Under the Government’s Wing
Fred Schwartz highlights two stories related to Environment Protection Agency (EPA) dictats. First, it turns out that Americans are still disinclined to spend money on electric and hybrid vehicles. Second, the EPA has now put companies in the position of being fined for not including an additive that they simply can’t get. Both articles reflect…
An article in today’s Providence Journal describes a familiar aspect of a town’s movement toward receivership that might point to a common contributing factor: A national investment ratings agency, Fitch Ratings, on Thursday downgraded the outlook for Woonsocket. In its report the agency said the city of almost 42,000 people faced a School Department deficit…
Somehow, I thought the state would go a bit more slowly when it came to using its new “tool” for taking over governance of Rhode Island municipalities: Again raising the sense of urgency and severity, Governor Chafee appointed a financial commission to oversee East Providence on Tuesday. The decision makes the city the state’s first…
I’ve found the ProCAP matter to highlight a thoroughly depressing fact of the modern civic arrangement, and it came to a point when Russ stated the following, in a comment to one of Andrew’s recent posts: If providing a bridge loan is cheaper than taking over the functions that would be lost if PROCAP goes…
This seems like another one like I referenced earlier with the call for a “Wait, What?!” category, or maybe it’s even slipping into a different one, some three-letter acronym that begins with the same letter as “Wait, What?!” What is going on with this redistricting process? Let’s take a step back for a minute. What…
I see, in the paper that cannot be linked, that Senator Whitehouse is leading the charge on legislation that would increase the difficulty of development in some coastal areas of Newport and Middletown “to prevent habitate and property damage”: The protections under the Coastal Barrier Resource System would be extended to an additional 45 acres…
Small business president Gerry Auclair has observed an interesting conundrum arising from the effect of government subsidies in society. He participated in a program through Workforce of Rhode Island to hire and train an employee as a sewing-machine operator, which essentially provided a $5,000 subsidy for the company’s cost of employing her, but: Then, in…
Reading about Rhode Island’s effort to return its unemployment fund to solvency in yesterday’s Providence Journal, I got the impression of a system so counterproductive that only government officials could conceive of it (and getting worse): The employers’ payments are determined by the number of former workers qualifying for payments; those paying the highest taxes…
Yes, the story isn’t as simple as a gut reaction allows, but broken down into a summary, this story feels like a cautionary tale of the leviathan state: David Whitaker’s cooperation with the Google investigation was called extraordinary several times during his sentencing [for Internet fraud crimes] in U.S. District Court in Providence. Assistant U.S.…
So, the Obama administration has given Rhode Island another $58 million to work on its government-run healthcare exchange, along with compliments for being so resourceful as to skip the legislative process in its implementation. At this point, the federal government shuffling around money that it doesn’t have is hardly news, nor is the Obama administration’s…