My take on the news

Will more taxpayer money reduce street, gang violence in Providence?

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POLITICIANS AND PROVIDENCE STREET VIOLENCE:  The three Democratic candidates for governor have proposed ideas for reducing street and gang violence in Providence. Two of the three want to throw taxpayer money at the problem instead of getting private enterprise involved.

Angel Taveras wants to double the number of teens with taxpayer-funded summer jobs and use $1 million in tax money to fund nonviolence training in schools.

Clay Pell wants to provide additional taxpayer-funded services to those recently released from prison to help reduce repeat street crimes.

Only Gina Raimondo mentions getting private enterprise involved. She wants to develop partnerships with local businesses to help get teens off the streets.

After years, indeed decades, of throwing taxpayer money at the problem of street and gang violence in Providence and other major cities with no positive results, one would think that changing our routine and getting private enterprise involved might be the answer.

USE FED-EX, NOT UPS: United Parcel Service, one of the nation’s two largest commercial parcel delivery companies, caved in and paid $40 million in fines to the federal government because it had previously refused to become a partner-agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency and violate shippers’ and recipients’ privacy by opening and inspecting items shipped. UPS has now agreed to become a police agent.

Fed-Ex, the other nationwide parcel delivery company, has refused to become a federal police agent. It has refused to open packages and look for non-prescription medicines ordered online. Just as UPS should have said, Fed-Ex says, “We are a transportation company – we are not law enforcement.” Fed-Ex will take its chances in court after being indicted by the federal government.

When government requires private companies to conduct police investigations on its behalf, our country is slipping down a very slippery slope. What’s next? Will government require citizens to conduct surveillance on their neighbors, to secretly open neighbors’ mail searching for evidence of wrongdoing? Perhaps big brother government will mandate that we hide in bushes in our neighbors’ yards and peer into their windows, or secretly install listening devices in their homes.

We owe it to ourselves, to our children and to their progeny – and to free enterprise that isn’t weighed down by the yoke of government oppression – to support Fed-Ex. The next time you have to ship something, please avoid UPS and take your business to Fed-Ex.

BLOCK’S ANTI-BUSINESS POSITION ON DMV: Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Block railed against the DMV’s yet-to-be-completed computer upgrade that has taken eight years and has raised its cost to $15.5 million. Block said as governor, he will assess whether or not the computer upgrade should be thrown out and the DMV should start over. If that’s the case, Block said he “will look to recover costs from the failed vendor for our project.”

That comment is about as anti-business as Block has thus far gone. He knows the state totally mismanaged the computer update project and had to pay the contractor millions for wasting 23,300 hours of its employees’ time. Yet now Block wants to extort money from the computer company simply because it did what the state stupidly told it to do? Come one, Ken! Don’t fall into the trap of blaming private enterprise for the failures of our bureaucratic, red-tape government.

SOCIAL SECURITY HAS “DMV” COMPUTER PROBLEMS: It seems that government agencies, whether at the state or federal level, just can’t get it right when it comes to installing functional computer systems.

We’ve seen it for years in Rhode Island as our DMV mismanaged replacement of its computer system over an eight-year period while doubling the price and wasting thousands of contractor man-hours. We saw it again when President Obama tried to roll out the Affordable Care Act and the Obamacare computer system crashed immediately, taking months to enroll more than a few participants.

And now we’re seeing it again with the Social Security Administration. Its $300 million computer system upgrade has been so mismanaged that it is four years behind schedule and won’t be online for another two to three years, just in time for its hardware to be obsolete. Federal officials have decided to “reset” the system instead of scraping it and starting over. Isn’t this squandering of taxpayer dollars a strong argument for privatizing almost all government functions? Never would such borderline-criminal mismanagement take place in private industry.

Government does few things well. Operation of federal, state and local representative assemblies; national defense; providing for public safety; and civil and criminal justice must be provided by government. Almost everything else should be in the hands of private industry with some limited government oversight.

RAIMONDO DOWNRIGHT WRONG ON GUN CONTROL: Apparently Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Raimondo is willing to alienate a large percentage of Rhode Island voters with her position that all “military-style” firearms should be outlawed.

The term “military-style” to extreme gun-control advocates has come to mean any scary looking firearm. Even though military rifles can fire in automatic mode and civilian firearms cannot, to gun-control nuts they are the same because they look alike – both are scary looking to them. When gun-control nuts mention nothing about outlawing hunting rifles, they disregard the fact that hunting rifles have the exact same capabilities as those scary-looking “military-style” firearms. It doesn’t matter that the capabilities and killing power are the same; to them, the mantra is “let’s just get rid of all those scary-looking guns.”

Gun owners and Second Amendment advocates are extremely protective of their rights and tend to be single-issue voters.  With close to 150,000 gun owners in Rhode Island, most of whom will vote against any candidate who wants to deprive them of Second Amendment rights, Raimondo is risking the loss of a huge number of votes. Her position on gun control in the state with the lowest gun-death rate in the country is just flat wrong!

OBAMA WRONG ON CORPORATE INVERSIONS: In the corporate and tax worlds, an “inversion” is when a U.S. corporation acquires or merges with a foreign corporation and moves its tax address to the foreign corporation’s country while continuing its U.S. operations. Why do about five major corporations do this every year? Because it increases shareholder’s return on investment by reducing corporate income taxes.

At 40 percent, the U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate of any industrialized country according to KPMG Global, an international accounting firm. In comparison, KPMG shows the corporate tax rate in Europe to average 19.7 percent, in Asia 22.9 percent, and globally 23.6 percent.

President Obama said last week about inversions, “I don’t care if it’s legal, it’s wrong!” and declared that companies who seek such tax savings for their shareholders are “technically renouncing their U.S. citizenship.”

Obama is dead wrong about corporate inversions. Any investor, to include state and local pension funds, would be terribly upset if the corporation controlling their money failed to take advantage of tax rules that allow such inversions. Why keep a tax address in the U.S. that allows our government to take 40 percent of investors’ profits when they can merge with an Irish company and pay only 12.5 percent?

Democrats support Obama in his goal to punish corporations who invert. Republicans insist that the entire U.S. tax code must be revised to lower the corporate tax rate and rid the code of the very reason it encourages corporations to practice inversion.

If we want our economy to ever recover its pre-2008 footing, our government needs to listen to the Republicans.

THE EXECUTION DRUG CONTROVERSY: A man executed for murder in Arizona last week gasped and snorted for 90 minutes before dying. It will surely add fuel to the controversy over the death penalty in this country.

Many supporters of capital punishment aren’t concerned about whether or not convicted killers and child rapists suffer while being put to death. To them, a painful death is condign, “they deserve a painful death.” Those who oppose the death penalty point to such suffering as unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment.” The controversy would certainly be less heated if states used an execution drug that kills painlessly.

Which brings us to the question: Why don’t states that impose capital punishment use the same drug that veterinarians use to painlessly euthanize animals? A couple of years ago, my wife and I stood vigil as our beloved terminally-ill canine friend was “put to sleep” by our very kind and caring vet. With his head in my wife’s lap, Jessie died quickly without any sign of pain or distress.

Without regard to the pros and cons of capital punishment, switching to the far more effective euthanasia drug used by veterinarians would at least resolve part of the death penalty controversy.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:  Thanks to Steven Frias, a lawyer, Republican National Committeeman and author, for pointing out this quote made in his memoir by Providence mayoral candidate Buddy Cianci.  After bragging about raising taxes, Cianci wrote, “I got very good at raising taxes, but only because I had a lot of practice.” Cianci further opined, “The first thing a new mayor should do when he takes office is raise taxes. And then blame it on the previous administration.”

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