Taxation
Although the bit has probably been recycled many times, the easiest version to find is a scene from L.A. Story, with Steve Martin. A street ATM has two lines: On the right are people waiting to take out cash; on the left are people waiting for their turn to mug them. As Martin walks away with his…
John DePetro and Justin Katz talk the Rhode Island politics of the day.
Two stories in the news recently have been nagging at me in combination over the past week. The first is the Republican response to Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s State of the State address, as delivered by Senate Minority Leader Jessica de la Cruz. Here’s the part that resonates particularly oddly: Where McKee called for cutting…
Once upon a time, the common wisdom was that government work couldn’t compete with the private sector for pay but made up for it in benefits and job security. Whether that was ever true, I don’t know, but it has long been the case that government workers in Rhode Island get the best of all…
John DePetro and Justin Katz find evidence of the missing ingredient in RI politics everywhere.
Addressing homelessness requires tracing the economic causes to their roots, including (for example) money provided to politically connected projects like the Superman Building rehab.
Socialist Rhode Island state senator Sam Bell (Democrat, Providence) has gotten a good deal of richly deserved negative pushback over truly terrible legislation he submitted in the state General Assembly (which is not to say that some of the correspondence he’s received hasn’t gone too far). As the cosigners on Bell’s legislation back away from…
Well, we have to thank Rhode Island Republicans for trying: The Rhode Island Senate Republican Caucus is proposing the state eliminate gas tax for the remainder of the year. “We want to direct the influx in tax revenue back to residents and provide relief from the crushing pain at the pump,” Senate Minority Whip Jessica…
Perhaps the key detail to be found in the report and interactive tools that the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council (RIPEC) just released is to be found at the top of its associated infographic. As shown in the featured image of this post, although Rhode Island is the 18th state in the country for per…
From Preston Brashers’s report, the three Bs appear to stand for “Build Bureaucracy Bigger”: The Build Back Better Act has several provisions that make Congress less accountable for U.S. tax policy and give unaccountable bureaucrats more control. The act would (1) give the IRS more regulatory authority, (2) task IRS agents with finding new revenues,…