Six-state review
Year-to-date revenues for the first four months of FY2003 were above their FY2002 level in most New England states. Hit hard by dramatically diminished tax receipts and/or increased spending pressures, all six states closed FY2002 with deficits that had to be eliminated by end-of-the-year fiscal measures. The improved revenue collections for the first four months of FY2003 were welcome. General revenues were up in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Sales tax receipts, driven in large part by car purchases induced by manufacturers' offers of zero percent financing, were up in Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, and Vermont; meals and rooms tax receipts were up in New Hampshire. Personal income tax collections were mixed; although higher in Maine and Vermont, they were down slightly in Rhode Island and sharply in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Taking charge: should New England increase its reliance on user charges?
New England relies less on user charges for its state and local revenues than any other region of the country. As a result, some policymakers maintain that increases in user charges would correct an "imbalance" in the region’s revenue mix. However, the national mix of state and local revenues is not necessarily the best mix for the states of New England. The degree to which a state should rely on u. ser charges depends on the priorities of its policymakers among competing principles of taxation, the conditions under which each principle favors user charges over taxes, and the extent to which these conditions exist within the state. Since each state has its own distinctive values and traits, the role of user charges in financing state and local government should vary across states. ; This article explores the conditions under which user charges compare favorably to taxes according to the principles of efficiency, equity, and exportability. The author finds that, given conditions peculiar to New England, the region’s low dependence on user charges makes sense in terms of ~11 three principles. Moreover, in several instances where New England states do rely heavily on user charges to finance a particular public service, circumstances favor user charge financing.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.