John Loughlin discusses with Todd Bensman, of the Center for Immigration Studies, the waves of illegal immigrations rolling across the southern border.
Featured image by Greg Bulla on Unsplash.
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Almost since I began keeping an eye on it, the unemployment rate has primarily been a means of disguising the underlying weakness of RI’s economy. With the latest iteration, the AP writer seems to accentuate the positive, but you don’t have to dig far to see the negative — as far, say, as the state Department of Labor and Training’s official press release. Note, in particular:
The Rhode Island labor force totaled 568,800 in January, down 800 over the month but up 3,200 from January 2021.
Since February 2020, the month prior to the pandemic-related shutdowns, there are 2,900 more unemployed RI residents and 5,900 fewer employed RI residents. Currently, there are 3,000 fewer RI residents participating in the labor force than there were prior to the start of the pandemic. …
Total nonfarm payroll employment in Rhode Island totaled 486,700 in January, a decrease of 1,300 jobs from the revised December employment figure of 488,000.
Accommodation and food services is down. Manufacturing is down for the first time since April 2020. Construction is down. All the industries where you find working people are down. On the other hand:
Offsetting some of the January job losses was a gain of 500 jobs reported in the Professional & Technical Services sector. The Educational Services, Health Care & Social Assistance and Other Services sectors each reported gains of 200, followed by an increase of 100 jobs in both the Government and Transportation & Utilities sectors.
As I’ve been warning for years, now, we’re becoming a “company state” in which the company is the government. More and more, we’re being taxed to pay people to serve other people who aren’t working. This is obviously not a workable model over the long term, requiring confiscatory taxation of the people who actually generate new wealth within the state and continual infusions of cash from other states.
Beware the year those other states decide to stop subsidizing ours!
The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a lot of dynamism in our state and our country, and a compressed spring of energy ready to rocket up if we can only persuade people to slip the weight off the top.
Featured image on Washington Area Spark.
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A lack of housing is a problem, and racism is simply wrong, so we have powerful emotional incentive to join the two matters into the story we tell about our society. In a more-specific way, advocates and researchers have even more-powerful economic incentive to do so. In that space, as with “equity audits” in schools, when a study is commissioned, it’s commissioned to find evidence to support a conclusion, not to determine whether joining the issues of housing and racism is accurate or productive.
For that reason, a Boston Globe article by Alexa Gagosz, headlined “‘Redlining never really went away’: Black Rhode Islanders still face racism when buying a home,” raises a number of red flags. That’s a very strong claim, so it requires very strong evidence.
For starters, readers ought to be able to immediately find the report from which all the numbers and charts are taken, and unless I’m simply missing something, that isn’t the case. (Some of the data and images from Gagosz’s article are not obviously to be found at her links, implying that there’s some additional source.)
Then, there are the unlike numbers presented side-by-side. For example, the article informs the reader that 73% of white Americans owned homes in 2019 versus 42% of black Americans. But when comparing Rhode Island, the number given is 62% of all Rhode Islanders versus 34% of black Rhode Islanders. The source gives precise comparisons, so why muddy the waters? Perhaps this was a simple mistake while writing, or perhaps the reason is that readers might then be distracted from advocates’ racial claims if they can easily see that homeownership is lower for white Rhode Islanders’, too. This might be taken as evidence that housing is the more-fundamental problem in the Ocean State.
The conclusion becomes less clear than the advocates present it as it the details become more specific. Consider:
In 2020, 1,288 Black and 16,037 white Rhode Islanders submitted mortgage loan applications for a home purchase. But 10 percent of Black applicants were denied while 6 percent of white applicants were denied.
“This goes so far beyond financial literacy,” [Brown professor Dr. Akilah] Dulin said. “It’s like redlining never really went away.”
The pandemic, she said, has only exacerbated the issue. Dulin found that nearly 20 percent of Black homeowners reported they were behind on mortgage payments, and few of them knew about the mortgage forbearance options made available during the pandemic.
Here, again, the numbers become a stumbling block. A chart in the article says the denial rate for black applicants was 9%, versus 5% for white applicants; why did Gagosz add one percentage point to each in the text? Just to get blacks into double digits? This discrepancy is a side issue, however. While suspecting one isn’t permitted to observe such things, these days, we should observe that high rates of late mortgage payments for some group may (repeat, may) have some non-racist link to higher loan denial rates for that group.
Unfortunately, the reader cannot investigate because source for the claim about mortgage payments is not provided, so we have no way of knowing how the 20% stacks up against comparable statistics for other groups.
All in all, it is clear that Rhode Island has housing problems with which it must come to grips for everybody in the state, regardless of race. What isn’t clear is that it is accurate or helpful to approach that problem with anti-racist-tinted glasses. Doing so may risk a stumble and unnecessary injury.
Featured image by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash.
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For the record, I’ve never tried hallucinogenic drugs. Even as a reckless teenager who was otherwise open to self destruction, I knew myself well enough not to roll the dice on that experiment.
This disclaimer is context for my agreement with progressive Democrat state representative Brandon Potter’s proposal to move toward decriminalization of psilocybin, which my friends in high school and college called “shrooms,” or “magic mushrooms.”
“There is evidence that this is effective in treating anxiety disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental conditions,” Potter said Monday. “It also reflects a shift we have had in recent years about criminalizing substances … I don’t think we should criminalize drug use.”
This step is unlikely in Rhode Island, if only because the state government will find it more difficult for economic and political reasons to turn shrooms into a cash cow than is the case with marijuana. (Although word on the street is that you’re better off going out of state for your legal cannabis.)
Still, as a medicine, hallucinogenics seem to have promise for positive life-changing treatment when administered properly. And even outside of medical considerations, the right of the government to ban natural substances that, of themselves, only present a risk to the person taking them, isn’t clear. (Note that “ban” is different from “regulate.”)
The appropriate response is to foster a culture in which people can make good decisions for themselves, with full knowledge of their own personalities and situations. In this case, somehow even I managed to do that at a time when good decisions were not my forté.
Featured image by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash.
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The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has localized a study from the Mackinac Center finding that some school districts in Rhode Island continue to have provisions in their teacher contracts that don’t reflect the right of teachers to work without joining the union and requiring express consent to enroll them:
According to the Mackinac Center in Michigan, one of nation’s top legal and public policy experts when it comes to government unions, Rhode Island’s rate of non-compliance with the Janus ruling looks to be among the highest in the country. The extent to which blatantly anti-Janus-constitutional provisions still exist in many teacher union Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA) is alarming.
An initial review of about three dozen collective bargaining agreements with local school districts in Rhode Island reveals an alarming number -ten (more than 1 in 4) – that were signed or put into effect after the Janus ruling, contained dues or fees mandate provisions that clearly defy the Supreme Court’s ruling … provisions that are legally unenforceable.
Entrenched interests, like teachers unions, play a marginal game, meaning that they have a strong incentive to make it marginally more difficult not to join the union at every step. If office staff inadvertently (“Oops, we forgot not to sign you up!”) adds a teacher to the union list and automatically withdraws dues, some percentage of teachers who didn’t want to join will simply live with it. If any of those teachers notice and have to talk to the principal, then the superintendent, then the local union head, more will give up the quest at each step.
Contrast that situation with one in which teachers have to actively pay their union dues separately from their paychecks. The unions would fight such a policy with existential vigor because they know that would reverse the game from creating marginal disincentives to creating marginal incentives.
That said, the noncompliant contracts in Rhode Island might not be making a big difference. When teachers hear that they don’t have to join the union, they are at first skeptical and then distrustful that they won’t lose anything by leaving. Unionization has been built into their understanding of their jobs for a long time.
School districts’ highly paid lawyers should be tracking changes in the law that require compliance modifications to contracts when they come up for negotiation. This is standard practice. But absent that proactive diligence, the districts have had no reason to change contract language, because most have probably had no teachers challenge them. When the office staff deducts union dues from a non-union teacher’s check at the beginning of every year, it really could be because she or he is the only one and they’re used to simply clicking “select all.”
This is what needs to change, foremost. Those of us who see government unions as a corruptive force of evil in our country need to do the work of educating teachers about their rights.
Featured image by the National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.
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John Loughlin speaks with Dr. Tim Shafman on colorectal cancer, Jack Posobiec of Human Events on Ukraine, and Greg Vespe on saltwater fishing.
Featured image by Jeff Kingma on Unsplash.
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Maybe I’m just entering that late-middle-age phase, but it seems to me that younger adults — or all of us, with reference to times that were before our time — too infrequently understand the experience of the past. Consider this find from Tim Worstall for Accuracy in Media:
A new piece from Teen Vogue says that student loans really must be forgiven because going traveling on vacation is so good for mental health.
No, really, that is what the piece says: “[T]he repayment pause went into effect soon after, and she was grateful. Without needing to make that monthly payment, she’s been able to put money into other things that are important to her, such as travel, which she says has helped her mental health.”
Sure, we like to travel, a vacation, as much as the next person. We do differ with the conclusion reached though: “You know, that’s not only eliminating student loan debt.”
As Worstall goes on to explain, “the economy must add up.” Somebody, somewhere, will bear the cost of your education, and a generation steeped in social justice ideology ought to understand that somebody will probably be way down the hill from them.
Paying your debts is social justice.
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Patrick Anderson follows up on the state’s ongoing efforts to change its official name everywhere, following a constitutional edit during the last election:
You don’t have to look too hard to find the words Providence Plantations on state buildings, a year and a half after Rhode Island voters deleted them from the state name.
The phrase is still on the State House’s Smith Street façade, on the marble floor of the rotunda, the façade of the Department of Transportation building and the marble outside the Licht Judicial Complex in Providence.
The picture of the lettering around the seal in the State House rotunda suggests the question posed in this post’s headline. Buildings, unlike official documents, are historical artifacts, and erasing the past is a dangerous game, especially when it comes at great expense.
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Gas prices have hit record highs in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, according to AAA. We’ve achieved and exceeded the pain some of us remember all too well from the Obama years:
In one week, Rhode Island gas prices rose 58 cents and Massachusetts saw a growth of 54 cents.
AAA Northeast says Rhode Island’s average gas price of $4.17 per gallon is the highest average price ever recorded in the Ocean State.
During the last peak, I was a carpenter using my own van for work, and at $80, I couldn’t always afford to fill my tank. Younger folks and those who weren’t as attentive to the news back then may not remember how it became a joke that recovery from the recession was always just around the corner. In a sense, it turned out to be true; the corner was the presidency of Donald Trump.
Before that event, some said slow growth was just the new normal for a less-dynamic U.S.A. Others suggested that the Democrats’ economic error, nationally, was that they didn’t borrow, tax, and spend enough to realize the benefit of their Keynesian economic policies.
Well, they’re certainly testing that now. Personally, I marvel that so many people who are ideologically disposed not to care or too blinkered by their theories to evaluate reality have managed to take positions of serious responsibility.
They’re going to try to spin, of course. Here’s Mike Raia, an alum of Gina Raimondo’s PR machine, complaining that Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long didn’t adjust her price comparisons by inflation:
It’s not hard to adjust those comps for inflation, and it’s kind of reckless not to.
$4.11 in 2008 = $5.37 in 2022.
You know, I’m not sure inflation can be blamed for a 15% increase over one week or, for that matter, a 50% increase over one year, which is what Long’s table shows.
More relevantly, however, I wonder whether it is appropriate to adjust one of the most important drivers of inflation for inflation. The cost of fuel is so central to overall prices that Raia’s admonition is kind of like saying that we have to adjust price increases by the amount that the price went up.
Featured image by Gabriel Cote on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- RI’s corruption retention policies
- McKee’s COVID messaging
- Sudden concern about Ukraine
- Raimondo: Designated Survivor
Featured image by Snehal Krishna on Unsplash.
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