Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
When it comes to reducing revenue, Justin Katz and I agree that it would be better to slash the sales tax than the estate tax exemption, in contrast to what the House Finance Committee thinks is the best course for Rhode Island.
But that’s about as close to agreeing on the proposed budget – or anything to do with government, for that matter – that we were able to reach on this week’s NBC 10 Wingmen segment.
News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England
In the hallowed history of NBC 10 Wingmen segments, I dare say conservative blogger Justin Katz and I have never come so close to agreeing as we did when tourism was the topic. The backdrop for this conversation is, of course, Memorial Day weekend, and the post I wrote earlier in the week about the tourist economy here in the Ocean State.
News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England
The candidate who sues the ratings agency will be the next governor, I told Justin Katz and Bill Rappleye on this week’s NBC 10 Wingmen. To me a lawsuit seems like the best way to punish the ratings agencies – who BY ALL MEANS should be punished. But – so far, it seems to me – the state’s likely to spend less money going forward by paying our $12.5 million (not legally-binding) obligation this year. Assuming you support future public infrastructure.
With so many students bombing the NECAP test, the state Senate moving forward with a bill that would put a moratorium on using the high stakes test as a graduation requirement and the Board of Education being chided by a court for having a discussion about all this in private, Justin Katz and I debate the matter on this week’s NBC 10 Wingmen.
Finally, Justin Katz and I get down to the brass tacks of it and hash it out over the big picture. Every week, we seem to have one fundamental difference: is the free market better suited to solving social issues than government.
Watch and see if either of us convince you to change your mind:
Justin Katz and I have very different philosophies on what to do about climate change: I think the government should take an activist role in addressing climate change and Katz thinks we should let the free market figure it out.
However, just because our differences are elemental, it doesn’t mean we can’t make 5 minutes of worthwhile television debating the point.
Take it away, Rapp…
Justin Katz, Bill Rappleye and I talk about the Central Coventry Fire District on NBC 10 Wingmen this week…
News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England
On aggregate, women are paid less in the workplace. Nationally, women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man makes and here in Rhode Island they earn 81 cents for every dollar a man makes. (We’re number 14!)
But what do we do about it? Carolyn Mark, president of Rhode Island NOW, offers her thoughts here and Providence state Senator Gayle Goldin gives hers here. Or you can watch me and Justin Katz take the total white guy approach to this topic and talk about it in the context of the construction industry!
That aside, I think we both make interesting points when it comes to what role the people should play in leveling the workplace playing field. Essentially, my point is we need to value caregivers as much as (if not more!) than hammer swingers.
There’s been no shortage of cursory – and even congratulatory – reporting on a new report from a right wing think tank that details how to shrink government to make way for more tax cuts. But when I debated Justin Katz, one of its authors, about its merits, it turns out there is much less substance to the report than it would appear.
Because it uses a samurai sword to do the work of a scalpel, it makes at least a few errors as well as makes some incorrect claims that were repeated by the media. Watch here and then I explain a few examples below:
News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England
One example we discussed on this weekend’s NBC 10 Wingmen segment was the idea that the state would save money if it eliminated a golf course at Goddard State Park. While I don’t love the idea that the state operates a golf course, the report wasn’t about public spending items we love and/or hate, it was about ways to save the “taxpayer” money. I will bet both Katz and Mike Stenhouse that eliminating the golf course at Goddard Park will actually increase the cost of operating that state park, not reduce it. (I don’t know this for certain, but neither did Katz – and he co-wrote a report saying it would save money to eliminate it.)
I happen to live near Goddard Park, so I know it well, but I suspect the report is littered with such fallacies that I don’t happen to know intimately. True story: the state used to charge admission to Goddard Park until we were reminded that the Goddard family gave it to us with the stipulation that it be open and available for free. Perhaps, by extension, it should be free for the people of Rhode Island to golf there. But it’s not free, and making it free or eliminating this source of revenue will not save the state money.
Another fallacy with this report is that it doesn’t cut social services. It does. The report itself details a $2,500 legislative grant to the Johnnycake Center, a food pantry in South Kingstown that provides nutritious meals to poor children when school isn’t in session. While legislative grants are by no means perfect, by the report’s own admission some are used to fund social services. Either the report cuts the social safety net or the Johnnycake Center isn’t part of the social safety net.
And this is just one such example of an agency or organization that works with people in poverty was singled out in the report. Another is the John Hope Settlement House. The reality is small government budget hawks have pushed some “essential” or “social service” public spending outside of the traditional budgeting process. Good, bad or indifferent it simply isn’t true to say this report doesn’t cut social services.
Other ideas in the report are simply economically foolish, like ending the full day kindergarten program or selling off the state’s nuclear reactor to a private entity.
It’s at least worth noting that such reports aren’t really about public policy. Its authors know well that many of its proposals are either politically untenable, wrong or just silly. But, in the same way this report cites Ken Block’s widely discredited report on SNAP fraud in Rhode Island, the real hope is that it will be used as a talking point in political debate. To that end, the small government activists who authored it have done their job well. But the political reporters who repeated its errors and/or gave a less than accurate account of its findings did not do theirs very well.
The Procaccianti Group, the multinational real estate holdings corporation that owns the Hilton and Renaissance hotels in Providence where workers have been protesting and organizing a labor union to demand more humane working conditions, should treat their employees better, agreed Justin Katz and I on last week’s NBC 10 Wingmen.
“In a given circumstance, perhaps they should” form a union, Katz said and said the way they have been treated is “garbage from [employers].”
Katz deserves a lot of credit for this admission. Richard MacAdams, one of the board members for the vehemently anti-union political advocacy group he works for, is also on the chief legal counsel for the Procaccianti Group. I respect Katz for speaking his truth on this issue for the same reasons I respect the fired Hilton Providence workers for speaking theirs.
But, as per every episode, we also had some disagreement. Katz would prefer the invisible hand of the free market create better working conditions for the Hilton employees.
“What I don’t like the union union debate the way it sets it up unions have power to counteract business power,” he said. “If a company isn’t valuing its workers then that’s a problem with the company and we have to create an economic environment in which they suffer for that.”
In theory, everyone agrees I suppose. But from a practical point of view, unfettered capitalism simply doesn’t have an effective way to compel a multinational holdings company to pay poor people a living wage without workers organizing and making a stink about it.
Every time Justin Katz and I tape a Wingmen segment, we find new ways to disagree. But we also find these not-inconsequential areas of agreement too.
This week we debated whether Obamacare is working (guess who suggested this topic!) and Katz articulates well where we agree on health care policy:
“What government is there to do is to say if you need help this is what these programs are set up to do,” he said. “If you need help this is a place you can go to find help.”
But he thinks the government-funded advertisements are going too far. I don’t. Especially given that conservatives like Katz are actively trying to subterfuge the program with their own ads and commercials. But leaving that aside, austerity by way of information asymmetry is a truly perverse political assertion.
Me: “I honestly think it’s unconscionable to try to keep that information from people. That’s not a cool way to save money.
Justin: “Taking people’s money to give it away to people who didn’t know they needed it is not conscionable.”
Watch the video to hear how loud Katz bangs on the table as he talks!
Rapp, Katz and I get an early start on the pension debate this week on NBC 10’s web-only Wingmen segment. I argue the pension case should go to court mostly because I think it’s horrendously unfair that Rhode Island boast about leading the nation when it comes to slashing benefits but loses the stomach for the real fight when it comes to figuring out whether it was legal to do so. (That’s not reform, that’s cuts)
A proposed 10 percent tax on guns and ammo to help fund public/private nonviolence partnerships has shed light on a philosophical difference between Justin Katz and I. And we have a pretty interesting and (sometimes humorous) debate about the ammo tax too, thanks in no small part to our host/referee Bill Rappeleye.
But one quick clarification first, Katz says “guns are not designed to be used in crime.” True, but they are designed to cause violence. And that’s why the sale of them should help prevent violence.
News, Weather and Classifieds for Southern New England
But back to the interesting philosophical divide though: Katz says the intent of taxes is to infringe. I think he’s wrong about that. And my great fear is that he knows it, but he is going on TV and the internet and purposefully lying about this as a means to an end: to convince the public to shrink government. (More likely is that he’s just become so entrenched in his cause that he’s not able to see the other side of the coin clearly.)
At the end, he explains how he thinks government works: “This is the problem with government and progressive policies in general. You’re not saying hey this is a good thing, let’s feed people, let’s get people jobs, let’s protect people from guns. You’re saying this is my priority I’m going to take your money and give it people I know and trust to do things I want done. That’s not the way the country is supposed to work.”
Progressives certainly are saying the first part that. Our government is too but it can defend itself (if it wants to). As for the latter part of his statement, he’s just got his pronoun wrong. Here’s the corrected quote of how our government actually works:
“We are going to take our money and give it to people we known and trust to do the things we want done.”
Right after Neil Steinberg finished filming with Bill Rappleye he noted that throughout the Make It Happen process led by the Rhode Island Foundation that no business owner cited taxes as being a difficulty to doing business in Rhode Island. So maybe, just maybe, that’s a bit of a canard being bandied about by anti-government activists like my frenemy/weekly NBC 10 Wingmen colleague Justin Katz.
Watch us discuss that, the Senate’s Rhode to Work plan, the Economic Intersections report and Justin’s seemingly deep distrust of chambers of commerce acting in cahoots with government. And we get into his sales tax/government elimination proposal.
This week on NBC 10’s web-exclusive Wingmen segment – starring me, Rapp and Justin Katz – we discuss the tea party’s influence on state government and why Governor Chafee called them out in his State of the State speech.
I do think the tea party has an outsized influence on state politics and public debate. (They have their own radio station, for crying out loud!) I also think Rhode Island gave austerity a pretty fair shake and it hasn’t served us very well.
Justin Katz and I square off over legalizing marijuana on the most recent installment of the 10 News Conference Wingmen Segment. I think it should be legal because it would raise new revenue and create new jobs. I still don’t quite get why Justin Katz doesn’t support this. But you can watch the reasons he cites here:
“John DePetro is not fair, he’s not honest, he’s not respectful. It’s time for him to go,” I said on NBC 10 Wingmen segment this week as Justin Katz, Bill Rappleye and I debate whether it’s okay for politicians to boycott the local radio station because of the uproar against the notoriously nasty shock jock under fire for calling labor activists whores.
Earlier today I made the point that the Pope is a progressive. On NBC 10 Wingmen this week, Justin Katz doesn’t disagree. Instead the devout Catholic blogger says the Pope is wrong!
“I’m saying that’s a potential error on his part, that he’s misunderstanding how the economy functions as a practical matter. Which you’re allowed to say the Pope misunderstands a science.”
Note: Katz agrees with Pope Francis that free market economics dehumanizes people and turns them into commodities. “That’s true. That has to be tempered by social structure.” Me: “That’s what us progressives believe.”
Is Rhode Island’s entire economy struggling? Or is the hurt pretty well contained in our urban areas? Are the people living in the affluent suburbs suffering under the strain of high taxes or is it the working class city folk who can’t afford to fund their communities?
On NBC 10 Wingmen last week, Bill Rappleye, Justin Katz and I debate the issue.
Capitalism is great. Except when it’s not.
Even my new-found frenemy Justin Katz seems to agree. “There is a role for government in ensuring that people do not slip through the cracks to that level where they are dying in the streets,” the Koch bros soldier told Bill Rappleye on this week’s edition of NBC10 Wingmen about the minimum wage.
When the minimum wage, about $16,000 a year in Rhode Island, falls below the actual cost of survival, at least $20,000, the public sector makes up the difference. This is how the fast food/big box industry works, or doesn’t, depending on your perspective. Multinational corporations that own fast food chain restaurants make huge profits that are largely subsidized by taxpayers.
“Walmart, which grossed $318 billion in the U.S. last year, provides its workers with technical advice about how to apply for this public assistance. For responsible businesses to subsidize the low wages of their larger competitors is a complete perversion of capitalism.” – Ralph Nader, Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2013.
In Rhode Island, this issue is just about to heat up. Five Wendy’s workers in Warwick joined labor and working class activists in storming their place of employment and demanding better working conditions. The effort was the first front of the Fight For 15, a nationwide movement of fast food workers, aided by the SEIU, who are demanding $15 an hour. More local and national protests are being planned in this drive to organize fast food workers. And several activists groups are planning to protest Walmart on Buy Nothing Day as part of the War on Thanksgiving.
Watch our debate below, and read this post about what our congressional delegation is doing to boost the minimum wage. (And listen to the deafening silence from Katz when Rapp asks him if it’s public assistance that keeps people from dying on the streets!!)
