Rhode Island Politics
In a letter to the Providence Journal, Mr. Dennis Odell of Smithfield gives him a “U” for Unsatisfactory. The other week, Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Patrick Lynch publicly opposed an offshore LNG terminal (“Lynch blasts LNG plan,” April 3). What does this have to do with law enforcement? Last month he supported Sen. Barack Obama…
Perhaps the most ear-catching thing that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Stephen Alves (D, West Warwick) said to Dan Yorke yesterday afternoon was that we, the taxpayers of Rhode Island, “don’t pay [legislators] enough money to sit there and spend all hours of the night up there” — as if being a state legislator is a…
So I’ve been wondering when the tripartite alliance of advocates for labor, illegal immigrants and entitlements would start to show cracks in the face of the budget crunch. It would seem only a matter of time, right? Thus far they’ve tried to identify other “revenue sources” such that no program shall be left behind, like…
There is no doubt that there are illegal immigrants taking advantage of taxpayer dollars here in Rhode Island. How many? We don’t know. But we do know that, if we are to apply the same sort of zero-sum economics favored by our friends on the left, any benefits going to illegal immigrants are not going…
A few weeks ago, the Projo‘s Daniel Barbarisi reported that the city of Providence was considering raising revenue by selling its water system…The city is considering selling the Providence Water Supply Board and the network of reservoirs and treatment plants it controls in order to pay down the huge debt in the city’s pension system.…
Every couple of years, it seems, a student from Brown will contact me for comment in an article about blogging for the Brown Daily Herald. It’s traditionally been a unifying topic: although we’ve got different emphases, we Rhode Island bloggers will all agree about the value and opportunities that the medium offers, not the least…
State Representative Carol Mumford (R-Cranston/Scituate), Senior Deputy Minority Leader and a member of the House Finance Committee, paid a visit to last night’s South Kingstown GOP Town Committee meeting, allowing me a change to ask her about the legislature’s progress (if you can call it that) on the state budget… Anchor Rising: Are you getting…
Not only are disposable diapers not taxable, not only do diaper services generate individual income, not only are they taxed via that income and other methods, but apparently diaper services are less expensive in the first place: For Representative Handy, who apparently has trouble with numbers, that means on average that it costs a mother…
Some credit for progress is due to Rhode Island Moderate Party founder Ken Block. His initial presentation of the Moderate Party agenda was almost entirely process-oriented, but the newest version includes some items of substance. Here are a few examples from the Moderate Party website (h/t Ian Donnis)…Decrease or eliminate funding for programs found to…
At the Taubman Center panel on the Rhode Island budget crisis I attended at Brown University a few weeks ago, several members of the audience attempted to attribute at least part of the state deficit to Federal cut-backs in domestic spending forced by the costs of fighting in the Iraqi theater in the War on…