Taxation
While Rhode Island has been distracted by gridlock snow storms, triple dipping public employees and Presidential primaries, Senate President Joseph Montalbano has been sneaking around giving an interview to the Editorial Boards of the Pawtucket Times and the Woonsocket Call. As reported by the Pawtucket Times’ estimable Jim Baron on Tuesday, the state budget was…
Charles Bakst has been peddling his curmudgeonly wares ’round these parts for much longer than I have, but at the risk of later being proven wrong, it seems to me that he’s either not very observant or is in on the game: The governor expressed the fear that legislators will backtrack on tax changes in…
One hesitates to take Pat “The Finger” Crowley’s comments on taxation too seriously. His branch of mathematics, after all, takes progressivism to be a fundamental principle and unionism to be the standard of comparison. That said, anybody who finds merit in his question marks should consider, first, that he highlights two components of taxation, with…
Just to amplify Andrew’s point, from the 2007 Revenue Facts report: State and/or local property taxes are levied in all 50 states. Rhode Island ranks very high in the percentage of state and local revenues generated from property taxes. It has traditionally relied more on local property taxes than most states. FY 2005 census data…
Remember last week when I told you that there are some people who believe that “as long as there exists any metric showing Rhode Islanders not near the top in what they are required to pay to the government, taxes need to be raised”? I just found another one. For some reason, the person in…
Liberals and progressives and those further out on the left assure me that government spending is what it is because of hard economic and social realities, certainly not because the machinery of government has self-serving incentives to spend everything given to it, then demand more! more! more! If that’s true, somebody explain to me how…
Assessing monies collected by state and local governments, the Rhode Island Public Expenditures Council ranks Rhode Island 7th in the United States in “state and local taxes collected per $1,000 of personal income”, but 26th in “state and local tax collections, charges and miscellaneous general revenues per $1,000 of personal income”. To some, the meaning…
There’s that learning curve again. Amidst all of the things that I’ve had to learn as a homeowner (not including carpentry, plumbing, electrical, and so on), it took me until today to realize an important part of my town’s tax structure: In addition to my annual property tax bill for the Town of Tiverton, I…
A few weeks back, Justin observed that the single biggest factor retarding fiscal and economic reform in Rhode Island may be the “but what can we do?” attitude of learned helplessness prevalent in Rhode Island’s legislature and municipal councils. Members of the But-What-Can-We-Do Caucus profess that they are powerless to do anything but raise taxes…
In discussing an Ohio proposal to exempt military pensions from the state income tax, the Toledo Blade names Rhode Island as one of only five states imposing an income tax on military pensions…With one of its members now on military duty and another about to return to Iraq, [the Ohio House] suddenly fast-tracked a proposal…