Ethics

There has been a lot of print devoted to government ethics these past weeks. In particular, Sen. William Irons claims that his conviction is faulty because he is protected from the Ethics Commission probe by the Rhode Island Constitution's Section 5. "For any speech in debate in either house, no member shall be questioned in any other place."

This seems a bit odd to me, a non attorney, but isn't unethical behavior of most concern to taxpayers precisely where Mr. Irons claims it is no one else's business?

The solution appears to be that the Legislature investigate the case brought to its attention by the Ethics Commission. If it refuses, then it would fail to perform its duty under Section 4. of the Constitution, "-- No member of the general assembly shall take any fee, or be of counsel in any case pending before either house of the general assembly, under penalty of forfeiture of seat, upon proof thereof to the satisfaction of the house in which the member sits."

The Senate must take responsibility to police its own members.

Are They Limits or Targets?

The Rhode Island legislature has passed a law (S3050) requiring town tax levy increases to have annual limits gradually dropping to 4% by 2013.

This puts towns who have tried hard to limit costs in an awkward situation. If a town were able to hold the levy to a low or even zero percent increase for example, the following year's allowable increase will be based on that low levy. On the other hand, were the town to increase the levy the maximum, it would be entitled to the same percentage increase the next year but based on a higher amount.

A town which is conscientious in holding expenses can effectively be punished by that decision creating an incentive for the town to request more than it really needs, just in case. The limit becomes a target.

Wouldn't it better to amend the current law so that towns can "bank" the unused portion of any allowable increase? This amount of money could be made available to increase the limit in the event of a shortfall in a subsequent year, subject to certain restrictions and time limits upon application to the state. This could also reduce or eliminate litigation involved with a Caruolo action.

In this way a town could try its best to hold down taxes while not being punished in future years should real need arise.

But maybe it's just me.

OK to Lie?

In a recent Providence Journal article the writer mentioned legislation which a committee of the General Assembly would "hold for further study". It occurred to me that there must be hundreds of bills languishing in committee, being held for further study that never actually get further study. In fact, they lied.

They simply pat us on the head when we introduce bills through our elected representatives and senators, telling us, "Now, now, that's very interesting and we'll look into it, now go outside and play like good little children".

I believe that lying to a legislative committee is a pretty serious offense and can even get a president impeached. How come the committee can get away with it?

Maybe it's just me

Photo-Op, Cheap

How dumb can one be not to realize the impact on New Yorkers of a low flying jumbo jet? And what about the cost? $328,000!

I did it for free and never left home.

From Intolerance to Fear

In a recent Providence Journal letter to the editor, "Can't be natural and unnatural" Apr. 23, 2009, the writer notes that some people believe homosexuality is a 'natural occurring anomaly', and he compares it to other natural anomalies such as "robbing a bank, raping a child, or killing your wife and children".

Is there no limit to the level will people sink to justify their intolerance and hatred and fear of someone different?

Can anyone explain how any homosexual marriage might threaten, not just traditional marriage but the "perpetuation of the human race" as the writer suggests?

For homosexual marriage to indeed threaten the perpetuation of the human race it would, by definition, have to become natural law and replace traditional marriage. I think we can rest easy.

To Torture or Not To Torture

There's been a lot of talk on the cable networks, talk radio and newspapers about what is and what isn't torture. There was even a recent report about the training that our personnel received where they are subjected to the very techniques in question; waterboarding, sleep deprivation and others so that they might be better prepared for possible capture.

The conclusion in this study was that since these folks didn't suffer permanent psychological or physical damage that the techniques didn't rise to the definition of torture. They investigators were influenced by this in particular: "For survivors, torture often leads to lasting mental and physical health problems."

The investigators concluded that since the Americans who were tortured as part of their training didn't suffer lasting harmful effects that such techniques did not constitute torture under the definition. I'm no psychologist but what level of intelligence would not see the difference between Americans being 'tortured' by Americans as part of training and people being subject to the identical techniques, isolated in a foreign country by sworn enemies? Are they fools?

This brings me to the latest flap about releasing the CIA memos and holding those in charge, responsible for torture policy. Former Vice President Dick Cheney (he brings an expanded meaning to "vice") insists that there were productive results from the techniques in question and thus they were justified.

I'd like to ask Mr. Cheney if he believed that tearing the arms out of a terror suspect might produce useful information would he allow it?

From his talking points it seems he would. If this represents America, may heaven help us all.

Is Segregation the Problem?

I just finished reading "The Shame of The Nation" by Jonathan Kozol. In it he documents the de facto segregation of public education in America, apartheid if you will. His statistics are numbing and depressing. And this unofficial segregation today is as bad as it ever was before Brown v Board of Education, 1954 and the Civil Rights Act, 1964.

That Blacks and Hispanics in America perform poorly in public schools will come as no surprise to anyone. Mr. Kozol implies that the underlying cause for this is first and foremost, segregation and second, unequal spending on students in these segregated schools. Additionally he believes that the emphasis of No Child Left Behind on strict education by specific protocol and accountability testing actually harms hoped for outcomes. Again, here his observations are persuasive.

When I finished the book however, I was plagued by a sense that something was missing.

The primary emphasis was that segregation in schools in poor neighborhoods produced inferior education for their students with dropout rates of as much as 40% for black students. According to Mr. Kozol the all white schools in affluent neighborhoods rob the poorer schools of critical funding, siphon off the best teachers resulting in superior outcomes with the vast majority of students in these schools graduating and going on to college.

But aren't these also segregated schools? Has segregation hurt them?

So should we segregate schools? Of course not. It is not only illegal, it is reprehensible and immoral. Conflating the education problem in America with segregation, however tempting, is an oversimplification. Requiring integration of schools will not improve student performance of primarily non-white schools in poor neighborhoods.

Another of Mr. Kozol's observations is that poor neighborhood schools are underfunded. This is undeniably true. The conditions in these schools are too often deplorable and must be rectified. Students can not learn without books, study materials, a safe environment, clean surroundings and a sense that people care about them. Teachers are being asked to do the impossible, teaching in the typical minority school with its faulty bathrooms, oversized classes, lack of study supplies, peeling paint and leaky windows. This is a disgrace and must be reversed, yesterday.

However, if anyone believes that sprucing up these facilities to match the more affluent schools will fix education for the disadvantaged, they are foolish. It may make lawmakers feel proud that they did something wonderful for their constituents, but did they? You can rent Boston Symphony Hall, hire the Boston Pops, put Keith Lockhart on the podium, dress me in an Armani tuxedo, sit me down in front of the most expensive Steinway in the world, and you will have thrown away a lot of money. I never learned to play the piano.

No, Mr. Kozols observations, while not exactly untrue, lead him to only partial solutions. We can never really fix the education problem doing only what he suggests since he skims over what I believe is the fundamental problem.

Until we come to grips with the fact that the children most at risk have already begun to lose the battle long before they ever get to school we are doomed to more of the same disappointment and failure. None of Mr. Kozol's suggestions include the parents and families of these kids.

Who are the children's earliest teachers? How frequently do the most disadvantaged children come from homes with no father, mothers on welfare and uneducated themselves, with little or no work ethic or work experience, with no tradition of independence and productivity?

It is my belief that when any child is perceived to have a problem in school, parents and family must be involved if this child is to have any chance at survival, any chance to realize his or her potential, any chance to escape a bleak, too often abbreviated future.

No laws, no amount of money, will work until the social and cultural deficits are acknowledged and addressed. We have to stop expecting our schools and teachers to be parents and, especially in the preschool years, we have to help parents learn how to be teachers.

So, do we have an education problem or do we have a family problem? Yes.

You Aint Seen Nuthin' Yet

Property tax increases are in the news once again. This time it's Barrington, RI where the citizens have finally said enough! The ire has been directed at Vision Appraisal who did the revaluation last year.

The fact is that even with perfect appraisals, the distribution of the tax burden will always be unfair to large groups of owners. And that's because individuals can get as much as a 100% tax increase while the law limits the total tax levy increase to 4.75% this year. And if you look at the data you will find that as most people get increases greater than 4.75%, thousands of people will pay lower taxes.

So the anger and outrage will continue.

But to quote Al Jolsen, "You aint seen nuthin yet".

Try to imagine what will happen after the next revaluation when people get lower assessments yet still see higher tax bills. And make no mistake, this will happen. Why? Because values don't change uniformly whether markets are on the way up or on the way down and there are always people who will get higher tax bills to make up for the ones who get lower tax bills.

Some neighborhoods will drop in value less than others and these owners will get the larger tax increases while the other owners will get smaller increases and thousands will even get decreases. If the multi million dollar home values fall more than the more modest homes, the owners of the more modest homes will be the ones to take up the burden with higher taxes. No one knows for sure which houses will go up or down the most. It's a crap shoot and it's the way we've been doing it for years. One thing is sure however, there will be wide variations in the changes, and the outrage will be even greater.

This is a system that continues to utilize the flawed model of taxing property values over time, that has taken our economy for a joy ride for decades, but the ride is over.

On our website you can see the impact of revaluations in Cranston, West Warwick, and North Kingstown after recent revaluations and compare those traditional taxes with the taxes produced by the RIGHT plan. The differences are striking.

We believe it is a much better way to pay for local government. Fair taxes for new owners, dependable revenue for towns, limits on increases for all existing owners. Visit http://righttax.org

Have Capitalists Killed Capitalism?

Capitalism: "An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market."

It might be said that the goal of any economic system is the production of goods and services which a population values and wants. If those products are priced fairly the consuming public will purchase them, the producers will make profits which can then be used to grow their businesses, hire more people and expand the economy, creating more wealth, and so on...

So what just happened?

Maybe we lost site of the goal: to produce products which have value for the consuming public. It seems the more ethically challenged of Wall Street and our financial markets thought they had achieved the alchemist's dream; they found a way to create something out of nothing, which they then sold at a profit. And this is how they did it.

They convinced gullible and/or naive buyers that the rising home prices will continue and that market values are no different than real money, just like money in a bank. These buyers then borrowed on that so called "market value", often more than they could afford to pay back, believing that if they got into financial trouble, they could always sell their homes at a higher price, and come away with a profit.

(NB. The only time the market value is real is when a willing buyer buys from a willing seller. That agreed upon price is generally considered "market value". )

The predators in the financial and banking industries then took these mortgages, bundled them together so that they were impossible to analyze and price fairly, then sold them as 'investments', taking their cut of course, thus creating wealth for themselves without actually producing anything of true value. They even gave them important sounding names like - Mortgage Backed Securities, Credit Default Swaps etc.

The goal was no longer the production of products or services to produce a profit; it now was only the creation of capital, money, for their own benefit. That nothing useful was produced in the process was of no importance. Gordon Gekko lives. For the cinematically challenged, Gordon Gecko, in the movie "Wall Street" pronounced "Greed is good!"

And worse still, it was based on an illusion, a Ponzi scheme - the idea that the market value of anything is no different than real money, instead of what it actually is; a best guess, a hope, a gamble. We have built our financial markets on illusions, a gamble and we are now suffering the consequences of that pipe dream. We've been "Madoffed". (The illusion, the market price of property, also serves as the basis for funding local government. Property taxes based on market prices are responsible for the incredibly unfair distribution of the property tax burden after every revaluation. )

I hope we can return to our original goals - making high quality things and providing high quality services that people want and can afford. The profits will follow.

The economy, what else?

It seems to me that the government is using an indirect approach to fix our ailing economy. If the infusions of cash to failing banks and lending institutions do make it possible for them to lend money, then to whom do they lend it? Businesses that have no business? Retailers who have no customers? If the consumer stops consuming, everything grinds to a halt, credit or no credit.

Maybe consumers could be given a percentage off of certain retail purchases for say, a year. They could submit sales receipts (automated at the register) to the federal government who would immediately reimburse consumers directly, instead of giving the trillions to the businesses who have been so badly run in the first place.

This direct action will have immediate effects, would quickly stimulate business activity and unstick the economy. For example, the total retail and food services expenditures (excluding autos and parts) in 2006 was $3.9 Trillion dollars. An instant 10% rebate would cost about $390 Billion. Sounds like a better option than giving $390 Billion to AIG, GM, Bank America.

Maybe its just me.