From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:
If only more humans had the anti-sucker capabilities of members of the corvid family. This quote is from The Economist:
“Members of the corvid family, including crows, ravens, rooks and magpies, are known to be unusually intelligent birds capable of keeping track of complex social relationships. Magpies can recognize themselves in mirrors; rooks and crows make and use tools. Ravens and jays can remember which of their group mates were watching when they hid food; American crows can remember the face of a dangerous human years after a single encounter. In the latest example of corvid ingenuity, detailed this month in the journal Animal Behaviour, nine ravens played a simple food-trading game with researchers—and were able to remember, a month later, which humans had behaved fairly or unfairly. They would then choose to avoid playing with humans who treated them badly.’’
And now on to humans:
This is so predictable: When Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is low, as it is now, public-employee unions move in to grab rich new perks from their allies in the General Assembly. These slam state and municipal budgets when the economy goes down (as it’s likely to do over the next year). During the ‘70s and ‘80s, we saw vast pension-benefit increases at the state and municipal levels, which turned into fiscal disasters when the economy went south in the early ‘90s.
And so in the legislative session just, if incompletely, ended were two potentially gigantic and unaffordable giveaways. One allows indefinite extension of expired municipal labor contracts. That means that very generous contracts signed in a time of relative prosperity could go on and on in a time of recession-caused falling tax revenues.
The other part of the raid is that the General Assembly has approved even richer tax-free disability pensions for police and firefighters by allowing “illnesses sustained while in the performance of duty’’ as acceptable reasons for getting a tax-free disability pension – allowing decades of affluence for many more pensioners (many of whom get another job after leaving public employment). As I’ve written, this bill, sponsored by legislators swimming in conflicts of interest, would mean that they could claim cardiovascular disease – extremely common and the most frequent cause of death in America! – as a reason to get big disability pensions. Or skin cancer, contracted from spending a lot of time outside. Or many other common ailments.
The disability pension system for police officers and firefighters is already widely abused. It’s depressing that the General Assembly would be willing to make it worse.
Let’s hope that Gov. Gina Raimondo has the fortitude to confront this raid on the treasury and veto both these deals.
