Geoff Schoos has a column in this week’s Cranston Herald that provides an excellent critique of Governor Carcieri’s State of the State address and his steal-from-the-poor budget.
Also, for anyone who was reading the print version of The Cranston Herald last week, you may have been confused by a column appearing under Geoff Schoos’s name and byline, but not sounding at all like Geoff Schoos. In fact, that strange Geoff Schoos imposter was applauding “Governor Carcieri for having the courage to fix the structural problems of the state budget.” That was a snafu — it was not Geoff Schoos’s column but Randy Jackvony’s column incorrectly attributed to Geoff Schoos. So now, will the real Geoff Schoos please stand up? Ah, there he is:
[…] The supplemental budget will withhold reimbursements for phasing out the car tax and general state aid from all Rhode Island’s municipalities. This alone will cost Cranston more than $1 million in expected aid. Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian was quoted as saying, “The governor took one bad budget and turned it into 39 bad budgets.â€? This burden shifting, ostensibly to encourage cities and towns to get their own finances under control, will only place a greater burden on middle-class homeowners and small businesses. The governor was quoted in the Providence Journal as saying he had “no sympathyâ€? for the cities and towns. Nor, apparently, does he seem to have sympathy for those who live in these cities and towns.
The governor, in his State of the State address, exclaimed that Rhode Island is staring at a cumulative deficit of $550 million. Then he rhetorically asked, “How did this get so bad?� He explained that the state’s financial condition was a decade in the making. What he failed to point out was that he was governor for five years of that decade. Given the fact that state finances for as long as I can remember have been tight, the real question that should be asked of the governor is “Why are you feigning surprise?� Two years ago, in 2006, some of us pointed to a structural deficit in the 2006-2007 state budget that would need to be fixed. In early 2007 it was fixed in large measure by reducing benefits to the most needy of our citizens. In the supplemental budget proposed a couple of weeks ago and the budget submitted last Friday, it’s more of the same. [full text]
Kmareka.com 
Here’s my (admittedly pithy-sounding) question:
What kind of CEO runs a company expecting no new revenue — and, in fact, revenue losses — for six years?!
The GA is going to hammer Don’s rich friends with the taxes they’ve been dodging and actually deliver some relief to us lowly folks who have to budget our dwindling salaries to afford our homes and schools.
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On the Herald’s snafu: Maybe if the Cranston staff weren’t also running a paper in Johnston, they’d have time to catch these silly errors.
I can’t say I’m terribly impressed by any of their other work, either. Their recent reporting of a poll on the potential Napolitano/Fung race, which included these nuggets: “no one has claimed ownership of the poll, which is being handled by a private polling company,” is simply lazy reporting. Turns out it was a Fung-sponsored poll (the ProJo reported that in the 2.7 edition).
A careful reading of this situation paints an unflattering picture of the Herald’s work ethic: either a.) Elizabeth Seal learned about the poll on her own but didn’t do the extra work to discover the source, or b.) Fung fed her the info about the poll and didn’t bother to mention he’d paid for it — and she didn’t press him. That’s bush league work, either way.
The only redeeming quality of the paper is that it’s still, at least nominally, a public forum for views like Mr. Schoos’s (the real one).