Did you know only eight Rhode Island communities have laws against the menace of snowball fighting?!?!
- Charlestown
- Glocester
- Jamestown
- Newport
- North Kingstown
- Warwick
- West Warwick
- Woonsocket
Over the recent years of the pandemic, the Rhode Island General Assembly has proven its concern for the big issues, like banning the release of balloons into the air and the automatic provision of plastic straws… not to mention imposing new burdens on companies that employ nurses. Legislators should really get on this snowball issue!
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The Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC) notes that Rhode Island’s downward slide on the Tax Foundation Business Tax Climate Index continues, with the Ocean State exiting the 30-something range on the bad side for the first time since 2017, at 40. The only saving graces are that Connecticut has been stuck at 47 forever and changes in corporate taxes, property taxes, and unemployment insurance taxes dropped Massachusetts dramatically in 2020, and it hasn’t recovered.
We should look at that as opportunity, though, not (in our decision makers’ usual practice) as a reason not to worry.
This is where I start to differ from RIPEC in my analysis. Their recommendations lead with a call for addressing high property taxes in our state, but I’m not so sure that’s the right answer. Rhode Island’s problem isn’t that it’s particularly bad in any particular area (although 49th in unemployment insurance taxes is obviously a downside for business), but that we’re not very good in any of them.
We should take a clinical look at the attributes of our state and determine what tax structure would be ideal. In doing that, by the way, we must resist the urge to impose too much of our vision of what sort of economic activity we want to have.
Consider this: multiple states in the top 10 have certain rankings toward the back of the pack. New Hampshire (#6) is in the 40s for corporate taxes, property taxes, and unemployment insurance taxes. Nevada (#7) is down there in sales taxes and unemployment insurance taxes. Tennessee (#8) hits people hard on sales tax. Note the contrast. It depends where you are, what your geography is, and what your probable mix of industries and population is.
So what sort of state is Rhode Island? This is the perfect question to transform into a massive public conversation. Forget all those Rhode Island Foundation events that attempt to put everything about RI on a whiteboard and herd insiders toward left-wing conclusions. Narrow the conversation down to the half-dozen main buckets of tax revenue and take a real look at our state in that context.
It’s a beautiful place in a great location, with a lot of cultural and tourist-drawing features with a scenically diverse character packed into a small area. In short, Rhode Island is a great place to be. So, where the government looks to collect its operating revenue should focus on where the value is: being here. That’s the property tax.
But if we’re going to settle ourselves in and be taxed for being here, we need to find ways to bring money from elsewhere into our state to keep our economy going. That means we should be much lighter with the taxes on doing things, so the lightest touch should be on sales tax, followed by corporate tax, followed by income tax. Regulation plays in, too, such that we should make it cheap and easy to do things here.
For a small state in a wealthy region where every town is near a border, this sets up a virtuous flow. A focus on justifying a high cost of being here will put emphasis on key attributes like property taxes. Meanwhile, the incentive to do things here will lead people who live nearby to come here, bringing their money with them. As it therefore becomes more valuable to be here, our property and our economic activity will make presence in the state more valuable.
This conversation could go in a whole lot of directions, from regulation to education to social policy, and I may not be right on any or all of it, but it’s the sort of conversation we should be having. Frankly, I think Rhode Islanders are capable and eager to have such conversations and are being held back only by insiders’ reluctance to have real conversations that might put them in the position of defending their selfish interests.
Featured image by Justin Katz.
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Writing for Heritage, Tim Murtaugh laments the continued credibility drain from the mainstream media:
It’s obvious that the media’s hatred for Donald Trump colored nearly everything they wrote or said during his presidency. But one hoped that after he left the White House, the media might recover a little objectivity.
Sadly, a review of 2021 shows that in many cases, it simply did not happen.
My read is that many mainstream journalists bought the lies that (1) Donald Trump was uniquely dangerous to the world and (2) systemic racism exists and infects the hearts of all white people, so they thought their self-professed objectivity had to bend a little. Over the four years of the Trump administration, however, they discovered that they really, really liked letting their biases run wild.
They won’t let those biases go until they have no choice, and it may very well require news organizations actually to replace their personnel rather than relying on the same people to put their overt prejudices back in a bottle.
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Via Instapundit comes a telling story out of Washington University in St. Louis:
Student leaders at Washington University in St. Louis want school officials to evict the “disproportionately wealthy and white” men in campus fraternities and give their buildings to “historically marginalized” groups.
Writing in Student Life for himself and almost 50 leaders of WashU student organizations, Student Union President Ranen Miao whines that while campus fraternities have a total of nine houses on campus, while underrepresented organizations have but three.
Miao, a triple major in political science, sociology, and women, gender, and sexuality studies, contends the fraternities “have done nothing to earn the space they occupy.”
Note, by the way, that fraternities don’t discriminate by race, whereas the identity groups that want their houses do.
Radicalism always comes to this. The activists don’t value what a targeted group does or represents, so they lay a moral claim to be given what that group has. There is no endpoint. When the group his beaten and smashed to have minority standing, the progressives will simply shift to “there is no place here for them” rhetoric.
This is fascism.
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A friend recently told me about a Massachusetts school that is explicitly leveraging peer pressure to influence families’ medical decisions related to COVID. The initiative seems to encourage a form of bullying that is unhealthy for both the students applying and the students receiving the pressure, and it reminded me of past initiatives that gave me misgivings.
Even as far back as the ’90s (and even as I was swept along in it), the push to have children guilt their parents about smoking seemed somehow inappropriate for schools. The explicit teaching of values also has had a religious feel implicitly at odds with the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment. Indeed, while it has not appeared to have originated in schools (yet), encouragement among progressives to pester family members about ideological policy generally during family gatherings has become the stuff of memes and parody.
Each step of this sort makes the next one easier. Encouraging students to move their parents toward the obviously healthy decision to quit smoking established the principle that schools could serve such purposes. Mandatory vaccination against horrible diseases transmissible in a school setting with religious exemptions became, in Rhode Island, mandatory vaccination against a sexually transmitted disease and is now becoming mandatory follow-up vaccinations for a disease that hardly affects children… and with no exemptions.
These things ratchet because a ninth-level crisis isn’t much better than the tenth-level crisis that justified a new imposition and on down the scale.
To be sure, human relations are gray and fluid, and limits often arise not from stark thresholds but simply because a critical mass of people aren’t willing to tolerate the next stage of erosion. This protection is fleeting, though, and only awaiting an excuse.
Thus, Jon Miltimore highlights, for the Foundation for Economic Education an academic’s argument that governments sometimes have to edge into authoritarianism in order to remain legitimate. Specifically, the American Political Science Review of Cambridge University published an essay by assistant professor of political theory Ross Mittiga of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile arguing that this principle of legitimacy was proven during the COVID pandemic. Naturally, Mittiga drew this lesson in order to apply it to “climate change,” which many skeptics have long seen as an excuse for authoritarianism awaiting sufficient fear. Miltimore writes:
Say what you will about Mittiga’s proposal—which is myopic and dangerous—his logic is sound. If “legitimate” governments embrace authoritarian measures to combat a deadly pandemic that poses a genuine threat to humans, why should they not embrace authoritarian measures to combat climate change, which many argue poses an even greater threat?
There’s a popular meme among libertarians: “If you allow politicians to break the law during emergencies, they will create an emergency to break the law.”
Exactly. We can implement all the safeguards for freedom we want, but every exception will create incentive for power-seekers to find reasons that they apply. COVID turned the ratchet such that provisions to address an immediate emergency could apply to a long-term crisis. Well, anything can be sold as a long-term crisis if the rewards of money and power are high enough.
Featured image by Zulmary Saavedra on Unsplash.
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Rhode Island teachers have been posting their attendance records on social media, today. Providence high school social studies and journalism teacher Dale Fraza listed his period 3 attendance as:
- Present: 4
- Absent: 4
- Quarantined: 9
This madness made me think that some academic with enhanced access to public school information should do a study of what absences would have looked like in a typical flu season with our current COVID quarantine policies. I suspect I’m not alone in thinking that we’d learn that quite a bit of our current crisis is attributable to mere panic rather than a particularly terrifying virus.
I poked around the Internet a little bit to see if I could come up with a passable estimate but was unable to find anything sufficient to analyze. I did, however, come across some articles that drew the contrast pretty well. Here’s Jeffrey Tucker, writing for the Brownstone Institute:
The most influential public health body at the time was the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers (ASTHO). They met on August 27, 1957. They concluded that they should recommend home care as much as possible to keep the hospitals from overcrowding. They would instruct people to seek medical attention if symptoms become severe.
Otherwise, ASTHO concluded as follows: ‘‘there is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease.’’
In particular, schools were not closed because public health experts observed that the children would just pick up the virus elsewhere. “The Nassau County Health Commissioner in New York,” observes Henderson, “stated that ‘public schools should stay open even in an epidemic’ and that ‘children would get sick just as easily out of school.’”
… Perhaps we had to lock down due to asymptomatic [COVID] cases? Not true. Henderson notes of the Asian flu: “Attack rates in the schools ranged from 40% to 60%. Serological surveys revealed that half of those reporting no influenza illness showed serological evidence of infection.”
In other words, half of all students who did not get sick back then would have been counted as “cases” under the current regime. And yet, Tucker notes, the flu was barely news, even though — opposite to COVID — it was especially dangerous to children.
Another interesting article I came across in my search was a 2009 study from Boston Children’s Hospital reviewing data from a Japanese flu pandemic. A “school outbreak was defined as a daily flu absentee rate of more than 10 percent of students.” That’s sick kids, not “close contacts.” The study authors concluded that school shutdowns were best limited to short interventions when the number of students absent was 4% for two days in a row.
Of course, it matters why students are out. Dale Fraza teaches at 360 High School, which had greater than 50% chronic absenteeism before COVID struck. That means on a typical day, he could have expected one chronically absent student (6% of his students) to miss his class on any given day, even in the absence of illnesses.
For those students, lock-down culture is only reinforcing of their impression that school doesn’t matter.
Featured image by MChe Lee on Unsplash.
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Years ago, a regular commenter on Anchor Rising who was obviously (let’s say) a dissenting voice around here commented more than once that college conservatives had a ready career path if they wanted to get into politics or media. The comment always struck me as delusional, but… whatever.
Nowadays, retired college professor Mark Bauerlein observes that radical activists on American campuses really do have a ready-made trajectory:
… Social justice has become a career, a promising one. Take a look at the material success of the founders of Black Lives Matter, or the salaries of diversity deans, or the money critical race theory advisers make. Every business that goes Woke has to hire a few of them, while wealthy foundations give them fellowships and grants, such as Ford Foundation’s massive bankrolling of numerous organizations devoted to “inclusive democracy.” And the job market looks good, too, very good. According to a 2018 study, University of Michigan employs fully 93 diversity administrators.
Bauerlein wonders, however, what will happen when the thrill of activism meets the grind of professional life. These poor souls are locking themselves into a life in which their youthful prejudices have to be true, so they can either refuse to mature or find their jobs empty.
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John DePetro has spotted a curious requirement for a job at Hope Academy charter school in Providence, which he redubs “Woke Academy”:
They currently have a job posting (listed below) for a teachers assistant that is woke and steeped in Critical Race Theory. It starts with the ability to be aware of ” microaggressions and redirect with affirmations.” Under Qualifications and Skills, the right candidate “must acknowledge racism and privilege, and talk about racism. When you see racism or other types of inequities, you address it.” The application also talks about supervision, fire drills and other teacher assistant skills you would expect. Why should a kindergarten teacher assistant need to acknowledge racism and privilege?
This is apparently yet another area in which the practices of higher education are permeating out into our communities. As I reported in October, Roger Williams is explicitly making demonstration of woke beliefs a requirement for any sort of job, from prep cook to nude model for art students.
This is simply becoming the reality of our society. Wherever radicals can impose requirements for hiring, they will ensure that agreement with their ideology is among them.
Higher education is especially relevant in this area. A half-century ago, the classical liberals (conservatives, by today’s standards) were sympathetic to progressives’ insistence on free speech, academic freedom, and ideologically balanced hiring. Once progressives were in control, however, their characteristic authoritarianism began to emerge, complete with litmus tests for hiring and other career advancement. (For worse or [probably] better, by the way, this is why I don’t have a PhD in literature.)
Once the campus was conquered, the Left had to contend only with gradual time to inculcate their ideology into those who would go on to careers in softer, people-focused careers like human resources, messaging, and media. Meanwhile, the education establishment, including teachers’ unions, worked to fully align the institutions they controlled with the radical line.
In this way, the focus of American schools has shifted from the core mission of education to the qualifiers that Hope Academy attaches to its job description. The act of “provid[ing] individual and small group instruction” becomes subordinate to the qualification that it be done “with a socially conscious lens.”
Take particular note that Hope Academy does not consider ideological conformity merely as a nice-to-have quality in a teacher assistant. The first three “skills” in the job description are explicitly ideological. Above all, applicants must recognize the fundamentally religious mission of the school.
The ad sends this message explicitly and implicitly. After all, how important could education and accuracy actually be to a school that wants aids to assist in the “preppring” of the curriculum?
Featured image by Niamat Ullah on Unsplash.
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When I conveyed the state Department of Health’s findings on the question of whether people were in the hospital because of COVID or merely while happening to test positive for it, one word in particular seemed worthy of a mental note for subsequent consideration (emphasis added):
According to Wendelken, “someone who goes to the hospital for another reason but is COVID-19 positive would not get admitted unless that other health issue was dire.” After “a closer clinical analysis on the charts of a subset of patients,” the DOH came to the conclusion that the virus “played a role” in the conditions of 94% of patients testing positive for COVID.
Thus far, those of us on the more-skeptical side have been agitating for authorities to recognize that COVID is entirely incidental in some hospitalizations, but we shouldn’t forget that it might be a contributing factor, without being central. Stacey Lennox picks up this thread on PJ Media:
[Open full post]An exacerbation of a chronic illness is not a Covid hospitalization. If a person with diabetes goes into diabetic ketoacidosis because of a viral infection, you treat the diabetic complication. Hospitals frequently see these complications in people with chronic conditions with influenza, pneumonia, and other acute illnesses. This phenomenon is not unique to Covid. However, it seems everyone has forgotten.
I actually just saw a Rhode Island politician proclaiming on social media that we must “never forget” January 6. The dogged fixation on that day is one of the most-obvious attempts at political narrative building in the past year.
But if we’re going to have a new national political holiday, we’re going to have to figure out some traditions. Maybe we all gather to hear proclamations of unearned moral authority and exaggerated pledges to stand against imaginary threats?
Alternately, maybe we can read things that remind us of open questions. Joseph Hanneman covers a big one for Epoch Times:
Independent media and online sleuths sounded alarms about the presence of unindicted individuals among those who first breached the Capitol at about 12:50 p.m. These men played a central role in the breach, encouraged protesters to go to the Capitol, and directed people into the building. Yet they haven’t been arrested, indicted, or identified by the FBI as among the wanted. Who were they?
As Hanneman goes on to explain, one of them was Ray Epps. Despite being perhaps the most well-documented person inciting actions above and beyond mere protest on that day, the FBI actually ham-handedly removed him from its wanted list, and he has not been arrested or charged. Weird.
I’m also keeping an eye on the progress of charges against Zachary Jordan Alam. Since I analyzed hours of video from that day, it’s amazed me that he hasn’t been the poster-boy among those emphasizing the violence. Arguably, without his participation, some of the most dramatic scenes would never have occurred and Ashli Babbitt would not have been killed, yet he’s not a very familiar face in coverage. Also weird.
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