Under the Government’s Wing
Possibly hoping to tap disenchantment with the recent performance of the stock market, Workforce Management reports that Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation’s $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive. House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George…
I don’t know anything other than what’s reported below, but this strikes me as heavy-handed, no? A 20-year-old woman pleaded not guilty to animal cruelty charges this morning after authorities accused her of muzzling her two pit bulls and abandoning them in an apartment before she went to a hospital to give birth. Judge Jeanne…
The Providence Journal, as represented by Steve Peoples, still isn’t giving the whole story when it comes to Rhode Island’s Family Independence Program: Lawmakers spent yesterday afternoon poring through Governor Carcieri’s 101-page plan that would dramatically cut benefits to the poor, while encouraging a “work-first” model and promoting “healthy marriages.” The governor’s sweeping proposal, if…
The point’s a little bit of a tangent from poverty advocates’ request for more workers to make food stamps easier to claim and disperse (which always raises questions about the responsibility of the government to promote its handouts), but this closing quotation illuminates one of the indistinct areas in which liberals and conservatives move toward…
Consider this vignette from Katherine Gregg’s Projo story on Rhode Island’s misuse of federal healthcare funds: Emma Villa told the lawmakers what would happen to her, as the operator of a small day-care business in her Laban Street, Providence, home, where she looks after two children in addition to her own. With the help of…
Representative Kenneth Carter (D, North Kingstown/Exeter) deserves credit for putting forward one piece of the solution: “… a humane society is concerned about all its members, including those who must pay the bill for the needier,” he said. “We cannot continue to drain others dry so that individuals on public assistance are able to do…
Charles Bakst presents a question that he thinks the governor ought to ask himself, and although my way of answering it mightn’t be what Bakst expects, I think it’s a worthy consideration: I said Carcieri would say he wasn’t calling them bad people, only that they’d made bad decisions. [URI Feinstein hunger center director Kathleen…
I’d like to, if I may, correct a couple of misconceptions on Matt Jerzyk’s part without thereby lending credence to the parts of his post to which I don’t think response merited: … please provide me one woman in the entire state of Rhode Island who, when confronted with the reality of having a child…
A comment from the “stunned” Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva Weed in yesterday’s Projo article raises a couple of beguiling questions: As a tradeoff for the new work requirements and time limits the state adopted in 1996, she said, Rhode Island made subsidized health care and childcare available so, she told the luncheon audience, talk…
New York City has tweaked and reissued proposed regulations requiring chain restaurants to put calorie information next to prices on their menus and menu boards. Many chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King and Starbucks, already provide calorie information on their Web sites or on posters or tray liners. But health officials say customers rarely see this…
