99.2% of Rhode Islanders believe the state economy is hopeless

[Indy Texas]

I've always thought of Rhode Island as a sad, very high-tax blend of Family Guy and Mystic Pizza.

[Indy Texas]

Many other states are completely deluded about American 'competitiveness' - but apparently not Rhode Island.  Practical people.  The American model of $10-15/hour labor costs simply can't work in the modern globalized world.

So your solution is to force everyone to be paid double that and simply sit back and sigh when half of them don't have jobs?

[Indy Texas]

How about how to attract well-paying jobs?

As I said blow up all the cheap labor and jobs become automatically well paying.  Or maybe a plague - but how do you tailor it to only kill non-Rhode-Islanders?

Why do you act as though the only people in the world who have a right to earn a decent living are Americans with few marketable skills? Why don't the poor, toiling masses in China matter to you, and why do you refuse to acknowledge the tremendous improvements in living standards they've obtained over the past 20 years?

[Indy Texas]

Why do you act as though the only people in the world who have a right to earn a decent living are Americans with few marketable skills? Why don't the poor, toiling masses in China matter to you, and why do you refuse to acknowledge the tremendous improvements in living standards they've obtained over the past 20 years?

Because they're not in the same polity.  Why should people in one tribe care about the people in another?

Why stop there? If Americans aren't supposed to care about the poor Chinese, why should a Texan like me care about a poor Ohioan or Michigander? For that matter, why shouldn't every city and municipality in the country just close itself off and operate in a state of autarky, where no good or service can be brought in from the outside and we can all only buy and sell things from and to the people who live in our same ZIP code?