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RIPR is a (paper) newsletter that looks at local, state and federal policy issues that affect life here in the Ocean State. Each issue focuses on particular policy areas of interest. Future issues will examine controversial aspects of environmental policy, health care, state tax reform, and education spending. The intention is to look at action rather than talk. RIPR also issues a weekly column about public policy, carried by ten of Rhode Island's finer newspapers. See here for an archive of recent columns. If you'd like to help, please contribute an item, suggest an issue topic, or buy a subscription. If you can, buy two or three (subscribe here). Search this siteAvailable Back Issues:
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Links:Links pageRSSRIPR is primarily a print publication (yikes! how 20th century!), and the work it represents is supported by its subscribers. Feel free to use this link to an RSS feed for the blog, but the real meat is in the newsletter, so come back and subscribe when you have a chance. Responsibility: Tom Sgouros
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Sat, 26 Apr 2008
Lenny Bruce used to say he didn't believe the stories about dolphins pushing drowning sailors to shore. He said dolphins just like to push people around -- and you never hear from the people who get pushed away from land.
As a nation of immigrants, we hear a familiar line whenever immigration comes up: "My grandparents came here and they worked hard and they did fine." And whenever I hear it, I think of a Greek uncle of mine, Niko, who I knew when I was little. He wasn't strictly related, but he was married to Georgia, my aunt's best friend, and frequently showed up at family holidays where I played with his daughter Photini. Niko never really mastered English, and I remember him sitting quietly by himself somewhere to the side of the action during those holiday gatherings. Sometime around when I was 16, Georgia died and he decided that America just wasn't for him, and moved back to Athens.
18:44 - 26 Apr 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sun, 20 Apr 2008
Every time you see a TV ad with shaky camera work, think that you're seeing the commercial use of what was once a hallmark of the non-commercial, and marvel at the free market's ability to co-opt pretty much everything — including economic policies originally meant as a critique of business-as-usual market capitalism.
Communist revolutionary Che Guevara rapidly became an inspirational figure for revolutionary socialist change after his execution in Bolivia in 1967. Forty years later, Che lives on but his image now adorns t-shirts that have become popular fashion statements. This transformation reflects the extraordinary power of markets to capture and transform, turning an avowed enemy of the market system into a profit opportunity.Read more here.The process of capture also holds for economic policy, which has witnessed the conservative capture of Keynesianism. This capture is now on display as U.S. policymakers struggle to contain the effects of a collapsing house price bubble that was recklessly funded by Wall Street. The sting is that the full powers of Keynesian policies are being invoked to save an economy that no longer generates Keynesian outcomes of full employment and shared prosperity.
18:04 - 20 Apr 2008 [/y8/ap] link
Fri, 18 Apr 2008
What? There's actual data to inform the discussion of illegal immigration and its effect on the state budget? Huh.
Here's the Congressional Budget Office's review of 29 reports about the fiscal impact on state and local budgets.
What does it say? It says that illegal immigrants pay more in taxes than the services they receive, but that they pay most of it in federal taxes, and the services they use are state and local services. Federal services typically deny assistance to illegal immigrants, but federal laws and court rulings deny that possibility to states and towns.
Immigration is, of course, largely a federal problem. It's the federal government that turned a blind eye to employers who came to depend on cheap labor from the south. So immigration is, again, a case of the powerful shifting the cost for their bad decisions onto someone else, simply because they can. The real mystery is why everyone gets mad at the immigrants and not at Congress or the President.
Here is a page of research from Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). They would seem to be the source of a lot of the data used in debates about illegal immigration here. I couldn't help but notice that they are on the high side of all the relevant estimates, though perhaps within the margins of error.
16:02 - 18 Apr 2008 [/y8/ap] link
Thu, 17 Apr 2008
Is at the printer.
- Eric Hirsch on homelessness and the housing market. How income polarization has affected homelessness in more ways than you think.
- What car imports in the 1980's and the housing market of the past few years have in common. See here.
- Review of Dan Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational", a behavioral economic account of irrational behavior.
Didn't you mean to subscribe today?
17:52 - 17 Apr 2008 [/y8/ap] link
Tue, 15 Apr 2008
It's now quite clear that nothing is going to happen to the President who has openly admitted that he authorized torture, and that, far from being the acts of a few bad apples, our appalling descent from at least a pretense to the moral high ground was engineered by decisions made at the very top.
It's hard to find words to express the astonishment at how quickly our country could descend to barbarism. Not to mention the sadness.
Here's someone who tried.
Background summarized well here.
09:56 - 15 Apr 2008 [/y8/ap] link
Sun, 13 Apr 2008
A historic blunder on tax credits
We got a taste last week of how House Finance intends to deal with the fiscal crisislast week. What did we learn? We learned that the distance between the House leadership and the Governor can be measured in small fractions of a millimeter. Challenged to do something about the burgeoning cost of the Historic Structure tax credit, they decided not to limit it to affordable housing developments, or to cap it, but to deep-six it altogether.
To understand this story, you need to understand how tax credits like this work. It's not that hard. Suppose you want to rehabilitate some historic building. If it meets the criteria, you are eligible for a 30% credit against your taxes. But suppose you don't ever owe that much, or suppose you're a non-profit who doesn't pay taxes? In that case you can sell your credit to someone who wants a break. If you have a credit for $100,000, and you sell it to your friend for $80,000, then you're $80,000 ahead, and your buddy gets to use your credit to pay his taxes, so he's ahead $20,000. Sweet, no?
12:16 - 13 Apr 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Thu, 10 Apr 2008
Another corner turned in the war on drugs. Apparently poppy production in Afghanistan is down. Why? It's more profitable to grow wheat this year.
Isn't that great? And it comes in bags of white powder, too.
11:03 - 10 Apr 2008 [/y8/ap] link
Sun, 06 Apr 2008
Handy/Moura hearing: special tax breaks and the general good
Last week, there was a State House hearing about the "Economic Growth and Fairness Act," a complex tax reform bill sponsored by Representative Art Handy (D-Cranston) and Senator Paul Moura (D-East Providence). (First, the full disclosure: I did research to support this bill, and testified for it. I've never claimed to be an objective journalist, only an honest one.)
Before the hearing, there was a rally in the rotunda protesting cuts to Head Start, the early-childhood education program. "Great," you say, "yet another interest group, trying to protect its special program that's costing us money." I watched the rally, then went downstairs to the hearing.
And do you know what I saw there? Lots of other interest groups trying to protect their special programs, mostly tax breaks. The difference? These people were wearing nice suits. (So was I. As I said: full disclosure.)
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