Justin Katz
Although with regret, I have to opine that former East Providence city councilman Robert Cusack misses the target in his op-ed, yesterday, suggesting a way for Rhode Island to rejuvenate its sputtering economy: We need to identify a job generator, make the changes needed to attract those jobs and then promote Rhode Island to execute…
Early in the summer, Rhode Island General Treasurer Gina Raimondo announced that the state had invested $900 million of its pension assets in hedge funds. The decision was actually made in the middle of last year, in response to an asset liability study, treasury spokeswoman Joy Fox tells the Current. At that point, the treasurer began…
One question lost in the heat of this school year’s example of the annual opening-day labor dispute is: Why should school children pay more for janitorial services than anybody else would? The practical answer is that parents are very sensitive to the treatment of their children, and that’s just one of the points of leverage…
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has been collecting reasons not to pursue a “dependency portal” unified infrastructure, marketing all government services through the health benefits exchange currently in the design phase. But there are plenty of reasons to resist the exchange and the related expansion of Medicaid eligibility without regard to the cutting…
Defending the No Child Left Behind Act, on the Hoover Institution’s online Uncommon Knowledge show with Peter Robinson, President George W. Bush argued that parents need to be able to see measurements of their school districts’ achievements in order to hold them accountable. The point is well taken, but there are reasons conservatives at the time…
I’ve had the extreme good fortune to shift careers to one that allows me time to create and stare at charts. (Sadly, yes, that’s a literal description of some of my afternoons, as well as my feelings about those afternoons.) So it’s with an especially strong “What!?” that I watched this video, via Ann Althouse, via Glenn…
Admittedly, I’ve been griping about PolitiFact from the sidelines almost since it entered the field. For many of the uses that the reporters put it toward, the notion of entirely objective facts is as absurd as the notion of entirely objective reporters. The simplistic (albeit marketable) Truth-o-Meter emphasizes the point; something’s being arguable is not…
I’ve been meaning to update the data that I collected for the first three months of 2012, based on single-family home sales data available through William Raveis Real Estate. Upon re-reviewing the information, it seemed to me that the three-month window is sure to be erratic on a running basis. Simply as a matter of…
Violence in movies is not the problem. Violent stories are as old as fiction. Likewise, the realism of cinema and video games may be new, but in prior eras people didn’t need the visual aids. The livestock bled when slaughtered; the forest road was menacing in a way that needed no symphonic score. The problem…
The unemployment rate for Rhode Island fell by one tenth of a percent to 10.8%, but total employment dropped by 80 people. That’s not even a “mixed picture,” though. The only reason the unemployment rate moved in a seemingly positive direction is that 471 more Rhode Islanders just gave up looking for work. So if…