Economy
Rhode Island is not alone in facing budget deficits as many other states (if not most) are in the same predicament. As a recent study by the Cato Institute shows, a lot of the deficit problems stem from generous public employee compensation packages. State and local governments face large budget deficits as revenues have stagnated…
Trying to effect change in Rhode Island at even the local level has been a monumental struggle with almost no success to show for it. Frankly, after years of trying, I have concluded it is not worth the effort. I crossed the state border again this Fall, this time leaving Rhode Island permanently. I recommend…
My thesis is that economic predictions are currently being made after the method expressed by respondents to a recent Providence Business News survey: A sense of nervousness can be gleaned from the results, but the respondents also maintained the optimism that came to the fore in the summer 2009 survey. Many in the business community…
So, yesterday I mentioned some news that’s sparking claims of a recovery: U.S. home sales rose 7.4 percent in November, according to the National Association of Realtors, while in neighboring Massachusetts, the single-family sales spike mirrored that of Rhode Island, at about 60 percent. However, enthusiasm must be tempered by this: The 11 percent slump…
Sometimes the order in which one processes information can create broader impressions than the individual items suggest. For just such an experience, first watch Steven Crowder’s short video about the crumbling, desolate city of Detroit, whose condition he attributes to the loving manipulations of big government. Now consider this news: Almost two months ago, the…
If you’re looking for some worthwhile snowed-in reading, Kevin Williamson’s recent National Review essay, “Priceless Is Worthless,” would be an edifying use of your time. In sum: … as we continue to pretend that there is another unseen economic reality beyond market prices when it comes to health care, banking, housing, labor, cotton, sugar, fuel-efficient…
The Democrats are clearly in grabbing mode, and this sort of thing is not going to stop until we citizens of the United States make it stop: President Barack Obama’s Democratic allies in the House Wednesday muscled through a year-end plan to create jobs, mixing about $50 billion for public works projects with another almost…
Reviewing Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, Duncan Currie emphasizes that advocates for the poor (and such) focus on the wrong measure of social progress: Mobility, not inequality, is the key indicator of economic opportunity. The two are not necessarily correlated: If income inequality has gone up since the early 1980s,…
One more statistic to paste into our collage of problems facing the state, all of which point to the same conclusion: The Mortgage Bankers Association, which compiles the most comprehensive statistics on mortgage loan performance nationwide, also had grim numbers for Rhode Island in the third quarter of the year, the months of July, August…
Via the Corner, some economic research out of Harvard (PDF): Our results suggest that tax cuts are more expansionary than spending increases in the cases of a fiscal stimulus. Based upon these correlations we would argue that the current stimulus package in the US is too much tilted in the direction of spending rather than…