Essay
Rhode Islanders United For Marriage, a same-sex marriage advocacy coalition, issued a press release yesterday which included a fact-check style response to a paid advertisement run in the Warwick Beacon by the National Organization for Marriage, a same-sex marriage opposition group. The press release claimed that the NOM ad contained “falsehoods and misleading statements”. The…
Rhode Island’s unemployment rate dropped to 10.2%, after spending a couple of months at 10.4%, but at the same time, the Ocean State remains one of only two states above 10%. Moreover, the other one, Nevada, has made up more than a 1-percentage-point gap to reach a tie for last place. That said, the following…
Here is the recent history of Rhode Island state government expenditures updated to reflect the Governor’s proposed budget for 2014, made possible in part by the fast work done by the State of Rhode Island Budget Office to make the complete budget available on the ri.gov website. As always, actual dollar amounts spent (or, in…
Justin writes live from a five-hour, four-panel economic conference put on by the RI House of Representatives.
If you haven’t heard by now, Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o claims he was scammed into believing he had a girlfriend who then was in a car accident and died of leukemia. The details are too involved to be summarized, so read about it at Deadspin, who broke the story. The larger take-away is…
With advocates’ having finally managed to bring the issue of same-sex marriage to the Supreme Court, it is critical that those who believe in limited government understand one thing: If the Constitution does not allow the people of the United States to maintain the traditional definition of marriage, then it does not allow them to…
Offered entirely tongue in cheek…I think…….Anyway, it looks like Governor Patrick is going to propose a series of tax hikes that could end up making Rhode Island look good in comparison (shhhhh, don’t tell anyone!): According to Boston.com, Patrick listed possible revenue sources including: Raising the gas tax from 21 cents to 51 cents per…
I’m going through all legislation as it’s introduced to the Rhode Island General Assembly, and the Center for Freedom & Prosperity will be putting out a real-time Freedom Index — essentially a watch list — in a couple of weeks. That’ll have the collection of good and bad within the think tank’s scope. Card check?…
Several months ago, I contacted Newport Grand to ask what percentage of their visitors came from Massachusetts so that we could project how much tolls on the Sakonnet River Bridge would cost them in business – and, by extension, cost the state in lost revenue from the slot parlor. I didn’t get very far, leaving…
Most legislation introduced into the General Assembly comes with a brief summary that appears with references to the bill — most visibly on the various pages of the legislature’s Web site. Sometimes the descriptions are misleading; sometimes they’re just confusing. (Usually, they’re pretty good, assuming one understands the lingo of policy.) Today, Representatives Thomas Winfield…
