Tom Sgouros
Equality Endorsement One on Long List for Obama
On Wednesday President Obama remarked that he supports allowing same-sex couples to marry. That’s great, but it is just words. What’s more, the president doesn’t really have much to say on the issue anyway, since (a) marriage is a state-by-state thing, (b) in state votes, same-sex marriage keeps losing, (c) Obama isn’t a Supreme Court [...]
Who Pays for Tax Cuts to the Rich? The Poor
A correspondent tells me that last week there was a meeting over at University Heights where some residents got bad news about their rent. University Heights was built in the 1960s as a mixed development, split about half and half between market rate apartments and subsidized apartments, available to poor people and families. It’s had [...]
Child Health Deficiencies Explain RI Education Gap
It’s often said that Rhode Island doesn’t get good value for its education dollar. The Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council says so every year, and the claim is dutifully repeated on the radio and I’ve heard it at the State House, too. But is it true? A while back I was looking at education funding [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: How Budgets Are Cut
I was at the hearing at House Finance last night, talking about tax cuts for rich people. The remarkable thing about all the tax cuts we’ve given over the past 16 years is not that we’ve given them, but how we’ve paid for them. As we saw in the last installment, the story of the past [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: Taxing History
Is it really too soon to modify our tax code? In the discussions of taxes at the State House, one line you hear a lot this year is that our state’s new income tax code is new and we should give it time to see how it works out. That’s what House Speaker Gordon Fox [...]
The Tax Foundation Can’t Help Themselves
I see the Tax Foundation has some issues with disparaging comments I made about their data the other day. Scott Drenkard, one of their analysts, published a kind of defense, but managed to completely miss my point. Here’s the story. The Tax Foundation, a DC “think tank”, put out a press release listing “Tax Freedom” [...]
Celebrate Rhode Island’s Taxes
Did you know you live in a low-tax state? According to the Tax Foundation, average taxes per person in Rhode Island are lower than in any other northeast state besides Maine, and lower than Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Delaware, and Virginia. Each year, you see, the tribunes of wealth and privilege who run the Tax Foundation [...]
Fixing the U.S. Post Office, and Fixing It Good
Headed down Route 2 yesterday and what did I see? About a hundred men and women in US Postal Service uniforms, demonstrating outside Senator Jack Reed’s office. What’s up? They are members of the National Association of Letter Carriers, protesting Senate Bill 1789, a plan to “fix” the post office. As you may have heard, [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: How RI Pays for URI
Should URI Faculty get a 3 percent raise? Let me tell you a story and you decide. URI is the big kahuna among the three institutions run by the Board of Governors. It educates about 16,000 students, around 10,000 of whom are from Rhode Island. Researchers there pull in about $80 million each year in [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: Cutting the Buddha
Our budget tour continues with a visit to the Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals. The acronym is BHDDH and I’m told by insiders it’s pronounced “buddha.” BHDDH is spending more time than usual in the news. This is largely because last year they cut $26 million from the budget that would have gone to [...]
Easy Choice: Meals Tax or Inspection Dereliction
I found myself in my favorite local diner the other day, enjoying, well, a heart-unhealthy breakfast, and look what was on my table: a plea to customers to help the Rhode Island Hospitality Association combat the scourge of a 2% increase in the tax on meals. Proposed by Governor Chafee in his 2013 budget, the [...]
Department of Education Posts Funny Numbers
What do you think about our state’s shiny new education funding formula? Neither Woonsocket nor Pawtucket are big fans and they are headed to a court date next month with the RI Department of Education (RIDE) over it. Using measures that used to be part of the funding formula, these two cities are taxed more [...]
Budgeting for Disaster: Medicaid in the Budget
In volume II of the budget, you’ll find there the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS), which contains the Departments of Children Youth and Families (DCYF), Health (DoH), Human Services (DHS), and Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities, and Hospitals (BHDDH). Collectively these departments spend over $3 billion, about 40% of the overall budget. In [...]
Payday Lenders Hire Power Broker Bill Murphy
One of the most interesting battles going on in the state house this year is over the fate of the “payday lending” industry. Payday loans are short-term loans, typically arranged something like this: I loan you $100 now in return for $110 taken from your next paycheck in a couple of weeks. This sounds good, [...]
Budgeting for Disaster Part VII: Quasi-appropriate?
Trick question: Why is Rhode Island’s housing policy not made by the state government? How about economic policy? Why do we have two environmental agencies? Two elections agencies? The questions sound unrelated, but they have very similar answers, and they’re all related to the state’s bevy of “quasi-public” agencies—whose budgets are in Volume I of [...]
Budgeting for Disaster VI: DMV Manages for Success
One part of the Department of Administration that gets a lot of press is the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is actually a unit of the Department of Revenue. DMV, of course, gets press because people don’t like it, and the lines are long, and it’s in an inconvenient place, and so on and on. [...]
Budgeting for Disaster Part V: Granting a Problem
Our tour of the state budget documents continues. We leave the Executive Summary for the time being (we’ll be back for the all-important schedules and for the invaluable predictions of the future), and move into Volume I. Volume I covers “General Government”, which includes the offices of all the elected officials, and the departments of [...]
Budgeting for Disaster Part IV: Lack of Education
After spending time with Appendix C of the Executive Summmary, it only makes sense to dip into Appendix D, doesn’t it? C was about state aid to the parts of municipal budgets that aren’t education. D is about the much bigger contribution the state makes to education. Once again, the really interesting things about the [...]
Obama tax plan clamps down on private equity
Reviewing reports of last week, I see that buried in the details of President Obama’s corporate tax reform proposal is a rare gem. To be clear, the overall package — basically a reduction of the nominal tax rate in exchange for giving up some of the more egregious loopholes — seems an ok deal. But [...]
Budgeting for Disaster – Part III
We continue our tour of state budget documents. The Executive Summary has a lot of useful information, but the parts that I find myself referring to most often are not the text descriptions of the Governor’s program for the various departments, but the numbers in the back: the summary tables, the planning values the Budget [...]
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