Rhode Island Economy
I didn’t make as directly a causal argument as Nandini Jayakrishna makes it sound in her Brown Daily Herald article as her final rendering makes it sound: Though Maselli and Ucci said the bill is consumer-friendly, others think it might end up harming shoppers. “Businesses are not just going to eat the cost of this…
I don’t support residency requirements for such public employees as teachers. It’s nice to think that your children are being taught by your neighbors (as inaccurate as that characterization of fellow townspeople may be), but schools should find the best teachers they can, and teachers should be free to decide where to live. That said,…
The business section of the Providence Journal was full of discouraging words, yesterday. Consider this from the dangerously clueless Senate Finance Committee Chairman Stephen Alves (D., West Warwick): When I asked him afterward about his remarks, Alves said that state tax collections were down last month, compared not only with January 2007, but also with…
With the numbers debate becoming increasingly involved, and now that it is clear that we RI bloggers are no longer merely talking among ourselves, I thought to expand my examination of population and wealth trends in Rhode Island. The most straightforward method is to start where I began with my proclamations of middle-to-upper-class flight from…
It’s good to see that the gatekeepers over at RI Future have allowed somebody actually to address the points that I’m making (as opposed to making distinct points and scoffing at whatever it was that some right-winger was saying elsewhere). That somebody turned out to be sometime Anchor Rising commenter Thomas Schmeling, and his argument…
Legislators — even those who are trying to sound conciliatory to RI businesses — are making some scary noises: Stephen D. Alves, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, suggested yesterday that lawmakers may raise business taxes to balance the state budget. The remarks, at the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce’s high-profile legislative luncheon, ran counter…
In attempting to match the Crowley/Poverty Institute/ITEP argument, I didn’t include 2005 data (in part, ahem, because its availability didn’t register in my whirlwind round of data collection). I’ve modified the charts in the previous post so that the scales match. The thing to note is how much more the columns grew for Massachusetts and…
Readers familiar with NEA Assistant Executive Director Patrick Crowley’s body of work are to be forgiven if they took the opening line of the letter to the editor that he’s been passing around to all the local papers — “repeat the lie, no matter how false it is” — as advice, not a complaint. Dan…
Beware unsigned opinion pieces phrased in the first person. The instance in mind is this post from A Blog Called Hope, which appears to be a somewhat official production of the Rhode Island Democrats: I know everyone hates taxes, but a longer and more destructive recession would be much worse. Actually, it simply isn’t the…
I originally posted this in response to Pat Crowley’s ranting on RIFuture. Since he’s published the same propaganda as a letter to the Providence Journal, I thought it worth bumping the post to the top. It is sufficiently tedious to respond to “analysis” from the NEA’s Pat Crowley that, when it’s limited to RI Future,…