Rhode Island Economy
Just a reminder to accompany all the quotes you may be reading (like the quotes in this Scott Mayerowitz Projo article) coming from people who say that it is absolutely impossible to expect the government of Rhode Island to spend within its budget (the state budget shortfall is now estimated at $77,000,000 for this fiscal…
Secretary of State candidate Guillaume de Ramel helps advance a point I began making at the end of last week (h/t RI Future)…I write today to strongly support legislation (2006 H 6718) that will incrementally increase the minimum wage in Rhode Island from $6.75 to $7.40 by January 1, 2007. Your committee members and House…
Possibilites for tax-reform in this session of the Rhode Island legislature appear strangely muddled. On the one hand, Speaker of the House William Murphy named tax-reform as one of the three highest priorities for the 2006 legislative session…Let it be our New Year’s resolution; let it be our sense of duty to every Rhode Islander…
In my first post in this series, I sarcastically contrasted two headlines that seemed to sum up the current state of RI economic development. In the second post, I noted that ProJo columnist Edward Achorn had also noticed the contrast and wrote on the topic. Achorn was especially critical of the state’s reliance upon gambling…
It seems that Hugo Chavez’s Public Relations campaign–“Petrol Populism“–is making some headway here in RI. Rhode Island’s senators will meet today with officials of Venezuela and its state-controlled oil company to discuss what may be an imminent deal to sell discounted heating oil to the state’s poor people. Citgo, a Houston-based business owned by Venezuela’s…
In a moment of negative serendipity (if there is such a thing), the following headlines great the reader of today’s ProJo: “Electric Boat to cut 2,400 jobs” “State OKs expansion in Newport Grand slots” The Electric Boat layoff is a result of a reprioritization by the Navy and is an example of the normal economic…
Andrew puts his post about Rhode Island’s fiscal position relative to its neighbors in the “Rhode Island Economy” category, but the issue is at least as political and cultural as it is economic. Over years of patchwork research, I’ve found that Rhode Island always tops Massachusetts in all the wrong ways. It takes bad or…
According to this story: For years, slot machines at Lincoln Park and Newport Grand have seen double-digit growth. But now — while the machines are still extremely profitable — they are not producing the same boom, and that could have grave ramifications for the state. This year’s state budget is based on the assumption that…
In his commentary in the Providence Journal, which Don mentions in the previous post, Rhode Island College student Bill Felkner does the single most important thing for government reform: Let’s draw a straight line: The school teaches the “perspective”; graduates get jobs at the state Department of Human Services and the Poverty Institute; the DHS…
The temporary part-time job delivering Christmas packages in Tiverton that I took to cross the financial finish line in December greatly helped me to gain a sense of my new hometown. (We bought a house here in July.) The most significant impression that the town makes is the dividing line that runs roughly in the…
