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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.
Perhaps this isn't the kind of story you expected in the paper this week, now that unemployment rate is approaching 10%? I believe our problems are best solved by a frank assessment of the situation. I've written plenty already about how the state's budget fiasco was the completely avoidable result of bad policy choices. Honesty about this is important, but it's equally important to see the good, such as it is.
One of the astonishing features of politics in Rhode Island is the prevalence of what can only be called a sort of civic self-loathing. For reasons that elude me, many of my friends and neighbors, and many of the state's policy makers are perpetually ready to believe the worst about our state: it has the highest taxes, the most corruption, the highest costs, the worst economy. If you read the news, you know the drill.
Much of this, though, is silly. People who think we've cornered a market on corruption have obviously never heard of Queens. (Or seen Chinatown, Roman Polanski's masterpiece.) Or read the papers in places like Philadelphia, San Diego, or Anchorage. We had a corrupt governor go to jail? Well so did Connecticut.
The highest taxes? Please. New Hampshire is a tax haven, right? Some of it is, but if I were to move from my home here to a comparable house in Jaffrey, Keene, Peterborough, or any equally unfashionable town, my total taxes would increase even without a sales or income tax. Our state and local taxes are lower than the national average, according to the Tax Foundation rankings whose poor methodology actually exaggerates the impact of our income tax. (We rise to 10th in their rankings only when they add the taxes you and I pay to other states, I kid you not.) There are at least 27 other states with higher sales taxes for at least some of their counties than we have. We have high property taxes, yes, but can you fix that by level funding the cities and towns while piling on new mandates?
The worst economy? Yes, it's bad now, like everywhere. But here's some news: we're small and urban. If you compare us to less urban states, we look bad. If you compare our urban area to other urban areas, not so much. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 42 urban areas in 12 states doing worse than we are. This is still pretty terrible, and unemployment is way too high for anyone to be complacent, but we've got to get it out of our heads that it's something unique to us.
The worst deficit in the country? OK, this one's right. But why is our deficit so bad? It's because so many policymakers have convinced themselves that our state is so hopeless the only thing they can do is lower our price. And so they cut taxes and cut and cut some more, way past the point of sustainability.
There's a bargain implicit in any government's relation with its citizens: we give taxes and get services. For years, Assembly leaders and Governors have tried to improve the bargain by focusing on only the first part of that equation.
This shortsighted perspective, and the determination to pursue it at all costs, has thoroughly ruined the service side of the equation, and given us the worst of both worlds: devastated services and higher state and local taxes. Bankrupting the state is not a route to prosperity.
We are a relatively poor state and proportionately very urban. We may not ever be able to be a low-cost state, but that doesn't mean we can't compete, as DandyID shows. We have other high cards: a beautiful state, a hip capital city, a fabulous art scene and more. What we don't have is policy makers willing to play them.
Oh, one more thing: DandyID.org is looking for a PR person who can really write and is habitual user of multiple social networking sites. If you have to ask how to contact them, this job isn't for you.
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