Basic Government Functions
Businesses on Hope Street in Providence were all prepared for one of their biggest days for sales: small business Saturday. Oops: Providence Water crews closed a portion of the street early Saturday morning and part of the afternoon for utility work. The construction has been happening for some time, but business owners, like Asher Schofield…
It adds up, of course, but when government is trillions of dollars in debt, a hundred million here and there seems hardly to count. That may be part of the reason that news of grants like the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Program doesn’t typically question where the…
Unfortunately, the unusual thing about the latest off-campus attack of a Providence College student is not the attack itself. Here’s what happened, as reported by Sarah Doiron and Matt Paddock for WPRI: The Minnesota native’s father, Anthony, who asked that his daughter not be identified out of concern for her safety, said she was walking…
One of my children is learning the standard single-axis political spectrum (no doubt in preparation for the AP test down the road), and the fortunate child enjoyed a free lesson on how inaccurate that is all the way home. I’ll spare you, dear reader, that experience, simply pointing you to the circular political spectrum I…
Sometimes RI’s most essential problem (the failure of its insider class to recognize reality) comes at us from all directions. One example is the call from Joseph Paolino to use the feds COVID gift to Rhode Island government “to change our economy.” How? Let’s look at what our state really needs and invest in them…
Katherine Gregg frames her story about state health facilities’ challenges getting by without unvaccinated employees for the Providence Journal in terms of the government’s incompetence at replacing them: Despite promises made to the state Department of Health to bring in replacements for unvaccinated staff, neither the state-run Eleanor Slater Hospital nor the Veterans Home has…
The Rhode Island General Assembly is calling its page for information about ideas and proposals related to its federal COVID handout the “American Rescue Plan Act State Fiscal Recovery Fund Recommendation Portal.” The Associated Press article about the portal maintains that framing: Rhode Island’s legislature has created a website to post the proposals it’s receiving…
The featured image for this post is the power outage map for National Grid at 7:00 a.m. Power is out across the entire state. It doesn’t have to be this way. Wires could be put underground, except that our government squanders as much money as it can so as to charge us additionally for basic…
Understandably, the president and CEO of the New England Cable and Telecommunications Association, Tim Wilkerson, is striving to get out ahead of rumors that the state government might give government-run Internet a try. Not only do such projects have a track record of failure, but also: Rhode Island already is one of the best states in…
Introducing discrimination into state contracting based on “equity” demands will create dreams deferred.
