Economy
John DePetro and Justin Katz check in on politics in RI.
As I understand it, RealPage offers landlords software for renting out and managing their properties. Like other such software across industries, it uses automation and analytics to help its clients conceptualize their assets and their businesses and squeeze out inefficiencies. Among those services is an algorithm that uses local real estate data, including from its…
Although it feels as if genuine policy debates have receded into the background in Rhode Island, reviving them may help correct the corrosion spreading throughout our civic house. Corporate tax incentives, for example, are an area in which conservatives and progressives in Rhode Island tend to agree on the binary “yes/no” question, raising the possibility…
I mean the title of this post in the sense both that progressivism/socialism ignores human nature and that it pretends people aren’t human. Consider: The underlying assumption appears to be that producers will simply produce because they are producers. Human beings don’t fall into nice progressive categories. We make decisions and change our status, and…
Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee tweets yet another area in which Democrats manipulate language to insinuate ideology: A grant from a government agency to another government agency is not “momentum.” Momentum suggests that the entity or project is moving on its own. Government subsidies are pushes… force. Democrats’ language is (deliberately) manipulative and always to…
This tweet reminds us, incidentally, that it makes a difference where inflation enters the economy, particularly in whom it benefits: If inflation results from an increase in the monetary supply, there’s more money floating around for the same goods and services, and the benefit tilts from the top down (starting with investor types), and effect is…
John DePetro and Justin Katz look for the hidden dynamics of local politics.
John DePetro and Justin Katz marvel at the built-in corruption at the state and federal levels.
Many people would likely see it as an obscure topic reported in a minor venue, but Christian Winthrop’s recent article in The Newport Buzz about the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) move against noncompete agreements hits three distinct notes that fire me up. The first is that it is unambiguous propaganda: In a landmark decision aimed…
Civility and compassion are important traits we should, as a society, strive to inculcate in our children and uphold ourselves. However, big-state nannyism has reached the point that well-meaning people no longer appreciate the distinction between how we should act as responsible people and what we should be forced or forbidden to do by an…