On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The meaning of education legislation
- The message of the Fane Tower collapse
- The signification of voting bills
- The significance of Matos’s declaration for Congress
- The statement of media ignoring Nicole Solas
Featured image by Hugo Jehane on Unsplash.
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Guest: Gregg Amore, Secretary of State, www.sos.ri.gov
Host: Darlene D’Arezzo
Description: Secretary Amore offers an overview of the areas he has begun working on. These include elections, specifically voter registration and preparation for elections; business regulation; State records and archives; State library; enhancing the civics education function. He acknowledged being an advocate for same day voter registration at the state level as it is permitted for presidential elections. Voter registration has undergone a cleanup in removing 60 thousand inactive voters. Rank choice voting; civics curriculum; enhancing business services; building a State Archives facility were also spoken about.
John Loughlin interviews RI Director of Veteran Affairs Yasim Yarn and Ukraine military expert David Demorrow.
Featured image by Damir Spanic on Unsplash.
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Americans really need to be able to step back a bit from the immediate issue addressed in legislation and think about how it relates to our understanding of society’s proper structure. A Rhode Island bill going after self-checkout lanes in retail stores is an excellent case study. Kathy Gregg writes in the Providence Journal:
An army of lobbyists for Rhode Island’s grocery stores, supermarkets – and unrelated retail businesses fearful they will be the next target – have a message for lawmakers:
Leave us alone!
Their angst – and anger – was directed at freshman Rep. Megan Cotter’s bill to limit the number of self-checkout lanes at any grocery store in Rhode Island to eight and mandate that grocers provide a 10% discount to customers who use self-checkout for 10 or more items.
Cotter’s reasoning shows how important economic understanding and a coherent political philosophy are:
Her argument: “Self-checkout is a way grocery stores are avoiding paying employees by getting customers to do cashiers’ jobs for free. It seems only fair that if they are going to take on cashiers’ work, the customer should get something in return,” said Cotter when her legislation was introduced.
Even just Cotter’s characterization of the retail transaction is questionable. For one thing, if the self-checkout is offered as a matter of cost, then customers are already “getting something in return” in the form of reduced or not-increased prices. Perhaps more significantly, customers may consider self-checkout to be preferable, whether because it’s faster, because they prefer not to interact with other people, or because it’s more fun. (I take my father grocery shopping each week, and we use self-checkout primarily for the third reason.)
In these cases, the argument would actually go the other way. The store should offer customers something if they’re going to have to waste time, talk to a stranger, and miss out on the fun of self-checkout.
Actually, maybe it’s Cotter who should offer customers something, if she’s the one presuming to force the issue, which gets to the matter of political philosophy. No doubt, Cotter is an excellent calamari saleswoman, but is it really her role to manage every aspect of Rhode Islanders’ businesses and our lives.
When we vote, is that what we’re doing? Choosing our dictators? That isn’t my view, and I don’t think it would be the view of a majority of Americans if they learned to think in such terms — which are the terms in which a free people should always think.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Oren Cass’s analysis of the weeks required to support a middle-class lifestyle for American Compass raises some interesting points. The study focuses on the income of men and shows that the combined cost of food, housing, health care, transportation, and education surpassed the median male income in the mid-’90s. By 2022, that income was about 20% shy of the mark. Americans have to work more weeks than there are in a year to cover a year’s expenses.
Given the focus on male stagnation, one might expect Republicans to be particularly sensitive to this problem in the midst of culture wars, but the emphasis goes the other way. Among Democrats, 41% “strongly agree” the shortfall is a big problem, whereas only 25% of Republicans say the same. The interesting aspect of this finding, though, is the factors that might account for it. For one thing, a chart of the number of necessary work weeks by state suggests that, generally, Republicans are more likely to live in states where the inability to afford essentials is genuinely less of a problem, whereas Democrats are more likely to live in states where it’s a massive problem.
If that answer is a bit too technical for your tastes, consider also that the question was part of a broader survey, so the order of the questions may primed both Republicans and Democrats to see the question in terms of welfare rather than work. Evidence for this proposition can be found in a chart asking, “Is Economic Pressure to Have Two Working Parents a Big Problem?” Republicans were more likely than Democrats to answer “big problem,” even though it’s arguably another way of asking the same question.
This chart, which is the only one to bring women into the picture, illustrates another interesting finding:
The key point of which we shouldn’t lose sight is that only male college graduates still make enough money to support a family. (Data for female college grads isn’t shown, so we can’t compare.) The three other lines for men — high school grads, those aged 25-34, and the average for those over 25 — were able to make ends meet in the ’80s but no longer can.
Because they’ve lost ground less quickly, the average for all women over 25 caught up with that for male high school grads and early-career men about a decade ago. Since then, the male high school grads have seen no improvement, while the average for women has more or less tracked with early-career men in making up some of the lost ground.
We aren’t given the data for women who are only high school grads, but the fact that women now outnumber men by big percentages in college makes it likely they’re faring better than their male peers. We also have to account for the fact that the discrepancies of the past are still with us. That is, the overall average for men and women remains skewed by the way things were 30 or 40 years ago.
This particular dataset is insufficient to justify broad proclamations, but we’re on safe ground to offer that America has problems that need quick reactions.
Featured image by Adraien Van De Venne.
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You can watch it happening in particular with advocacy organizations. Where once they had very specifically defined missions — like RI Kids Count keeping track of information about children in the state of Rhode Island — that mission becomes merely a mild flavor differentiation from every other progressive organization. Witness:
The divisive racism is bad enough, but it’s a dire warning sign when ostensible advocates for children can’t even acknowledge the existence of women and, specifically, mothers.
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With Lawrence, MA, as my inspiration, I described what I’ve since come to call the “company state” or “government plantation.” Just as big companies used to set up “company towns” which existed mainly to serve the companies, now governments are becoming the central industry and animating force of the regions under their control. Their model is to find clients for their services and then collect money from others (whether within or outside of their jurisdiction) to cover the cost.
Unsurprisingly, just like businesses, governments are forming cartels to ensure the people whose money they harvest can’t easily escape their influence:
State legislators from California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, and Washington announced a coordinated set of bills to hike taxes on wealthy individuals, families, and businesses. The purpose of coordinating is to try to keep these taxpayers in their respective states by making it seem like crushing taxes are inevitable wherever they move.
We can predict this won’t work (certainly in the long run), but the most important point is that it’s plainly immoral and beyond the bounds for representative governments of free people.
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An omission in Asher Lehrer-Small’s recent article about reforms spearheaded by the state Department of Education puts a spotlight on the reason I’m skeptical and fear the changes are yet another cover-up of incompetence that will put Ocean State students even farther behind. The reasonable hook is this head-scratching finding of a problem that should be relatively easy to fix:
While about 80 percent of students said they wanted to attend college, just 60 percent enrolled in the courses necessary to be eligible for higher education, and only about 50 percent passed those classes. …
In many cases, high schoolers would sign up for classes and have no idea that their selections could disqualify them from access to higher education, [Education Commissioner Angelica] Infante-Green explained.
Yet, the most-concrete solution described in the article is this:
The new regulations also add flexibility for students who work or are caregivers, so they can receive credit for their real-world learning experiences. The changes will eliminate seat time in the classroom from being a criteria used to award academic credit, placing the emphasis instead on subject mastery and student proficiency.
The reason I’m skeptical of such changes, as reasonable as they may sound, is that they put the power of subjective judgment in the hands of a system that is already utterly failing and that has both strong incentive and immense power to avoid holding an adequate line. A school system that is failing to educate students has many reasons to paper over that failure by granting credit for student activities that have nothing to do with the system. At least seat time is measurable and puts the responsibility for education squarely in the classroom.
The problem runs even deeper, though. Nowhere in the article do we see a term at the center of students’ mismatch between intentions and class selection: guidance counsellors. Every district pays multiple people very well to provide exactly this kind of assistance. (They’re often, to my experience, highly active members of the teacher union, by the way.) Maybe there is some obstacle or institutional challenge that prevents them from doing their job well, but how can the Boston Globe not even mention their role and wonder whether a big reform is needed when simple accountability for the professionals who aren’t accomplishing their core mission would do?
Here, we reach the heart of the matter: the mushier the standards for grades and graduation, the more we need school personnel to be held responsible for upholding standards and achieving student goals. If we can’t even name those personnel as a problem area, we’ll find ourselves a decade or two into continually worsening results, with millions of children suffering for it.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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One can hardly doubt that Jessica David means all the best with such sentiments as this:
I attempted to explore the specifics with her, but I didn’t get very far. Basically, she believes all variety of sectors ought to take money from all variety of sources to work toward population-wide goals that they and their funders set, and that somehow this should all be accountable to the public. The ways this could go wrong are so manifold one hopes a moment’s scrutiny by a reasonably aware person would spot the danger.
One gets the feeling we’ve gone around the circle and are now articulating in nice-sounding ways precisely the worldview our system of government was designed to circumvent.
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Perhaps the most-challenging thing about good-government reforms is that, for the most part, we’re seeking to develop and implement them on the basis of a shallow political and organizational philosophy. Consider legislation that would change Rhode Island’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA). Some of the adjustments make sense, but I’m not so sure about this one:
The bill would reverse the longstanding exception for elected officials, whose communications — like emails — have not been subject to public scrutiny, in contrast with other public officials.
The proposal would continue to exempt elected officials’ correspondence with their constituents, but would make public other communications related to their official capacities.
I definitely see the appeal of having access to elected officials’ email. At the end of the day, how they came to their positions isn’t as important as whether voters agree with them, but knowing who was advocating for or against policies can provide a shortcut for analyzing the results.
Nonetheless, making such communications public documents could easily dissuade people from sending them. Saying that people with nothing to hide shouldn’t care ignores the many reasons people might prefer some expectation of discretion (intimidation, privacy, and more).
Anyway, people will care, whether they should or not. That means those with direct access to politicians will benefit. An email address is much easier to secure, for instance, than cell phone numbers or fundraising-event availability, and it can be less intimidating to send messages that way than in person or on the phone.
Regulating communication, in other words, will lead to less of it, which means worse, not better, representation.
The distinction from bureaucrats and other government employees is important. In those cases, they’re supposed to be executing the public processes put in place by representatives. Their decision-making should therefore be held to a higher standard of transparency.
Featured image by Joshua Cotton on Unsplash.
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