-backed” Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC) is in the third category for me:
Troubling results for state ed funding in terms of equity. Wealthy districts received the highest percentage per pupil increases. Urban core districts are not even in the top 8. Providence is 24th highest and received less than the statewide average percentage increase.
My initial thought is: What’s the point of having a formula if what you really want is to ensure maximum redistribution? The state expended a great deal of cost and effort creating a formula that already took into account (with varying degrees of directness) things like the wealth of the community and the proportion of students requiring enhanced services. If the point is simply that poorer districts or those with more minority students must always see the largest increases, then why bother with the formula?
If that isn’t the point, then the appropriate response to RIPEC’s finding — especially for policy analysts — should be to ask what’s going on, here.
Doing so will immediately draw one’s attention to RIPEC’s data-visualization for the nominal change, rather than the percentage change. For one thing, a chart of the actual dollar increases brings important caveats, like the fact that it takes less money to get a bigger percentage increase when the starting amount is smaller. Thus, number 1 for percentage increase is Jamestown, dwarfing the rest at 119%. But Jamestown’s actual increase was in the bottom half, at $737 per student. For comparison, Central Falls saw a per-student increase of $3,444.
Taking the analysis to a deeper conceptual level, RIPEC’s attitude implicitly assumes no change. What if Barrington, for example, begins to see its tax base erode or its needful population of students increase? In such cases, its percentage increase ought to be higher. If Central Falls were to experience the inverted trends, then its percentage increase ought to be lower.
If the moral imperative is always to rig the formula such that a handful of previously identified districts always get a higher percentage increase, however, then we’re simply responding emotionally and with a high degree of unfairness that will inevitably hurt children (albeit children about whom we’re apparently not supposed to care as much).
And all of this, by the way, avoids the key question of whether more money will actually solve education problems, when some of us would argue it’s making things worse, if anything.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Returning to a longer once-a-week segment on WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Poor infrastructure and flooding
- National advice to flee Rhode Island
- Legendary business unfriendliness
- RI targets independent contractors, the nexus of innovation
- Beach access activism to claim private land
- Reliable Matos gets the union endorsement
- The warning of cannabis union mandates
- TopGolf [Somewhere]
Featured image Zulmary Saavedra on Unsplash.
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A tweet from Mike Hruby, this morning, caught the attention of a number of conservative-leaning Rhode Islander’s:
The State of Rhode Island, oceanside home of 1.1 million Americans, just muscled into the front lines of job-killing legislation.
RI has attacked its 190,000 self-employed independent contractors with this $50 form to fill in for each client. All info is public information.
As somebody who is very happy to be an independent contractor, it certainly caught my attention, representing further evidence that legislators and the governor in Rhode Island are constantly edging us toward a cliff of unemployment, with the only escape being to accept terms that are favored by the state’s powerful labor unions. Knowing that the state is always on the lookout for such opportunities can (and should) discourage businesses from setting up in the state and workers from seeking to build a life here.
That said, we do not appear to have reached the point of tyranny that Hruby suggests. Most prominently, I can find no indication on the Department of Labor and Training’s relevant webpage or in the relevant law that filling out the form comes with a $50 fee.
More broadly, the relevant state statute, 28-29-17.1, has been around since 2000, so this form is nothing new. However, as part of a favor to the unions this session making independent contractors much riskier for businesses, the General Assembly and governor did modify this section of the law. House bill H5710A and Senate bill S0427B made three material changes:
- They required the department to make it possible to fill in the form electronically.
- They instructed the department to send its list of independent contractors to the state department of taxation every year (the better to squeeze every penny from workers).
- They added a requirement that the contractor “shall be required to file the form annually, regardless of how many forms are filed.”
That third change slips into the insidious mess that is sloppy legislating and a scheming bureaucracy. On its own, one might conclude that every contractor must file this form for each of his or her clients. In context, though, one could make a strong case that annual filing is only required in order for the form to remain valid.
Notice this language that remained in the law from 2000:
The filing of the notice of designation shall be a presumption of “independent contractor” status but shall not preclude a finding of independent contractor status by the court when the notice is not filed with the director.
That means Rhode Islanders can still be independent contractors whether the form is filed or not. For context, if ever somebody challenges a person’s independent contractor status, courts consider a range of factors like whether the person has only one client/employer, what sorts of benefits are given, whether paid time off is part of the deal, if the company supplies the tools, and so on. This form requires the court to find a very good reason to say somebody is an employee if he or she and the client insist it’s a contractor relationship, but the absence of a form doesn’t mean the balancing test doesn’t still apply.
Naturally, because Rhode Island’s state government is always scheming against the people in favor of special interests, the instructions on the form practically invert meaning of the law (emphasis added):
Warning! This form is for purposes of Workers’ Compensation only and completion of this form does not mean that you are an Independent Contractor under the rules, regulations or statutes of the Internal Revenue Service or the R.I. Division of Taxation. Information on this form will be shared within the Department of Labor and Training, the RI Division of Taxation and the Internal Revenue Service.
One can infer that — knowing most people lack the time and experience to trace these forms back to original statutes or the resources to run such things by attorneys — the RI Department of Labor and Training wants people to conclude that hiring independent contractors is always a risk. And it is. The aforementioned gift to the labor unions was to make the consequences for misclassification a terrifying felony, with up to three years in prison in addition to financial ruin.
For that reason, independent contractors may find that some of their clients want the additional protection of this form, but if that’s the case, they’ll be accepting, up front, the fact that they’ll be searchable online. A better approach may be for independent contractors to include language their contracts emphasizing their status.
Even with that protection, however, this sort of legislation will likely cement the general feeling businesses have that hiring independent contractors isn’t worth the trouble. That means less work for contractors, less reason for companies to set up shop in the Ocean State (especially with an innovative business or business model), and less opportunity for Rhode Islanders.
In other words, it’s just another stick on the fire as elected officials and the bureaucracy slowly roast our economy for the unions’ consumption.
ADDENDUM (July 14, 2023, 12:57 p.m.)
Note that the original version of the legislation does, indeed, include a $50 registration fee. However, although the language is typically sloppy, it appears that it would be $50 per contractor, not per client.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Returning to a longer once-a-week segment on WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Free states on the economic move (while RI languishes)
- AI in RI? Why would innovators come here?
- Licenses to lure illegals.
- The media’s lack of soul searching when excluded.
- Rhode Islanders defend their property rights along the shore.
- Push poll finds Regunberg in the lead.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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