Under the Government’s Wing
Mainly on government’s bad incentives: bad housing spending in Providence, unlearnable spending lessons for the governor, stimulus corruption, and Medicaid reform. Continue reading the Ocean State Current…
People across the United States should consider Rhode Island as a canary in the ObamaCare coal mine, whistling the tune of the President’s larger public welfare project. When he spoke on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, RI’s Lincoln Chafee introduced himself as “the nation’s only independent governor.” That’s “independent” as in belonging…
An inherent problem with price fixing identified in basic economics is that we tend to see the proximate results of forced changes on the system, but not the more systemic results. Moreover, fixing prices prevents us from addressing the underlying difficulties that drove them up or down in an undesirable way. The same is true…
Economic development options, from all-government to government-dominated; the heartless-to-caring axis in politics; Southern New Englanders’ “independence”; solidarity between Romney and his garbage man; the media coup d’etat. Continue reading on the Ocean State Current…
In the battle of hidden video and archived recordings that is sure to characterize political campaigns during the digital age, audio emerged from a 1998 presentation by then-state-senator Barack Obama at Loyola University in Illinois. The statement that made headlines (at least on the center-right side of the media) was now-President Obama’s belief in economic…
Today: September 11, global change, evolution, economics, 17th amendment, gold standard, and a boughten electorate… all to a purpose.
Today it’s debt and gambling, from bonds to pensions to entitlements, with consideration of regionalization, ObamaCare, and campaign finance.
Today’s quick(ish) hits touch on: Partisanship as evidenced by Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, and Nick Gillespie. The libertarian-conservative divide and this year’s election. Ed Fitzpatrick’s one-way love of fact checking. The dependency nation as an existential threat. Read all about it on the Ocean State Current…
Against Incentivizing Cooperative Strategic Workarounds with Comprehensive Market-Driven Measurables
At the risk of repeating myself, I have to opine that one of Rhode Island’s core economic challenges is the frequency of sentences like this: To position Rhode Island to compete successfully for jobs and investments, a new public/private economic-development partnership should be designed to implement an integrated economic-development strategy that focuses on business retention…
Although with regret, I have to opine that former East Providence city councilman Robert Cusack misses the target in his op-ed, yesterday, suggesting a way for Rhode Island to rejuvenate its sputtering economy: We need to identify a job generator, make the changes needed to attract those jobs and then promote Rhode Island to execute…