Most Americans probably know very little about Rhode Island
beyond the fact that it is at the wrong end of an awful lot of
national economic and civic rankings.
Residents of the state who’ve sought some explanation for its
willful decline inevitably come across the concept of
“Rhode-apathy.” Under the thralls of what force would a
state’s electorate allow its deteriorating condition to persist —
indeed, to advance — year after year?
The answer has something to do with this: Some 16 percent or
more of the state’s working population is employed by a state or
local government. Add in their retired former coworkers, as
well as their immediate families and close friends. Around 20
percent of the overall population relies on government for direct
handouts, with the attendant industry for processing those
transactions.
Then we have the academics and wealthy liberals for whom
government is more of a religion than a service provider, as a
means both to supply meaning for existence and to perform
charitable works. Conducting the Masses is the priestly class of
political insiders, almost all Democrats.
And the rest? Well the better part of the remaining
population is beguiled by the strange condition mentioned
above. Rhode-apathy is a mysterious mixture of resignation and
affection. The Ocean State’s various assets — the geographic,
historical, and cultural components of its high “quality of life”
— have given the powers of corruption and incompetence room to
impose a premium for living here.
Still, working and middle-class Rhode Islanders with aspirations
for upward mobility have no choice but to measure bad government’s
cost not just in higher taxes, but also in lost
opportunities. As that premium climbs, apathy transforms
into hopelessness, and another family up and leaves.
According to migration statistics available from the Internal
Revenue Service, Rhode Island lost nearly 25,000 taxpayers from
2003 to 2010.
That’s after subtracting those who’ve moved into the state, and
it’s based on a population of around a million people.
Those leaving have tended to have higher incomes than those
arriving. Consequently, not only has the out-migration amounted to
roughly 2.5 percent of the population, but the income that they’ve
taken with them amounted to roughly 2.5 percent of the state’s
gross state product (GSP).
As that stark trend has worsened, Rhode-apathy has seemed an
increasingly inadequate explanation, and during the last election
cycle, as the electoral tide continued to drag out Rhode Island’s
solvency, a more powerful emotion became apparent: fear.
Such fear may have led Rhode Island’s treasurer, legislature,
and governor to enact a reform of the state’s pension system in the
face of labor-union opposition, but a more potent terror kept many
important constituencies in the shadows. During a high-profile
event discussing economic development last autumn, a businessman
across the table from me explained that he’d been one of just a few
of his peers to testify in favor of pension reform. Shortly
thereafter, a website appeared focusing on harming his
business.
The business community isn’t the only check on government power
that’s been cowed in Rhode Island. A conservative news and
commentary site for which I work, OceanStateCurrent.com, recently
offered a young journalist a regular freelance opportunity at a
very competitive rate of pay. The one catch was that his name
must appear on the articles, and that was a step too far. It
appears that union leaders and other insiders who are entrenched in
boards, initiatives, and agencies at every level across government
had only just begun responding to the journalist’s calls, having
suspected his political leanings. For the journalist to be
identified by his own name would be fatal. His calls would go
unanswered again.
The fear permeates to the local level too. It’s long been a
standard political strategy for school districts to threaten to
close schools and cancel extracurricular activities if voters don’t
keep the money growing. When my town still had its old-style
New England financial town meeting to approve budgets, teachers and
school administrators would sit in the bleachers of the gymnasium
and glare at their students’ parents during hand votes.
One year, after a one-decade doubling of the tax burden, I
explained that the latest requested tax increase was equivalent to
what I had recently spent on Christmas presents for my
children. The red-faced principal of the high school
caught my eye as he joined the chorus jeering at me.
So it isn’t surprising that it’s become a regular
election-season experience for my political allies to have parents
and students approach us with intelligence about some way that the
school department is illicitly leveraging its access to children
for political advantage. And perhaps it also isn’t surprising that
none of the parents are ever willing to step into the public
spotlight with their information. They fear reprisals against
their children.
Take this as a warning, America, from a state where the dusk of
economic and civic decline is quickly turning into night: A
government that is deeply entwined with our lives creates natural
constituencies whose self-interest is always served by demanding
more from government, but it also creates deep and intricate
pressure points for everybody else.
Why would a parent want to make her child a target in a
government-run school just to defend abstract civic principles and
halt ratcheting tax rates? Why would a journalist risk his
sources within government when everything that is newsworthy occurs
in proximity to it? Why would a businessperson offer technical
expertise for pulling government budgets back from the brink when
doing so invites attacks on his own bottom line?
When such things happen within a state, there’s always the
option of leaving. After all, the quality of life is only high
for those who can afford it. Still, let’s hope the federal
government doesn’t go down the same path as Rhode Island. It’s
easier, after all, to become an ex-Rhode Islander than an
ex-American.
Images courtesy Jef Nickerson,
foroyar22.
