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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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Wed, 26 Dec 2007
Why should you worry about welfare?
[Appeared last week in the Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times and other fine RIMG papers.]
While browsing through old reports at the state house library a while back, I found the 1936 report of the state's Public Welfare Department. The report was interesting, but it was the cover that caught my attention. It's a fascinating image, but what's most fascinating about it is how incongruous it seems in 2007. Just try to imagine some meeting next year of the newly reorganized Human Services directorate, where an artist proposes this as a cover for their first annual report. When the laughter finally subsides, the new director will lean over and, with teeth clenched, inform the artist that meetings are not for drollery.
14:28 - 26 Dec 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Tue, 18 Dec 2007
[Appeared last week in the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times and other fine RIMG papers.]
An interesting fall: One week we open a stylish new bridge, and the next week, one of the most important bridges in the state is found to be unsafe for anything as heavy as, say, a truck. The Department of Transportation says they can't afford to fix the I-95 bridge in Pawtucket any time soon. But it would be cheap to build in a slightly greater upslope on either side of the bridge. That way, you can gun your engine as you approach the bridge, and soar across the weakened span without having to worry about whether there is more rust or steel beneath your wheels. Detours are for sissies.
But wait a minute. It can't just be cost, because at the same time DOT says they can't do anything about the Pawtucket Bridge, they just finished a new bridge in Providence and they're about to begin construction on a replacement for the Sakonnet River Bridge. They have money for new construction, but not for repairs?
11:11 - 18 Dec 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Mon, 10 Dec 2007
[Appeared last week in the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times, and other fine RIMG papers.]
Last week the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) voted not to change its rules about gas and electric shutoffs if you don't pay your bill, and rules about getting it turned back on. The PUC had been considering a minimum payment required to get your electricity turned back on, as well as new rules about who could be represented by whom at shutoff hearings, but they decided against it.
In any discussion of utility shutoffs, there is a question lingering in the back of people's heads. It was all over mine, so I'll be the one to admit it: why should I care? If someone can't pay their bill, then how is that different from ordering food at a restaurant without money in your pocket?
21:57 - 10 Dec 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Tue, 04 Dec 2007
[Appeared last week in the Woonsocket Call and Pawtucket Times and other fine RIMG papers.]
All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey, and I have Governor Carcieri's staff reduction plans to evaluate. We finally learned last week that the Governor's proposed job cuts will not all be in invisible "back office" positions. It turns out that he's not only talking about middle managers, but about front-line state employees: translators, janitors, cooks, nurses, social workers and many more.
15:05 - 04 Dec 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Mon, 26 Nov 2007
What you didn't know about welfare.
[From the Woonsocket Call and Pawtucket Times, etc.]
The Governor made it clear last week that he wants to include discussions about welfare in the debates over the state budget crisis, again. Fair enough, I suppose. No budget item is sacred. But let's make sure we know the facts first.
How much don't you know about welfare? Like many people you might have heard that Rhode Island is a "welfare magnet," attracting welfare recipients from other states by our lax rules. Did you know that the actual data show exactly the opposite?
23:08 - 26 Nov 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Sat, 17 Nov 2007
Getting serious about state spending
[Appeared first in the Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times, etc.]
When you talk with people for any length about the state budget, unions are bound to come up. When you talk with people for any length about unions in the state, the Brotherhood of Corrections Officers is bound to come up.
In many ways,the Brotherhood is among the more militant of the state's public employee unions. Plus, a crowd of prison guards is just a teensy bit more imposing than a crowd of teachers, so they get press. They have been in the news over the last few years for helping prevent the establishment of halfway houses in Rhode Island and for contracted work rules that force the extensive use of overtime at the state prisons. As a result, few people find it surprising that, after accounting for inflation, we spend 160% more on the state prisons now than we did 20 years ago.
But what might be a surprise is that 160% is just about the increase we've seen in the number of inmates since then: from 1528 in 1988 to 3937 in September, about 95% of capacity. The number of people on probation and parole is up 170%, from 10,000 to 27,000. That is, after inflation, we spend about the same per prisoner now as we did 20 years ago. The real problem is that we have a lot more prisoners.
23:21 - 17 Nov 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Sun, 11 Nov 2007
Taxes are taxes, until you ask who pays them.
[Appeared last week in the Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times and other RIMG papers.]
Are taxes just taxes? Does it matter when the state cuts the income tax and towns raise the property tax? As a matter of fact it makes a world of difference, and here's why: Like the federal income tax, the Rhode Island income tax rate gets higher as you earn more income. People who earn very little pay a very small fraction of their income in tax, while people who earn a lot pay a greater fraction. In Rhode Island now, the Greens who earn $50,000 a year will pay about 2% of their income in tax. The Browns earn around $200,000, so pay tax at around 7% most years.
22:31 - 11 Nov 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Wed, 07 Nov 2007
The state budget: choosing a crisis
[Appeared last week in the Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times, etc.]
In 2006, when the legislature passed its tax cap for rich people (also known as the alternative ``flat'' tax), they did it without saying what services would be cut to pay for it. The way the tax cut game is usually played, the cut has to be phased in over several years, leaving. the harsh spending decisions to some future legislature. Naturally we're all supposed to pretend not to notice how cowardly it is to propose a tax cut without saying what will be sacrificed to pay for it. Are you in favor of lower taxes? Put that way, who isn't? Where it becomes hard is after we understand what we're giving up.
06:46 - 07 Nov 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Sun, 28 Oct 2007
Our flinty neighbors to the north.
[Appeared in Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times, etc, last week.]
After a column I wrote about taxes, a reader wrote in to ask about New Hampshire. He wrote that they have half the number of state employees there, and still manage to pave their roads, and do it with no income tax and no sales tax. When you write about taxes and state budgets in Rhode Island, you hear a lot about New Hampshire, a fact that amused several of the New Hampshire officials I spoke to. It seems they don't spend much time thinking about us.
But let's clear up some misconceptions about our flinty neighbors to the north. New Hampshire has no income tax, right? Well, sort of. They have no income tax on wages, but they do tax unearned income, like interest and dividends, at 5%. A married couple here have to be making well over $100,000 a year before they're taxed at that rate. New Hampshire has a business income tax of 8.5% to 9.25%, depending on size and they define taxable businesses much more liberally than we do, with three times as many business tax returns filed than here. The business income tax funds a quarter of their budget and 4% of ours. If I, a self-employed writer, were to move to New Hampshire, my state taxes could go up.
20:38 - 28 Oct 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Fri, 26 Oct 2007
[Appeared in the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times, and others.]
We learned last week that Operation Dollar Bill, the federal investigation of the Senate leadership, involves tax legislation. In federal court, Gerard Martineau, the former Senate Majority Leader from Woonsocket, admitted to crimes involving taking money from CVS in exchange for legislative favors. In cases involving other former Senators, we've already heard about corruption involving "pharmacy choice" legislation, where the legislature rejected bills that would have allowed pharmacies to compete with each other for your business. But now we hear that some of the favors may have involved the 2002 capital gains tax cut. If it's true that money changed hands in order to influence tax legislation, I have some free advice for the CVS and Blue Cross executives who gave it: Don't waste your money. Most of the legislators in our General Assembly love you already, and money can't buy that kind of love.
11:07 - 26 Oct 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Tue, 23 Oct 2007
State Pensions: Who is the liability?
[Appeared in the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times, and others, two weeks ago.]
The Governor has announced his plans to cut 1,000 state employees and to cut $50 million state spending and another $50 million in benefit costs for the remaining state employees. I can say stuff like that, too. Watch: I will cut all 15,353 state employees! Except the lifeguards at Scarborough. Of course I'm not the Governor, so it's a tiny bit less credible, but not by much. Until he starts to say what positions he will cut, from which departments, and which services will be sacrificed to make this plan work, it's all just words, about as valuable as mine. (Not to mention how he will overcome such obstacles as employee statutory status.)
07:28 - 23 Oct 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Sat, 20 Oct 2007
A solution in search of a problem
[Column originally appeared in Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times, etc.]
Last spring, Ralph Mollis, our new Secretary of State, announced the formation of his "Voters First" commission. The idea was to find ways to improve how we vote. Some of his proposals -- extending elections to cover several days and eliminating the need for an excuse to get an absentee ballot -- aren't bad. My favorite is about improving the training and pay for poll workers. Many of them are hard working and intelligent volunteers we should honor, but they are often not informed about the details of election laws. I've twice been threatened with arrest for seeking public information from poll workers on election day.
19:22 - 20 Oct 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Mon, 01 Oct 2007
Are state taxes your biggest problem?
[Appeared last week in RIMG papers all over Rhode Island. If this wasn't in your local paper, complain to the editor.]
It's hardly news to anyone that the state is in a terrible fiscal situation this year. It will be very surprising if we end this fiscal year without a deficit, and the deficit anticipated in *next* year's budget looks immense. Numbers north of $400 million are being discussed around the state house. For some perspective, this is over 10% of the state's entire budget.
The Governor spent a little time last week trying to prepare the ground for the upcoming budget season. He put out a press release saying how hard he was pushing the heads of state departments to find cuts to make, and sat for press interviews. He promises deep cuts in services, and wants to lay off 1,000 state employees. (When he said something similar last spring, it turned out that no member of his administration had actually identified 1,000 employees whose services could be dispensed with. Instead it appeared his office had simply picked a number from a hat, and then complained when no one in the legislature took the proposal seriously.)
As he frequently does, the Governor took some time to claim that the blame for the budget situation belongs to the legislature, who rewrites the budgets he submits. In a newspaper interview last week, he is quoted as saying, "I can propose some things, but the General Assembly has to enact it and they enacted a budget that... is not a budget that works."
The Assembly is far from blameless for the current disaster of a state budget, but he is far too modest. Without his able leadership, we wouldn't be in nearly as serious a crisis. To hear him speak, you'd think that the budgets he submitted were models of fiscal responsibility, vandalized by evil legislators, but that just isn't true, and it hasn't been since the day he was sworn in.
15:51 - 01 Oct 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Wed, 19 Sep 2007
Can't get a break, even when they give them.
[Appeared in the RIMG papers last week.]
A few weeks ago I met a guy, a Republican who shall remain nameless here, out of kindness, since he's not a public figure yet. He's thinking of running for the state senate next year, and in conversation, he told me that part of the reason he's running is that Rhode Island raised taxes more this past spring than any other state. This is, of course, ridiculous, the kind of non-fact that deserves to be laughed out of the room whenever it comes up.
21:58 - 19 Sep 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Fri, 07 Sep 2007
Paying for war with your school budget
[Appeared this past week in the Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times, and several other papers in the RIMG group.]
Over the last several years, the cost of educating our children has been the major driver of the rise in property taxes in Rhode Island. The biggest part of the rise -- by far -- has been the cost of special education. According to state department of education numbers, general education costs rose an average of 48% between 1998 and 2006, while special ed costs went up 83%. As of the 2005-2006 school year (the latest year published on the Education Department web site), we spend $444 million to educate these children out of nearly $2 billion for all the state's' public schools.
23:53 - 07 Sep 2007 [/y7/cols] link
Tue, 28 Aug 2007
[Appeared last week in the RIMG newspapers, including the Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times, Kent County Times, and the rest.]
The Senate last week held hearings about some terrible things that happened in some of the state's foster homes. Some families and children were put in awful positions by what appear to have been poor choices by DCYF. But DCYF has been put in an awful position by poor choices made by our elected leaders. When you budget a disaster, should we be surprised when that's what we get?
11:22 - 28 Aug 2007 [/y7/cols] link
[Appeared a couple of weeks ago in the RIMG papers.]
The awful news from Minnesota has brought to light a way in which Rhode Island leads the nation: we have a higher proportion of "structurally deficient" bridges than any other state in the nation. According to the Federal Highway Administration, 191 of our 753 bridges are considered deficient enough to need repair. As Kazem Farhoumand, the deputy chief engineer at DOT has been emphasizing in interview after interview, "'Structurally deficient' doesn't mean the bridge is unsafe to travel on." He's right, but it does mean they're on the way to being unsafe unless they get attention. There are 191 bridges in need of attention, and it's not clear when any of them will get it.
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