The response to COVID showed that we aren’t a serious society. One hallmark of that condition for all to see (if they look) is that we are institutionally incapable of identifying the actual causes of our difficulties and, therefore, of addressing them. Consequently, because the solution of the clueless must always be to throw more resources at a problem, we’re going to make things worse.
For today’s example, turn to Lynn Arditi’s brief article on a recent Rhode Island Kids Count report. The topline number is that 98 children were hospitalized because of abuse or neglect in the Ocean State in 2020, which represented a 145% increase over the prior year, which itself represented a significant increase over the prior year:
The sharp rise was related to an increase in mental health issues and “the stresses associated with the pandemic,’’ Katherine Chu, a Kids Count spokeswoman, said in an email. The closure of daycare centers and schools during the pandemic increased stress on families, she said, and also removed children from teachers and caretakers who could report suspected abuse or neglect.
The immediate cause, in other words, was the government-enforced shutdown of our communities. (The toll of that decision continues to climb.) But RI Kids Count turns its attention to the lack of reporting. So, predictably:
“The devastating effects of the pandemic fell on the shoulders of our most vulnerable children and families,” Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director for Rhode Island Kids Count, said in a statement. “Now more than ever, we need to ensure that we provide the funding to support the community-based providers that provide the mental health services, prevention services and early intervention services children need to be safe and supported.”
Kids Count recommended expanding services for at-risk young children and families, including raising Medicaid reimbursement rates for programs that serve them to improve the recruitment and retention of staff, and improving screening and evaluation tools to assess mental health needs of infants and young children who have been neglected or abused.
We will see no reevaluation of the state’s decisions. No serious consideration of whether the tradeoffs were worthwhile or whether another option existed. Even as our institutions deteriorate before our eyes, the only solution institutionalized advocates can conceive is to rely more heavily on those very institutions.
We will see no attempts to address the underlying causes of our social ills because we might (read: “will surely”) then find reason to reverse our radical turn, which is the motivating force behind the sorts of people who fund and produce these reports and the resulting policies.
Featured image by Jan Kopriva on Unsplash.
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Dakota Wood of the Heritage Foundation discusses military considerations with Russia, and Cortney Nicolato and Monica Deroche promote 401 Gives.
Featured image by Damir Spanic on Unsplash.
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Overstating the significance of individuals’ Twitter commentary is an easy pitfall, but Phil Eil is a journalist and writer and so spends more time observing and thinking about the world around him than the average. The following tweets are likely to be more representative of the progressive mindset than would be the case if it were just Phil the barista:
It is wild to be living amidst a multi-systems meltdown in the United States. Politics. Academia. Pop culture. Tech. Just chaos and dysfunction everywhere you turn.
Not saying that some — even a lot — of this upheaval isn’t overdue and righteous. Just observing the palpable and pervasive sense of uncertainty and instability. Very few things seem solid in this country right now.
These sentences have a cult-like feel, actively undercutting the voice inside the adherent warning that something is off. “Chaos and dysfunction are everywhere you turn!” says the voice. “Ah, this is just the storm before the calm,” soothes voice of the cult, echoing Jesus’ warning about the end of days.
The critical difference, however, is that Jesus presented the turmoil and trials as a natural precursor to an event that humanity could not control — indeed, we explicitly cannot know when it will come, much less bring it about. By contrast, the Marxist-progressive cult has an alchemical expectation; if they actively cause turmoil and trials, the righteous flame will burn away the evils of the West’s foundational institutions.
This is pure faith, not only ungrounded in evidence and reason, but actively contradictory to them. Human society is not a pure core of crystalized goodness with inhumanity caked onto it and hardened over millennia. Rather, our institutions cultivate goodness.
In other words, the progressive cult believes that if we destroy what is visible, we’ll see the utopia underneath. That is dangerously, fatally wrong. Behind chaos is only more chaos; the flames aren’t burning away privilege but consume the bridges away from disadvantage; and society will only tolerate the destruction for so long before submitting to whatever tyrant proves able to impose order.
Progressives who instigate, rather than merely investigate, know this. They are simply expecting to be the tyrants and believe themselves to be benevolent. They, too, are dangerously wrong. Either they (as proven agents of chaos) won’t be the ones to whom humanity looks for order or they will prove less benevolent than they believe (although excuses for their corruption will be plentiful).
In this, Eil is doubly emblematic. Not only does he represent the progressive delusion, but he illustrates the clever strategy of the Left. The journalists, observers, and heralds whom the West has entrusted to warn of coming danger have been convinced that it is not danger at all, but salvation and deserving of promotion.
Featured image by Issy Bailey on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee invites in the FBI (and doesn’t know it)
- The excitements and bow-outs of the CD2 race
- A change of career for the top cop
- Ashley Kalus checks in
- Election cheats try to extend the unwasted crisis
Featured image by Dan Grinwis on Unsplash.
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Here’s an important detail from a recent budget analysis by the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC), as summarized by WPRI’s Eli Sherman:
In a breakdown of the hospital’s financial picture, RIPEC estimated McKee is seeking to spend $143.7 million in state and federal revenue next fiscal year on the state-run medical and psychiatric facility, comprising Zambarano in Burrillville and three more units in Cranston.
With about 188 patients currently living at the hospital, the per patient cost would total $764,362 per year – an eye-popping figure considering House Fiscal Office staff pegged the number at about $557,000 per year during the 2019-20 fiscal year. That’s a roughly 37% increase in per patient cost over four years.
For comparison, RIPEC cited a 2020 report done by the consulting group Alverez & Marsal that estimated the average cost of nursing home care is about $125,000 per year – about six times less than what the state is spending on Eleanor Slater patients.
This result is emblematic of government systems. Public records show Eleanor Slater has gotten control of its six-figure laundry workers, but that issue was always low-hanging fruit for those investigating the system’s poor management. In fiscal year 2021, the state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities & Hospitals (BHDDH) paid 187 employees more than $100,000 in regular and overtime pay, most of them nurses.
Sixteen employees took home over $200,000, with Eleanor Slater Hospital’s chief medical officer, Brian Daly, topping the list with $366,702. The highest-paid nurse was Portia Richardson, with $230,905— a quarter million dollars!
Making matters worse, these eye-popping payrolls aren’t to blame on individuals; they’re built into the system. When I investigated nursing salaries a decade ago, it came to light that one big problem is the payment structure in the union contract. A supervising nurse covering for another on a different floor could be credited multiple times for each hour of overtime worked. The only universe in which that arrangement is fair for the taxpayer is one in which patients are being put at extreme risk because nurses are being asked to do something that isn’t humanly possible.
The systemic corruption goes deeper, however. Eleanor Slater’s troubles have been amplified in recent years as the federal government has withheld aid because too high a percentage of patients are hospitalized for psychiatric reasons.
Following state government for some years makes it easy to imagine how this sort of thing happens. The regulations that the state imposes on private organizations mean those who absolutely need care can only look to the government because non-government organizations can’t make the numbers work. At the same time, federal programs create incentive for the state to pile the patients in, pushing the boundaries of the programs they’re tapping for funds.
Meanwhile, the super-strong labor unions take advantage of these pressures, combined with the lack of real accountability for systemic failure, to lock in unheard-of arrangements.
Something has to give. Either taxpayers have to shoulder the burden, worsening the condition at the heart of the problem, or patients begin falling through the cracks… or both.
These are the inevitable results of excessive use of government to control people’s interactions combined with reliance on government to provide services that others are thereby prevented from providing. We see it in RI because the state is small and progressive, but the chronic illness is worsening throughout our entire society.
Featured image by Adhy Savala on Unsplash.
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We’re not supposed to eat meat on Fridays during Lent. However, yesterday was the Solemnity of the Annunciation, which means the rule of abstaining from meat was suspended for the day.
Whether Biden knew of the suspension, we cannot know. Even if he didn’t, this would have been a small transgression (especially compared with his full-throated support for killing unborn babies). It may even have been excused by the likelihood that he genuinely forgot the date, the liturgical season, or the rule.
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Of course, I agree with Erika Sanzi across the board on the issues she mentions in her latest Valley Breeze op-ed. Support for school choice and opposition to vaccine and mask mandates, radical gender ideology, and racial indoctrination — check, check, check, and check.
For that reason, I want to issue a little bit of a warning about this conclusion upon attending an event in D.C.:
I was in the presence of the moderate middle, people from different political persuasions who find the extremes in both parties tiresome, unhinged, and useless when it comes to solving problems. My gut tells me that most of us find ourselves somewhere in this moderate middle, regardless of party affiliation or political philosophy. At the moment, the most active and engaged subgroup within the moderate middle seems to be parents. They are Democrats, Republicans, independents, and apolitical types who only became political when COVID brought school into their kitchen and living room. What remains to be seen is what this bipartisan parent movement will mean come election time, but after the victory of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia’s governor’s race and the successful recall of three school board members in San Francisco, I’m confident it will mean something.
Framing this coalition as the “moderate middle” is wrong for at least four reasons.
First, the members aren’t necessarily “moderate” in their feelings about the issues that bring them together or about others. They’re in such fervent agreement on their coalition’s core concerns that they are willing to put other differences aside.
Second, this group isn’t really a “middle.” Being non-extreme leaves a whole lot of Left and Right in play that can’t be assigned as the “middle,” because then most people will be in the “middle” most of the time.
Third, Sanzi’s “middle” isn’t really pinned between two groups. Its constituents are aligned against the radical woke Left. That fact does not make it a conservative movement, but it’s far too easy to fall prey to divisive internecine “both-sidesism” if the movement builds in a need to imagine somethign it opposes on the right that isn’t fundamentally applicable to its core mission.
This point leads us to: Fourth, promoting a “moderate middle” brand leaves the movement vulnerable to erosion. Once people are thinking of themselves in those terms, they are susceptible to disingenuous calls to denounce one ally or another as “immoderate.” Their motivating grievances will be diluted with the impulse to make them fit the moderate brand.
Featured image by Eran Menashri on Unsplash.
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More frequently than I liked, during my years reading the thousands of bills submitted in the Rhode Island General Assembly each year, I’d come across one that made me wonder how anybody could submit such a thing. Legislators couldn’t truly be representative of their constituents if they were expected to be the uber academics we sometimes seem to expect them to be, but we should reasonably expect some minimum diligence to understand the repercussions of their proposals.
Along those line, the attempt of far-left Democrat Representative Brianna Henries (East Providence) to ban single-family zoning not only shows utter contempt for many, if not most, of the people she’s supposed to represent, but also would spell disaster for the state:
Henries went a step farther, linking single-family zoning to a long-standing history of racism in Rhode Island which, along with the lending practice known as redlining, “banned non-white [people] from living in affluent neighborhoods where generational wealth could be built.”
She called the prohibitions on multi-family housing in many neighborhoods “a purposeful decision by our state and others to segregate our community to ensure that non-white residents would never — or could never — economically compete with white residents.”
The careless condescension of insisting that the only reason people support limits on the density of housing around them must be racism is remarkable. Her position is illogical, too. Single-family neighborhoods are desirable and, therefore, more valuable to everybody; hollowing out communities such that they do not exist will much more effectively widen the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged than the zoning Henries decries.
People want to live where they want to live. Henries can call them racist (if she wants to say things that are foolish, offensive, and rightfully beneath the integrity of a state legislator), but expectations for a nice home are what they are. This sort of bill would ensure two things if it were to pass.
One, the benefits of being rich and greedy would increase as Henries forbade working and middle-class Rhode Island families from approximating a higher-end lifestyle as closely as they can afford. The much-maligned rich will find ways to secure the types of neighborhoods they want (in part by bribing progressive government officials with donations), thus increasing the likelihood of selfish behavior as people on the cusp of that privileged threshold strive to overcome it.
Two, productive people for whom selfishness is not an option, or at least insufficient to make the grade, will simply go elsewhere, removing their talent from the Ocean State and slashing the value of what houses remain. A state that is already abysmally deficient in career opportunities would cease to offer suitable places to live even for those who can find good work. The decades-long hollowing out Rhode Island would accelerate.
Rhode Island’s government gets away with its ridiculousness to the extent it does because it’s naturally an attractive place to live. That has its limits, and if we’re not careful, we may find that the limit is a drop-off from which there is no return, rather than a taper from which we could easily back off.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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Westerly produces another bit of evidence that Rhode Island is not ultimately a free state:
[Tom] Riley and Debbie Stebenne said they spent almost $30,000 on a custom party bike for their hotel near Misquamicut Beach.
The goal was to bring an attraction to Rhode Island that is already a success in cities like Nashville, Tennessee. …
But their party bike has been stuck in one spot for the past year. The couple said they cleared the idea with Westerly’s police chief and were approved for a business license, but the Division of Motor Vehicles hit the brakes.
“There’s just no classification for it in state law,” Riley said. …
Last year, a similar bill was passed in the House but not the Senate.
In a free state, people could try things — especially if they make some effort to gather feedback from local officials — and then, if problems arise or they refuse to address officials’ concerns, the government could respond. In a non-free state like Rhode Island, residents have to go all the way up to the state legislature and beg permission from the government to try new things.
Elected and appointed officials cannot keep up with the changes of life… even if they are the experts on everything they implicitly claim to be. Moreover, the margins between risk and profit on innovation aren’t so large as to accommodate years of lobbying for legislators to take action on things about which they have very little reason to care.
Such stories hardly attract notice, and they evoke little more than a “huh” from those who do notice them, but they should lead us to shake our heads and consider for a moment what a dynamic place our state could be were we actually free.
Featured image by Tim Foster on Unsplash.
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Financial expert Dennis Miller outlines the effects of the United States’s reckless undermining of the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Featured image by JP Valery on Unsplash.
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