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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
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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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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