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| Carcieri (center) does his bit to bury the state's economy |
While Keith Stokes might be the one to have lost his
job and Curt Schilling might lose his business, the person most responsible for
the 38 Studios financial fiasco is former Governor Don Carcieri.
The CEO governor billed
himself as having the business background necessary to boost the economy and
create new jobs. But as it turned out, Carcieri was the worst steward of the
state’s fiscal situation in a generation or more.
He’ll now be forever
remembered as the one who wanted the now-infamous guaranteed gamble/guaranteed
loan to 38 Studios which seems almost guaranteed to fail. And this comes on the
heels of Rhode Island
finally recognizing that his aid cuts to cities and towns simply pushed the
burden onto local property taxes, an added expense that the poorest cities in
the state couldn’t withstand.
Carcieri’s credibility is literally vanishing before
Almost as soon as
mayors and media pundits started to blame Carcieri’s cuts for the financial
struggles of our highly distressed cities, his swan song and biggest economic
achievement, the dreaded 38 Studios deal, seems likely to enter the annals of
fiduciary disasters.
The last guy to cause Rhode Island so much
fiscal pain was Joe Mollicone, and he only made off with $13 million. Carcieri’s
got that beat more than five times over. In fact, Carcieri’s ill-fated decision
to invest nearly $100 million in an ex-baseball player’s ability to develop
video games could cost the state about a quarter of what it saved on pension
reform this year.
Speaking of which,
there are those who blame Carcieri for exacerbating the pension problems in Rhode Island , too. When
he laid off state workers, he drastically reduced the number of people paying
into the retirement system while more people were retiring than ever.
One has to wonder what
Carcieri was thinking – I mean, I can’t imagine he would have made this loan
when he was working in the private sector at Old Stone Bank so why did he do so
when he was working for the public sector? Was he star struck by Schilling? Is
he a secret video game junkie? Did he actually think this was a good deal for
the state? Of course hindsight is 20/20, but it seems the only thing that makes
sense is that Schilling sold him snake oil.
Ironically enough,
prior to the 38 Studios debacle, Carcieri’s biggest public blunder was having
the Narragansett Indians beat up for not paying taxes on cigarettes they were
selling while opposing their efforts to develop a casino. But a casino would
have generated twice the number of jobs as 38 Studios and the taxes the smoke
shop owed paled in comparison to what Carcieri invested in 38 Studios.
It will be interesting to see if he
remains a visible part of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Romney, another
CEO governor, had the good sense to at least act like a moderate while he was
the governor of Massachusetts .
Carcieri never seemed to realize that politics is the art of the possible, not
of the ideological.