Tue, 28 Jul 2009

Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island

I'm happy to announce that Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island is now available. The book, a collection of articles and columns written over the past couple of years, is my attempt to begin to assimilate a critique of the conventional tale about Rhode Island's woes.

What's that conventional tale? Let me quote the introduction to the book:

Rhode Island is in a crisis! Hamstrung by a legislature in thrall to powerful unions and the lobbyists for social service agencies, we have spent far beyond our means. Furthermore, profligate spending by cities and towns is bankrupting local government, and threatens to take the state down, too. Meanwhile, to satisfy the unquenchable demand for government services and benefits, taxes are rising every year without end.

Does this story sound familiar? It should. I encounter it in the newspaper, on the internet, on talk radio, and even in conversation with my friends. You probably do, too. I think of it as the "conventional tale," and it defines the politics of the past two decades here in Rhode Island. I've heard it not just from friends and neighbors, but from the vast majority of the many legislators, town councilors, school committee members I've ever spoken with.

The problem is that this conventional tale is wrong in nearly every particular. Labor has several allies in the state legislature, but it has lost almost all the high-profile battles it has undertaken over the past decade. Welfare benefits are stingy and hard to get here, just like in other states, and the welfare rolls have declined dramatically over the past dozen years. Meanwhile, few municipalities are spending any more than the bare minimum necessary to meet legal requirements -- and the ever-increasing demand for services by their own residents.

What about taxes? Aren't Rhode Islanders paying more and more taxes each year? Even this, it turns out, is not correct. If you ignore the take from the Rhode Island Lottery and the video slot terminals in Newport and Lincoln, the proportion of our state's economy collected in state fees and taxes plus all local property taxes has barely budged, except to decline slightly since the early 1990's. What's changed is who pays them.

See more ...

00:08 - 28 Jul 2009 [/y9/jy] link

Sun, 26 Jul 2009

Efficient or not? Can't be both.

A few weeks ago I was in Maine with a good friend of mine, and we happened to walk by a little rural post office. My friend gestured with his thumb and said, "You know what's killing the Post Office? Having to support thousands of tiny offices like that."

A little while later, I mentioned that it is now much cheaper to send an overnight letter via the Post Office than by Federal Express, and he said, "Well, they've got all the infrastructure." An essential part of that "infrastructure" is all those rural post offices. In other words, the public sector is terribly inefficient, except where it isn't.

You see this all over. A few months ago, I was watching my local school committee discuss the possibility of letting the school kitchen offer some limited catering services to the public as a way earn some extra income and offset the cost of producing school lunches. One of the members nearly blew his top at the suggestion and vigorously denounced the idea as unfair to competing businesses. This came mere moments after he suggested it would save money to privatize the same kitchen. This was a new member, just elected last November, and this was also the first time I'd seen him so worked up. An ex-committee member sitting next to me (a Republican) leaned over and asked me to explain why he was so heated about a simple idea to earn the district some money.

We're not alone in puzzling over this attitude. President Obama expressed the same thing in a press conference last month, where he defended the a public insurance option in the health care reform. He pointed out that either the public plan would be too inefficient to compete with private insurers, or not. But you can't argue both that it's so efficient it will put private insurers out of business and that it's an inefficient waste of taxpayer money. It's got to be one or the other, according to the rule of the excluded middle, one of the logical rules handed down to us from Aristotle.

See more ...

23:26 - 26 Jul 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Fri, 24 Jul 2009

Another one

Who says we're the most corrupt state? Only people who don't get out much.

Remember this? Measures of corruption from last winter. Especially check out the survey of statehouse reporters.

10:26 - 24 Jul 2009 [/y9/jy] link

Sat, 18 Jul 2009

We need more curiosity, less condemnation

Our state is the smallest state, of course, but do you also think it's the weakest, dumbest, most expensive and most corrupt? If so, you're not alone. But why do you believe that? Is it because it's true, or just because you've been told it so often?

In truth, it seems there is a curious sort of civic self-loathing among Rhode Islanders that seems to leave us perpetually ready to believe the worst about our state. Playing to this suspicion is a fairly effective way to get elected, so there's a large class of policitians and activists with a lot of personal prestige based on such claims. So you hear this kind of auto-insult, a lot. My favorite recent example came up in the news last month about Providence fire fighters.

Now I'm a little chagrined to have no useful opinion about the Providence fire fighters' union and its dispute with Mayor Cicilline. I simply haven't spent enough time with the details of the issue to understand what's going on. Plus I always harbor a suspicion that when two sides let a dispute like this fester so long there are issues in play that no one's talking about. But I don't know that, so can say no more.

What I can say is that there is a statistic about firefighters making the rounds that is highly misleading in some important ways. You heard its echo in news stories covering the firefighters' picket of the National Mayor's Conference, in claims that Providence has the most expensive department in the most expensive state for firefighters. But wait a minute. Who says we are the most expensive state for firefighters?

See more ...

23:21 - 18 Jul 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Tue, 14 Jul 2009

Health care: Hope for Congress

I spent an evening last week engaged in a 21st century American chore: reading the fine print on competing health plans. There I was, trying to discern whether one plan, that covered "100% of eligible expenses" but has no "out-of-pocket" limit is better or worse for my family than another that covers 90%, but has an out-of-pocket annual limit. After failing to find adequate definitions of "eligible" for one plan and failing to determine whether the absence of a qualifier in the other really meant "all," I felt like throwing the whole mess across the room.

Our nation has accomplished some phenomenal things in medicine. Our medical care is the envy of the whole world, except for one teensy detail: its cost. As of a 2003 survey, we spend more per person each year on medical care, than any other country in the world. By a lot. The second place country, Switzerland, has only two-thirds of our expenses, and almost every other country spends half what we do, or less.

What's more, because of its high cost, we get less of that magical care than people in many other places. So our infant mortality is higher and our life expectancy lower than in virtually any other industrial country.

Now I read that the plans making their way through Congress are expected to cost somewhere between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion more than what we're already paying (over ten years). For those keeping score, we already pay around $1.6 trillion in health care costs each year.

Which is all to say that the only way that Congress can figure out to control health care costs is to increase the costs we're already paying? Some reform. But apparently we're doing this to preserve the valuable parts of our system.

Which parts do you want to preserve? The all-expenses paid conferences in Aruba that drug companies hold for doctors? The endless pads, pens, tote bags, and tape dispensers advertising drugs? The conflicts of interest where physicians have a financial stake in the tests they order? The millions paid to the United Health's CEO? Or maybe the millions paid to the Lifespan CEO? Who pays for all that? You do.

See more ...

00:00 - 14 Jul 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Tue, 07 Jul 2009

Leadership, but to where?

During the budget debate a couple of weeks back, House Majority Leader Gordon Fox offered some stern words about leadership. "You're here to be leaders," he told his House colleagues.

He's absolutely right. It takes a special kind of leadership to insist that cutting taxes for rich people is the only way to raise enough revenue to deal with our fiscal crisis. It's the leadership of the bus driver who takes his bus right off the cliff, assuring the passengers he'll find the button to make it unfold into a jet on the way down: "It's got to be here somewhere!"

It is also, of course, a leadership built on threats of retribution. Assembly members well understand that a legislative proposal is not judged on its merits, but on the "loyalty" of its sponsor. A "no" vote on the budget dramatically decreases the chances that any bill of yours, no matter how important or useful, will be considered. This is the way House Speakers have maintained control for decades, and so everyone thinks it normal, and that's why there was such a crush of bills to pass that had been held until after the budget vote. I have no doubt whatever that Speaker William Murphy and his team feel this budget is the best they can do for the state. But let's be clear: when they prevent members' bills from consideration based on anything besides the merits of the bill, they subordinate the good of the state to that of the Speaker and his team, and I can't imagine why they would expect praise for that.

See more ...

13:20 - 07 Jul 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Do they care enough to share?

An important part of Rhode Island's budget puzzle is the budgets of our cities, towns, school districts and fire districts. The state offers a considerable amount of aid each year to the cities and towns, and it seems to be a permanent bone of contention. A couple of weeks back I wrote about how folks at the Assembly seem to think the money is largely wasted.

Well last week, they proved it by axing one program of aid, called "general revenue sharing." This was a program, begun under Governor Bruce Sundlun, that allocated a set percentage of the state's general revenues (mostly sales and income taxes) to the cities and towns. At first it was just 1%, but in 1998, the Assembly changed it to ramp up to 4.7% by 2009.

But the optimism gave way, and in 2002, we delayed the phase-in by a year. Then, in 2004, Governor Carcieri suggested it be delayed another year. His budget that year level-funded the program and delayed the phase-in schedule by a year. But then the next year, he proposed something similar, and that was pretty much the end of ambition. For the fiscal year 2009, the one that finishes at the end of this month, we originally allocated $55 million last year, about 4% of municipal budgets. The supplemental budget this year was going to eliminate this aid entirely, but a near-revolt in the House earlier this spring saved $25 million of it.

The budget draft reported out of the House Finance committee contained zero dollars for the program. It didn't repeal the provision of the law, but it did remove the percentage targets entirely and inserts language to say the whole thing is up to the whim of future Assemblies. Of course they've made it clear that municipal funding is up to the whim of the current Assembly, too, so maybe there's not much of a change there.

See more ...

13:20 - 07 Jul 2009 [/y9/cols] link

Ads and the like:

Rhode Island 101
(A funny book you should own)