What's this? A Book!
Or buy here: Light Publications, Powell's, or Bn, Amazon A look at the lousy situation Rhode Island is in, how we got here, and how we might be able to get out. Featuring
Now at bookstores near you, or buy it with the button above ($14, or $18 with shipping and sales tax). Contact information below if you'd like to schedule a book-related event, like a possibly entertaining talk on the book's subjects, featuring the famous mystery graph. Join the RIPR Mailing List! For a weekly column and (a few) other items of interest, click here or send an email to ripr-list-subscribe@whatcheer.net. RIPR is a (paper) newsletter and a weekly column appearing in ten of Rhode Island's finer newspapers. The goal is to look at local, state and federal policy issues that affect life here in the Ocean State, concentrating on action, not intentions or talk. 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:
Subscription information:
Contact:For those of you who can read english and understand it, the following is an email address you are welcome to use. If you are a web bot, we hope you can't understand it, and that's the point of writing it this way. editor at whatcheer dot net Archive:
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. AboutThe Rhode Island Policy Reporter is an independent news source that specializes in the technical issues of public policy that matter so much to all our lives, but that also tend not to be reported very well or even at all. The publication is owned and operated by Tom Sgouros, who has written all the text you'll find on this site, except for the articles with actual bylines. Responsibility: Tom Sgouros
|
Sat, 27 Dec 2008
How much does it cost to live in Rhode Island? That's a hard question to answer, so here's another: how much do you have to earn so that you're not poor in Rhode Island?
Since it was first developed (by Mollie Orshansky, a researcher at the Social Security Administration, in 1963), the federal poverty level has been controversial, subject to misinterpretation and manipulation. Originally based on typical food budgets, the poverty level has crept up with food prices over the years, but not with the changes in the way we spend money, leaving it a poor measure of being poor.
14:09 - 27 Dec 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 20 Dec 2008
I got a press release last week from the Governor's office. It seems that he's organized what they're calling a small business stimulus package. Well that's the kind of thing we need right now, so I clicked right over and looked for the details.
Sadly, what was on offer was something else entirely: a package of measures intended to make it more likely that Rhode Island businesses who need credit will get it. Apparently the Governor's office organized a bunch of local banks to pledge specific dollar amounts in local business credit and a variety of other ways to get credit to small businesses. This is a good thing, and I'm glad it's happening. The measures, all told, are cheap ways to use the government's power to get things to happen. Credit is the life blood of many businesses, and current events in the financial markets have jeopardized it, even for businesses in no danger of default.
But what of this word, "stimulus?" I'm afraid it's become a little overused, sort of cheapened by wide use this year. What is stimulus?
15:57 - 20 Dec 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sun, 14 Dec 2008
Last week the Governor's "Blue-Ribbon Panel on Transportation Funding" issued its draft report about how we're supposed to pay for rebuilding our roads and bridges. The report says we need $639 million a year to rebuild our roads and bridges and to put RIPTA on a solid footing over the next ten years. This is about $285 million more than is going to come from the federal government or the existing array of taxes. This is a lot of money, even in these days of hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. It's enough dollar bills to blanket our sections of I-95 and 295 with them, including the breakdown lanes and bridge abutments.
The report isn't shy about revenue, which is a refreshing change -- not because I welcome paying more money, but because I welcome honesty from my public officials. It suggests a variety of tolls, taxes and fees to pay for the maintenance and reconstruction of what we've got. More about them in a moment.
The report recommendations are separated into the more frugal "Scenario 1" and the more expensive "Scenario 2". I gather that the intent is that we find some happy compromise between the two, but as I perused the report and its findings, I found it hard to imagine finding contentment anywhere between these two.
15:01 - 14 Dec 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 06 Dec 2008
Affordable housing is still a problem
I was looking over some data about homelessness last week. It seems that the number of homeless people using shelters from July 2006 to June 2007 was about the same as the year, before, which seems like good news only until you compare it to the years before that. Shelter nights in 2006-2007 were up over 70% from 2000. The most recent year's data is still being compiled, but with unemployment up and rents not down, there's no obvious reason to think things have improved.
Homelessness is a complicated thing, with many reasons behind it, but high rents are a principal cause. Right now, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about four times what a disabled person receiving Social Security (SSI) support receives. Sure, those people aren't necessarily shopping for median apartments, but show me the units that rent for $200 a month, which is about what they can afford. And that isn't the only problem.
18:26 - 06 Dec 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 29 Nov 2008
Last week I attended the monthly Geek Dinner at AS220 in Providence, a regular get-together for anyone interested in Rhode Island's tech industry. I got there early enough to get a seat and sat at a table with a guy who runs a database business and who is thinking about a new venture that -- well it would be unkind to describe his business idea, since I was talking to him as a fellow geek, not as a reporter. But it was great, and I would buy it, so I hope he goes ahead with it.
The evening's speakers were from DandyID.org, and they have a proposal for unifying your online identities across different services, so that your Facebook identity matches you on Amazon and Twitter, too, along with about 150 others. This way, your friends on one service can find you on another, and you can save having to maintain all these separate identities. It's an interesting niche, but what caught my attention is the three partners just moved their company here from Boulder, Colorado, a place I'm more accustomed to hearing about moving companies to.
I spoke with Sara Czyzewicz, one of DandyID's three partners and she told me that Boulder is oversaturated with startups, which makes it hard to get actual employees, and it's quite expensive to get space. They toured places like Seattle and San Francisco last year, looking to move. They added Providence to their list, and were quite surprised when they got here. (Sara is originally from Pawtucket though her partners are not.) She said they were attracted by affordable office space, but also by events like the Geek Dinners, and efforts like RI Nexus which show off the active community of technologists and inventors they found here. Since arriving in August, they've settled down to their new routine, and have found themselves a new programmer, too.
14:54 - 29 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 22 Nov 2008
The state budget chickens are coming home to roost. After five years of self-inflicted fiscal crises, we finally have a real one, and your state is pretty much helpless. You might remember all the fuss last spring about closing a $400 million deficit in this year's budget. That was the manufactured crisis, created by years of ill-advised tax cuts, deferred maintenance and a refusal to raise enough money to pay our bills.
But now we face a real crisis. Last week the Revenue Estimator Conference met and agreed that we're going to be short around $233 million from what was estimated last May. We're also spending more, for nursing home care, RIte Care, DCYF and other services. The Governor's office says the overspending plus the shortfall totals $372 million, though I expect that number to change.
21:41 - 22 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Fri, 14 Nov 2008
In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy created an absorbing story about how individual actors created the events that shaped European history, but how none of them were ever knew what was going on when they did. Napoleon won battles during which no one followed (or even received) his orders, and yet was credited with strategic genius for those victories. Weather and disease lost other battles (and the war) and Napoleon got the blame. In Tolstoy's view, the sweep of history is nothing more than the story of individuals blundering about, doing the best they can with their limited views of circumstances, and grand generalizations about it all are just hot air.
The opinion pages of our state's newspapers are routinely filled with exactly these kinds of grand generalizations, facile words describing how our state's politics can be explained because voters have "chosen" the status quo, or "refuse" change because they re-elected so many members of the General Assembly.
I'm with Tolstoy on this: it's silly to encase the individual acts of hundreds of thousands of people in some kind of frozen metaphor like "the people want..." It doesn't explain anything and besides, in our government, "the people" have no way to express "their" opinion. If you are reading this, you probably have opinions about how the state would be best served. When you were in the voting booth last week, did you feel that any of the choices on offer represented your opinions well? The fate of our state deserves at least an essay question, but elections are multiple choice tests. Actually, given how many candidates run unopposed, many elections are True/False tests, where you're not allowed to check "False."
So, given all that, can we learn anything from the state election results of last week? Studying the results, the best I could come up with was this: when given the option, voters often seemed to prefer new faces, but not Republicans. Where elections were about policy issues, progressive views seemed to prevail. Mostly.
23:24 - 14 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 08 Nov 2008
I had to write this column last week, and my crystal ball was cloudy, so not a word about the election today, but in the spirit of changes afoot, I have a couple of pieces of good news worth sharing -- your government succeeding by doing interesting and creative things.
The first concerns the state bond sale of a couple of weeks ago. This was when Treasurer Frank Caprio arranged to sell bonds to the public. Here's what happened.
10:09 - 08 Nov 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 18 Oct 2008
So there are exciting times on Wall Street. But what does the financial crisis mean for those of us who aren't borrowing or lending? Well, the credit markets serve not just businesses but governments, too.
Our state and local governments issue bonds not just for building things, but also for cash management. That is, sometimes the tax revenue doesn't come in synch with the bills to be paid. In those cases, cities and towns can issue "tax anticipation notes", short term loans to help cover the bills until the tax collections pick up. It's a pretty typical cash management technique. Borrowing for a few months at 3% isn't a huge cost, and if it means not having to build up a big cash reserve, so much the better.
But this only works so long as the credit market works and the rates are low. East Providence has used anticipation notes fairly routinely in the past, and was intending to do so this fall. Last year they borrowed about $25 million at 3% interest sometime in December, and paid it back when property tax collections started arriving in the summer. They anticipate about the same need this year, but at the moment, interest rates are running at more than triple what they've paid in the past, not to mention some uncertainty their bonds would sell at all. Right now, their policy is to hope this all clears up by December since they only have around $4 million in reserve. If it doesn't, there's big trouble.
00:47 - 18 Oct 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Fri, 10 Oct 2008
Sometime during the Ford administration, legend has it that Wall Street Journal editor Jude Wanniski and two White House officials named Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney sat down for lunch with the economist Arthur Laffer. During the meal, Wanniski said Laffer drew the famous "Laffer Curve" on his napkin, and our government has never been the same since.
The Laffer Curve? That's a graph that shows that if you raise taxes too high, tax revenue drops. Conversely, if you're above some magic point on the graph, lowering the tax rate will increase revenue.
But the whole thing is essentially a fairy tale, beginning with the napkin. As Laffer himself told it, the restaurant had cloth napkins and "my mother had raised me not to desecrate nice things."
But what about the economics? In a certain sense, of course, the Laffer Curve is valid, even obvious. In an abstract world, it is indeed possible to imagine a tax high enough that raising it further would lower revenue. However, stepping back into the real world, few real governments could actually impose such a tax. Ours never has, and despite legions of economists looking for examples, no one has ever demonstrated that this effect is observed in the world in which you and I live.
23:03 - 10 Oct 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 04 Oct 2008
A Failure to Plan for Failures
As the nation continues to reel from the ongoing financial crisis, the boom and bust that we're suffering, it's worth stopping to ask how it is that we got to this place.
Everyone knows that foreclosures are driving the economic crisis, but does everyone know that people falling behind in their payments isn't the big story? According to HUD statistics, in 1986, about 5.5% of all mortgages were in arrears, and about one in 21 of those went into foreclosure. In the first quarter of this year, 6.35% of all mortgages were behind in their payments, but foreclosure proceedings had begun on one in six of those. In the subprime markets, the delinquency rates are much higher (22% for variable rate mortgages), but the foreclosure rates are higher still (almost one in three). As late as 2002, the delinquency rates for this kind of mortgage were almost 15%, but only about one-sixth of the delinquent loans began foreclosures.
In other words, these are tough economic times, but at the ground level, we're not so far from other economic slowdowns. What's different now is that foreclosure is a far more likely outcome of falling behind in your mortgage payments than it has been at any time since HUD started tracking these numbers in 1986.
15:06 - 04 Oct 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Wed, 24 Sep 2008
Over the past 25 years, as our nation has disassembled its manufacturing base and shipped those jobs elsewhere, we've heard over and over again about how that's ok, because those kind of "old economy" jobs were the thing of the past and the "new economy" would provide lots of jobs in finance, service, software, design, and management. We were all supposed to become "knowledge workers", according to Peter Drucker. In the new economy assets are "minds rather than machines," said George Gilder. The new economy was to be clean, smooth and prosperous.
Admittedly, we haven't heard much about all this lately. Gilder's newsletter and web site empire collapsed after the technology stock crash in 2000-2001. Some of the other cheerleaders have gone to ground, while others have said they were right all along -- about different predictions. But the truth is that the events of the past year, and especially the past week, have made everyone a little skittish about imagining an economic future that depends on finance. (Except securities lawyers, who are going to have a little boom of their own over the next few years as the sub-prime mess gets untangled.)
22:47 - 24 Sep 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 20 Sep 2008
A couple of weeks ago, Bill Connelly, a candidate for state senate district 36 in North Kingstown and Narragansett, handed me a flyer. I put it in my pocket, and checked it out when I got home. It had a nice picture and capsule bio. For policy planks in his platform, it had only four bullet points. I was particularly interested in two: One said, "Increase state aid to education" and right after it was, "Hold the state to spending and taxing limits."
Well, golly, when you put it like that, it sounds pretty good. Easy, too. I mean why didn't anyone think of that before? But why stop there, let's just eliminate all taxes and make the schools better, too. Or maybe offer us all free commuting helicopters? Better yet, free ice cream and cookies at every meal!
Now, in fairness, Bill is a perfectly nice gentleman, and his opponent, incumbent Sen. James Sheehan, though an energetic and effective legislator, is not widely regarded as a fiscal prodigy. But really, candidates shouldn't even think they can run with this kind of empty and self-contradictory platform.
Though my exalted peers at publications further up the journalistic food chain balk at taking it on, it is role of the press to call politicians on stuff like this, and here I am, published in newspapers and online. So this is my challenge to you. In mid-October, I'm going to award prizes for the most absurd campaign literature I run across (2008, Rhode Island general election), and I'm inviting your nominations.
Don't submit any just for bad photos or slogans, please. I'm interested in flyers or letters that promise the unattainable or the contradictory. So when some candidate tries to hand you their flyer, take it, and look it over. If you get a candidate letter in the mail, read it, and if you learn about a candidate's web site, go there and check it out. If you think you've found something that can beat my example here, send it in for judging by a panel of impartial judges I'll appoint. (You can send nominations for judgeships, too. After all, vying for judgeships is traditional in politics.) Send your nominations to me electronically, or c/o The Times Newsroom, 23 Exchange Street, Pawtucket, RI 02860. Enter by October 15 or so. May the best candidate win!
02:08 - 20 Sep 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Do you want change or just to shout about it?
As perhaps you know by now, the state ended the last fiscal year around $33 million in the red, and the accusations and counter-accusations are flying. There are some important misconceptions flying around, though, and it's worth clearing some of them up. So last week I spent some time reading the preliminary financial report for the fiscal year that ended June 30.
For one thing, several reports have pointed out that the Department of Human Services is where the bulk of the overspending seems to have occurred. You might think, "Aha! It's because we still spend too much on social services." But in fact, the overspending appears to be that the DHS administration had promised $19 million in general revenue operational savings that they were unable to achieve. That is, someone high on the chain of command appears to have decided they could peel off that much spending while not affecting service, and it didn't happen. In reality, looking only at state tax dollars, every single division of DHS was under their original budget, except for Medicaid, which was over by $641,000, or less than 0.1%.
02:05 - 20 Sep 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 13 Sep 2008
The primary is behind us and the election looms. This November, you'll see a Rhode Island tradition on the ballot: the Transportation bond. Every two years, since at least the DiPrete administration, Rhode Islanders are asked to approve another huge round of bonds for roads. Ho hum, isn't that how people build roads?
Well no. Virtually no other states fund their roads this way. Sure lots of states borrow for a specific highway here or a bridge there. But we borrow for no specific project, an astonishingly wasteful practice.
At this point, DOT borrows about $40 million a year, no matter what. We use that money to match federal dollars that are awarded on the proviso that the state come up with a 10% or 20% match to the funds. We spend the sum on whatever projects are at the top of the list.
00:18 - 13 Sep 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Sat, 06 Sep 2008
A Landmark report, but when can we read it?
This week I decided to spend some time researching just why Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket is in trouble. For those who don't live in Woonsocket, or haven't been paying attention, Landmark is broke. Its CEO has left, and the enterprise is in the hands of a court-appointed "special master" who is trying to keep it afloat while a savior can be recruited.
I quickly learned the troubles extend well beyond Landmark, to the other community hospitals. These troubles are well documented, and were the subject of an extended report a year ago by a blue-ribbon "Community Hospital Task Force", which included staff from the departments of Health and Human Services, the Lt. Governor's staff, various hospitals, the Health Insurance Commissioner and more.
Fairly well masked by the technical language, here's one thing I learned from it: insurers pay hospitals very different rates for exactly the same services. Getting an appendix removed at Rhode Island Hospital costs your insurance company a much different amount than getting it removed at Landmark.
01:02 - 06 Sep 2008 [/y8/cols] link
Fri, 05 Sep 2008
New Management at RIPTA won't help, but money might
RIPTA got itself a new board chair last week. John Rupp, Governor Carcieri's newest appointment to the board, succeeded Robert Batting, who resigned after being outvoted in an effort to ease the agency's managing director out the door.
These are obviously troubled times at the transit agency, and, as usual, money is at the bottom of it all. The agency is having a bunch of problems all at the same time, which makes it seem like one big fiasco. These are the important parts of the story:
Ads and the like:
(A funny book you should own)
