Senate Finance Committee Chairman Dan DaPonte caused a stir last week when he told me he was “quite honestly confused at the liberal opinion that the 2010 personal income tax reform was a big giveaway to high-income earners.” Samuel Bell, Rhode Island coordinator for the Progressive Democrats of America, e-mailed this response to the chairman’s comments:

There is a very simple reason Senator Dan DaPonte says he is “confused at the liberal opinion that the 2010 personal income tax reform was a big giveaway to high-income earners.” That is not the liberal opinion. DaPonte is confusing the 2010 reform with the 2006 tax cuts for the wealthy – the flat tax – which were indeed a big giveaway to the rich.

As a package of technocratic changes, the 2010 reform had a fairly minor effect on the overall income tax code. The details are dull and unimportant: instead of allowing the top rate to fall from 6% in 2010 to 5.5% in 2011, as it would have under the law at the time, the 2010 reform froze the top rate at 6%. (Technically, the rate fell by 0.01 points to 5.99%.) So relative to the proposed 5.5% flat tax rate for 2011, the 2010 reform actually raised income tax rates on the wealthy extremely mildly. On the other hand, relative to 2010 policy, the changes represented a minuscule decrease in effective nominal tax rates for the wealthy (due to the complexities of the marginal rate structure). In short, it was a bureaucratic reform of little significance. If progressives opposed the 2010 changes, it was because they did not address the deeply unfair 2006 tax cuts for the wealthy.

Few red states have slashed taxes for the rich as deeply as Rhode Island did in 2006. When state lawmakers dropped the top rate from 9.9% to 5.99%, the General Assembly claimed they were creating jobs. What followed was a clear demonstration of the failure of Republican economics. There is only one difference between what happened in Rhode Island and what the national Republican party would like to do to America: in Rhode Island, many of the Republicans have Ds after their names.

The economic devastation we are facing does not call for the laughably tiny tweaks Chafee and the General Assembly are proposing. What we need is a jobs bill, one we can easily fund by rolling back the 2006 giveaways to the rich. So let’s not waste our time discussing the bureaucratic baby steps Smith Hill loves. Let’s actually fix the economy.

• Related: DaPonte: RI progressives are wrong about income tax changes (Jan. 18)

The marquee lefty confab Netroots Nation will hold its annual gathering at the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence from June 7 to 10. And while last year’s Netroots was ground zero for liberal disenchantment with the Obama administration, this year’s is likely to be a more harmonious affair. Here’s Evan McMorris-Santoro reporting for TPM:

“People are definitely in more of an electoral mode,” said Raven Brooks, executive director of Netroots. …

Netroots organizers said they’re in talks with the White House to get someone from the administration to appear at the Providence conference.

“We don’t know what that will look like yet,” Rickles said. “I think it’s fair to say that we expect someone will be there because they come every year.”

Whomever attends from the White House will face a much warmer reception, the organizers said. …

The next Netroots will be focused on building on those victories as well as expanding the Netroots base to include activists focused on areas like criminal justice by tapping into the outrage over the Trayvon Martin shooting.

It will be interesting to see which high-profile speakers, including but not limited to White House officials, will make their way to Rhode Island for Netroots.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse got a whole lot less liberal in 2011, at least in the eyes of National Journal.

The Beltway magazine is out with the latest edition of its widely watched annual rankings of where members of Congress fall on the ideological spectrum, and Whitehouse dropped to No. 19 on the liberal list after two years on top.

National Journal put Whitehouse in lockstep with his senior colleague U.S. Sen. Jack Reed. The Rhode Islanders shared a two-way tie for 19th place, voting for liberal policies 78% of the time. Reed ranked 10th most-liberal the prior year.

Reed and Whitehouse were the only two senators from the same state who received the exact same composite scores from National Journal for 2011. But the other half of Rhode Island’s congressional delegation isn’t in agreement nearly as often.

(more…)

The latest Gallup polling is a mixed bag for those on Rhode Island’s political left.

President Obama’s job approval rating among Rhode Islanders slipped below the crucial halfway mark in 2011, with 49.2% approving and 39% disapproving of the way he’s “handing his job as president.”

Obama’s approval rating in Rhode Island has declined steadily since he took office, starting at 66.6% back in 2009, then dropping to 55.1% in 2010 and now 49.2% in 2011. The president won 63% of the vote here against John McCain in 2008.

Rhode Island and Washington were the only two states where Obama dipped under 50% last year. His approval rating was six points higher – 55% – in neighboring Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Gallup’s surveying also found the Democratic Party’s dominance continuing in Rhode Island despite a decline in the number of liberals.

The share of Rhode Islanders who describe themselves as liberals fell to 24.7% in 2011, down from 29.3% in 2010, while the share of moderates rose 3 points to 38.8% and the share of conservatives rose 2 points to 31.8%, according to Gallup. Rhode Island was the most liberal state in the first half of 2010, but was only the 8th most-liberal last year.

When it comes to the two parties, 47.8% of Rhode Islanders leaned Democratic in 2011, basically unchanged from the prior year, and 27.5% leaned Republican, a slight dip from 29.2% in 2010. Hawaii was the only state more Democratic than Rhode Island.

(chart: Gallup)

the new Rhode Island's Future

It’s back to the future for Rhode Island’s Future.

The lefty website that was an influential voice of opposition to the Carcieri administration will return to its roots on Wednesday by debuting with a new look and a commitment from 15 contributing writers to reenergize the blog, which fell all but silent last year.

“There is this ephemeral image of Rhode Island being this bastion of liberal policy,” Brian Hull, who bought Rhode Island’s Future in August 2009, told WPRI.com. “Sure, everyone’s a Democrat, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s a liberal. Now RIFuture is coming back to actually have that strong liberal voice that’s been missing.”

With Hull busy as a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Rhode Island’s Future became a ghost town in 2011, rarely updated except for occasional scattered posts, some anonymous, and event announcements. It was a far cry from the consistent commentary that marked the site in its heyday under founder Matt Jerzyk or that still happens at Anchor Rising.

(more…)

“Is Rhode Island really a blue state?” Projo health reporter Felice Freyer asked on Twitter the other day. I had the same thought after scanning recent headlines out of the Statehouse.

Felice pointed to two good examples: the legislative stalemate over abortion that blocked creation of a health insurance exchange, and Governor Chafee’s decision to sign a voter ID bill. Then there was the gay marriage debate, which ended with an unloved civil unions law that included controversial religious exemptions. WRNI’s Ian Donnis declared the losers in this year’s budget debate to be labor, liberals and the poor. The Democratic Party’s rising stars – Angel Taveras and Gina Raimondo – have both been at odds with organized labor early in their tenures.

I don’t have any brilliant unified explanation for all this, but it sure is striking when you consider Rhode Island is by some measures the nation’s most liberal state.

“Blue state” and “red state” certainly can mask a lot of subtleties. Presidential elections are probably a poor proxy for state policy, and “heavily Democratic” doesn’t necessarily mean “heavily liberal.” The state’s center-left governor is a Rockefeller Republican at heart. Anti-tax groups like the Rhode Island Tea Party and the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition are energized and media-savvy. Organized labor’s interests aren’t always straightforwardly liberal. Plus, the financial squeeze from an age of austerity colors everything.

Sometimes I think slapping labels on politics actually make it harder to understand what’s going on. True, calling Rhode Island a “blue state” is helpful shorthand in some ways (Republicans really don’t win a lot of elections here) but not others (gay marriage was never the cinch it might have looked like on paper). But if you really want to know what’s going on, you should watch what policymakers and other elites do, not what they say – or what letter they stick after their names on a ballot.

(photo: CafePress)

Governor Chafee’s original sales tax plan may be gone, but it’s not forgotten. One of the problems the proposal ran into was that it had many critics and few defenders.

Take The Poverty Institute, which advocates on behalf of government support for low-income Rhode Islanders, and therefore often backs efforts to raise tax revenue rather than cut programs.

The organization did wind up coming out in support of Chafee’s proposal last week. But included in the group’s explanation of its position was this chart showing how much more sales tax different groups of Rhode Islanders would pay if the plan passed:

The analysis was done by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which is nobody’s idea of a right-wing think tank. If you look at the percentages, rather than the flat dollar amounts, this shows Chafee’s plan was unquestionably regressive – the less income you have, the bigger a share of it you’d wind up paying.

While business opposition to the sales tax proposal garnered the most attention, I think this was another key reason for its demise – while the governor was proposing to raise revenue instead of relying solely on cuts to balance the budget, his chosen method for accomplishing that wasn’t particularly liberal.

That’s likely why, in The Poverty Institute’s case, its support for the sales tax plan was tied to passage of a more generous Earned Income Tax Credit, which boosts poor and working-class Rhode Islanders’ incomes – but which was not really a part of the discussion, particularly with the state already facing a large deficit next year.

The dynamic was on display at The Poverty Institute’s annual state budget conference last month, where the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ John Shure admitted it would have been preferable for Chafee to have proposed raising the income tax rather than the sales tax.

But “I’m also not here to let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said that day. “In states where the only option seems to be to raise the sales tax, you need that money,” and he argued governors who are willing to propose higher taxes needed liberal groups’ support either way.

Similarly, another organization that spoke in support of Chafee’s plan last week – the union-backed advocacy group Ocean State Action – sounded perfectly willing to throw it overboard late last week and pivot nstead to a more general call for raising taxes on upper-income Rhode Islanders.

“In light of growing opposition to Gov. Chafee’s sales tax plan we need real solutions to our fiscal crisis,” the group said in a press release Friday that called for “closing corporate tax loopholes, reforming our regressive personal income tax structure, and taxing our state’s top earners at a reasonable rate.”

With battle-ready enemies and fair-weather friends, then, perhaps it’s no wonder Chafee’s original proposal crashed and burned.

National Journal is out with the 2010 edition of its famous annual rankings of where members of Congress sit on the ideological spectrum – and Sheldon Whitehouse was the most liberal U.S. senator for the second year in a row.

Whitehouse took the title of “most liberal” in a nine-way tie with senators from Ohio (Brown), Maryland (Cardin and Mikulski), Vermont (Leahy and Sanders), Michigan (Levin and Stabenow) and Nevada (Reid), according to the Beltway magazine. They voted for liberal policies 83% of the time.

Whitehouse’s Rhode Island colleague Jack Reed was right behind him, though, in a three-way tie for the ranking of 10th most-liberal senator along with New York’s two members, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer. Reed voted for liberal policies 81% of the time.

In the House of Representatives, now-retired Patrick Kennedy and Jim Langevin were further from the ideological extremes and also further apart from each other than the senators.

National Journal ranked Kennedy the 60th most-liberal congressman, voting that way 83% of the time, and Langevin as 120th most-liberal, voting that way 73% of the time.

Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, who represents Bristol County, was in a three-way tie for eighth most-liberal congressman, according to National Journal. He took the liberal position in votes 95% of the time.

National Journal’s Ron Brownstein said the rankings showed Congress reaching “a new peak of polarization.” Here’s how he described the magazine’s findings overall:

The results document another leap forward in the fusion of ideology and partisanship that has remade Congress over the past three decades, the period tracked by NJ’s vote ratings. For most of American history, the two parties operated as ramshackle coalitions that harbored diverse and even antithetical views. … But since the early 1980s, they have vastly diminished as the differences within each party have narrowed and the distance between them has widened.

Over that period, “it’s just a straight, linear increase” in congressional polarization, says Gary Jacobson, a University of California (San Diego) political scientist who specializes in Congress. “There’s a little bit of bumping around in the numbers here and there, but the basic movement is toward the parties moving further and further apart. The 1970s are a high point of all the cross-party [coalitions]. The last three decades are ones of pulling apart.”

The magazine has been putting together the rankings since 1981. To do so, its researchers looked through all of last year’s roll-call votes in Congress – 664 in the House and 299 in the Senate – and determined which ones showed a clear ideological distinction. Just under 100 votes were used to do the calculations. More about the methodology is available here.