Are you the same Tom Sgouros who...?

Thomas Sgouros, the distinguished painter who taught at the Rhode Island School of Design for 46 years and is a member of the National Academy is my father.

But yes, you've heard my name in a number of other contexts.  I am fortunate that my freelance work has provided me an opportunity to carry out a wide range of activities over the years.  I've provided statistics help to scientists in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, written about economics and finance, helped assemble business plans for high-tech startups, and even produced a circus, attended by several thousand people over 3 seasons in the 1990's.

What is the Rhode Island Policy Reporter?

The Rhode Island Policy Reporter is a journal of public policy I founded in 2003.  It reports on the technical issues of public policy that so often go unreported but that make a profound difference in our lives.  Over the past seven years, I've covered the state's budget in great detail, but also tax policy, financial markets, affordable housing, obscure issues of accounting, environmental policy, foreign trade and much more.  In 2007, this work led to a weekly column in about ten newspapers around the state, including the Woonsocket Call, the Pawtucket Times, and the South County papers of the Times family.  You can find back issues of the Reporter and all the columns and a lot of other material archived at whatcheer.net.

What are the ten things you don't know about Rhode Island?

"Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island" is a book compilation of Policy Reporter articles and columns from 2007 to 2009.  It is an assortment of different topics, but the overall focus is on the facts that everyone knows to be true, but aren't.  For example, everyone knows that the cost of managing our cities and towns is bankrupting the state government, but the truth is that over the last couple of decades, Rhode Island's municipal governments have not only been more fiscally responsible than the state, they've done a better job controlling costs than such famously efficient (and non-union) private businesses as Federal Express.

You can find links through which you can buy the book here.

What do you mean by the "opposite of stimulus"?

According to the basic Keynesian economics that has worked for our nation since the 1940's, you stimulate an economy by putting money in the pockets of people who will spend it.  The increase in spending in the economy provides the incentives for businesses to invest and expand, and they hire, too.  This is how we got out of the Great Depression, and the Obama stimulus package is how we have avoided a far worse economic calamity than we have had.  The problem is that state economic policy works against stimulus in dozens of different ways, taking money from people who will spend it in favor of giving it to people who will save it.  These ways include tax policy that hits poor people harder than the wealthy, cuts to income support and other social services, a lack of enforcement of wage and labor laws, and an inadequate public transit system that makes it very hard to avoid owning a car, and much more.  All these factors (and more) contribute to people feeling strapped, and when people feel strapped, they don't spend money.  Less spending means less economic activity.  I wrote about this recently.

Do you work for a union?

No.  I'm listed on the web site of the Institute for Labor Studies because I spoke to their classes (unpaid) a couple of times about state budget issues.  Their students were interesting and I would be happy to speak to them again.  Gary Sasse,  formerly the Governor's Director of Administration, also spoke at the same events, and is on the same list.  He doesn't work there, either.

In 2006, Working RI, a coalition of RI unions, commissioned me to compile a survey of current academic research about out-of-classroom effects on education.  I surveyed the professional literature about the effects on education of poverty, nutrition, early childhood experience and unions (good and bad), and put it in a report called "The Shape of the Starting Line."  It was about six weeks of work that year, but I have not worked for them since.