EDITORIAL: Rhode Island Is Missing Its Chance - This Needs To Be an Economic Battle
Monday, October 26, 2020
Rhode Island has a significant opportunity to transform its economy and develop a plan more focused on the future coming out of the pandemic than it did going into 2020.
2020 was going to be a difficult economic year regardless of coronavirus. There were many key indicators that pointed to an economic downturn.
As early as 2019 indicators were beginning to point in the wrong direction not just in Rhode Island, but everywhere. The Guardian wrote, “As 2019 gets underway, things look very different. Consumer debt has risen back to pre-crisis levels in many countries. Corporate borrowing has soared and governments, while they have reduced annual deficits, continue to sit on mountains of debt that dwarf the borrowing seen before the crisis.”
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTNow, financial realities and the pandemic have created an economic reset button.
It is Rhode Island’s chance to outperform its peers and use its size to transition from an economy too dependent on retail and hospitality, to one that is focused on flexible skills and driven by jobs of the future and not of the past.
To win it requires an understanding of the opportunity and more importantly, it requires Rhode Islanders to be disciplined.
Rhode Island has to keep working and transforming.
Today, the state has the most infection in the northeast — actually on the entire Eastern seaboard. You have to travel to Kentucky to find a state that proportionately has as much contagion.
“The biggest danger that it will spread widely and we don’t have a way to check its spread,” said Dr. Michael Fine on Friday on GoLocal LIVE when the RI Department of Health reported a record number of new cases. “I fear at these numbers it will exceed RIDOH’s ability to do contact tracing — they’re working as hard as they can but there are just not enough bodies to get the contact tracing done.”
Last week, COVID Act Now put Rhode Island in its highest risk category for an imminent outbreak — and pointed to the state's insufficient contract tracing abilities as being particularly problematic.
Rhode Islanders need to be motivated to wear a mask and attack the pandemic not as a reaction to government bureaucracy, but see this as an economic opportunity. If Rhode Island stays open all winter and other states are forced to close, then Rhode Island has an economic advantage. More time, resources and energy to transform.
This needs to be an economic battle -- a battle for our economy and for our economic future.
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