Whitcomb: They’re Not Overpaid; Media Herd Mentality; Socialist Sunshine State
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: They’re Not Overpaid; Media Herd Mentality; Socialist Sunshine State
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
‘’No Man is an Island,’’ by John Donne (1572-1631), English poet, scholar and Anglican priest
“I’ve always loved the autumn. Trees bleed amber,
the sun moves south to sink into the river.
For several of these seasons you were here….
I can hardly claim to be alone.
nevertheless, of all whom autumn’s new
russet brocades are draping, none is you.’’
-- From “Riverside Park,’’ by Rachel Hadas (born 1948)
“It was another Vermont house, white, of course, with long and narrow windows like New England faces.’’
-- John Knowles, in his 1959 novel A Separate Peace
Raises Are Right
GOPQ Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate Ashley Kalus has predictably bashed Gov. Dan McKee’s proposal, which he’s partly walked back on, to increase the salaries of department directors by as much as 43 percent. There haven’t been increases in pay for these posts since 2015. But Mr. McKee should have done more research on how to implement pay raises for cabinet officers.
His idea was that base salaries would rise to $200,000 from $140,000 for the director of the state Department of Health, and to $160,473 from $135,000 for the folks running the departments of Business Regulation, Behavioral Healthcare, Environmental Management and Human Services.
But in fact, people running large, complex and frequently crisis-embroiled state agencies are usually underpaid considering the nature of these usually thankless jobs. They’d be paid far more for doing jobs of similar complexity and importance in the private sector.
By the way, it may be a sign of our civic values that the highest paid state employee last year was University of Rhode Island men’s basketball coach David M. Cox, who earned $715,188. He’s since been fired. His successor, Ryan “Archie” Miller, is set to receive $9.5 million in a five-year contract.
URI football coach James M. Fleming took in a measly $274,007 last year.
I’m sure we’ll eventually find out how much income Ms. Kalus, who seems to have some degree of residency in Illinois, Florida and Rhode Island (the foundation for a presidential campaign?), took in for managing a since-canceled COVID testing and vaccination contract between the Ocean State and her Doctors Test Centers.
Timothy Buckley, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s chief of staff, is right when he complains that the shrinkage of the corps of news-media people is worsening the herd-mentality problem in journalism. Reporters who have survived the slashing of journalistic resources in the past two decades are too few and too busy to do what they should be doing: looking at a wide and ever-changing range of topics and being leery of the conventional wisdom (which in my experience is usually wrong).
And Mr. Buckley noted to Commonwealth Magazine that the news-resource crisis leads to less analysis and nuance in coverage overall.
Consider the recent 30-day closure of the MBTA Orange Line for repairs was presented as though it could be as catastrophic as a hurricane. Smaller outlets followed the big ones, most notably The Boston Globe and public radio, in seeing the shutdown as perhaps, in The Globe’s phrase, “a new circle of hell.’’ In fact, the shutdown, during which the T offered commuters alternative options – mostly buses – caused much less disruption than the apocalyptic warnings had suggested.
Another result of the shrinkage of what used to be usually called “the press corps’’ (not so many presses anymore!) is that far fewer things are watched. It’s easier to just report on what everyone else is covering, taking the lead from the big boys. And yet, as Bill Kreger, a long-departed editor of mine at The Wall Street Journal, once told me: “What may turn out to be the biggest story of the year may start out as three paragraphs at the bottom of page 11.’’
We need far more local news outlets, be they print or online. But the old ad-based business model continues to falter.
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In a happier report on the news business, my GoLocal colleague Rob Horowitz reports that the use of social media as a source for news has stalled, and for good reason. He writes:
“It is the case that some of the plateauing of social media as a source for news is a result of a general slowing in the growth of the use of social media generally. But that is only part of the story. The increased awareness of the amount of disinformation and misinformation available on and spread through social media has resulted in social media becoming a less trusted source of news than other media platforms. This distrust is a major reason for the curbing of social media’s growth as a source for news. {Russia and other malign dictatorships have long used social media as a tool for undermining their foes and propping up the likes of people like Trump who are likely to collaborate with them.}
A Reuters Institute study found that the “levels of trust in news on social media, search engines, and messaging apps is consistently lower than audience trust in information in the news media more generally.’’
Good.
You might hear fewer complaints in Florida about “socialism’’ for a while as federal aid pours into the Sunshine State in the wake of Hurricane Ian.
(A few people might remember that, as a new Florida congressman in 2013, now GOPQ Gov. Ron DeSantis voted against a federal relief package for New York and New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which hit the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states in late 2012, killing more than 100 Americans.)
That was then….
Anyway, much of the help for Florida will go to assist rich folks, many of whom are self-proclaimed “conservatives,’’ who tend to live where people most want to live in the Sunshine State – along the water. (Poorer folks usually live inland, in depressing towns many of which evoke a sort of flat Appalachia.)
The closer you get to the water, the higher the real estate prices and the more danger of destruction. Sounds paradoxical but it really isn’t because of the financial protection afforded by public policies in disasters.
When will the Feds and coastal states get serious about rigorously discouraging people from having homes in flood zones as ocean levels rise? To do that would require confronting the politically powerful residents and developers there. When Mother Nature damages or destroys such properties taxpayers get some of the bill to fix or replace them.
I wonder what will happen to the overwhelmed and very fraud-vulnerable property-insurance sector in Florida as tens of billions of dollars of claims roll in over the next month. Insurers have been leaving the state in recent years amidst warnings of more global-warming-induced storms and floods threatening its too densely developed coasts. And will GOPQ Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s legislature be forced to raise taxes to keep the state’s own insurance program, and thus the real-estate-development bonanza, going?
For decades, people have flocked to coasts, as they have to scenic but increasingly fire-prone forest areas in parts of the West. We need to think more about how much we’re willing to pay so that people can stay there.
Hit this link for maps of population growth in Florida.
Meanwhile, in such states as Michigan and Vermont, authorities are starting to make infrastructure upgrade and expansion plans to absorb what may become millions of climate refugees from the South and West over the next couple of decades.
And this link for an amusing and useful look at how concentrations of wealth affect the quality of life in such localities as Palm Beach and Martha’s Vineyard:
Cleansing
Every now and then, we need recessions, though they can be painful for many. They put the brakes on inflation and inflationary expectations and in some industries, such as restaurants, make it easier to hire. Recessions, of course, are caused in part by higher interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve Board aimed at reducing demand and, thus, price pressures.
A recession cleans out much speculative froth.
Some of the benefits of recessions can include lower prices across the board, higher savings rates, a stronger dollar making it cheaper to travel abroad, and being able to buy more stocks at cheaper prices (and await the market recovery). And petrostate dictatorships such as Russia earn less money with which to threaten their neighbors and suppress their own populations.
A friend of mine who owns an inn and attached restaurant in New Hampshire has been on the edge of closing because despite having lots of real and potential customers, she can’t find the staff to work there (even though tips are very generous). I predict that the anxiety produced by a recession will swiftly change that.
Again and again, Putin’s regime reminds us that he’s waging war on the West and of the insanity of being so dependent on imports from a murderous and kleptocratic dictator. As The Telegraph of London reported:
“The suspected sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines could be a page ripped straight from Vladimir Putin’s playbook of panic, escalation and misdirection.
“The former KGB agent’s illegal war on Ukraine resulted in unprecedented Western sanctions against Moscow.
“But the Russian president is confident that his people can endure economic pain longer and better than Europeans.
“His calculation is that soaring gas prices and the cost-of-living crisis in a continent hopelessly addicted to Russian energy will turn the situation to his advantage….’’
Can the West, in general, and Europe, in particular, tough it out through the winter without succumbing to Putin’s blackmail and appeasing him by withdrawing support from Ukraine? The challenge is to hang on until spring when demand for gas declines and more non-Russian energy sources will have come into play. In the meantime, Western and allied democracies must do everything they can to undermine Putin’s mobster regime.
After the war, Ukraine should promptly become a NATO member and some kind of Marshall Plan should be implemented to rebuild that battered but potentially very rich country, whose citizens urgently want to be part of the West.