By JIM BARON

NORTH KINGSTOWN — Rhode Island has gone from being the economic engine of the country at the start of the 1900s to an “entitlement mentality state,” administration director Gary Sasse said Saturday.

Asked why that happened, he answered, “those were political decisions; people voted that way.”
Sasse was part of a five-member panel assembled by Operation Clean Government to provide a prescription for restoring Rhode Island to fiscal health. He was joined by General Treasurer Frank Caprio, Pawtucket Rep. Elizabeth Dennigan, URI Professor Leonard Lardaro and John Hazen White Jr., president of Taco, Inc. and an occasional columnist. WPRO talk host Dan Yorke was moderator.
One of the things that struck him when he moved to the Ocean State from Tennessee three decades ago, Sasse said, is that “people seemed to have an inferiority complex. And that seems driven by the entitlement mentality that government owes us something.”
White cited “a tremendous lack of courage” on the part of Rhode Islanders to make the changes necessary to turn the state’s economy around.
“If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to keep getting what you’ve always gotten,” he said, adding that he was “dumbfounded” after the last election when Democrats increased their numbers in the General Assembly.
What that means, White says, “is that when the rubber meets the road” voters believe “it is not their guy, it is not their gal” at the Statehouse causing the problem, but somebody else’s candidate.
White drew vigorous applause from the 200 or so people attending the OCG breakfast forum when he asserted, “we’ve got a union problem.”
The state can’t begin solving its problems, he said, “Unless and until that elephant in the middle of the room is dealt with — and I don’t mean squashed or beaten up, but dealt with.”
Caprio, an all-but-declared candidate for governor in 2010 who described himself as a “conservative Democrat, diagnosed the same difficulty as a “special interest problem.”
“Over the last 30 years,” Caprio said, “the unions/special interests have worked every day in every district and up at the Statehouse and city halls and town halls. And many times on the other side of the table, there was nobody there. There was nobody there for the taxpayer.”
Lardaro told the group that “the real necessary condition to get Rhode Island off all fours and start standing up in the information age is that the people of this state will have to demand results, it is as simple as that.”
Asked why nobody from the House or Senate leadership attended the forum, Dennigan prompted an eruption of boos and catcalls from the audience when she said she gave the leadership “kudos for letting me be here.” Yorke asked Dennigan if she needed permission to come to the forum, she said no, but legislative leaders “encouraged her to come.”
Dennigan, who is exploring a race for lieutenant governor in 2010, acknowledged that leadership is “making the decisions,” but added, “the representatives and senators get to confer.”
She got in trouble with the crowd again when she attempted to give a nuanced answer to Yorke’s question about whether unions and social service advocates should be able to exert the influence over the General Assembly that they are perceived by some to have. As Dennigan hesitated mid sentence, trying to differentiate between worthwhile and necessary social services and those that might be more discretionary, audience members stood and shouted “She can’t say no,” to Yorke’s question.
Sasse said government should concentrate on three core functions, education, building infrastructure and maintaining a realistic safety net for the disadvantaged. “Everything else is irrelevant,” he declared.
Carcieri, who was not a member of the panel but gave opening and closing remarks at the forum, said part of the problem is “we don’t know what we want; we’re pretty confused. That’s why we are where we are.”
He said while there are groups like OCG and the RI Statewide Coalition “that know fundamentally that we have to change some things, there is a whole other branch” of the population, who rely too heavily on government.
“The whole notion of social justice,” the governor said, “is a very complex issue, but we’ve tended to migrate as a state, and as a nation we are moving in that direction, which is that social justice means that the government must solve all of these problems. I submit to you, that is the soul searching that’s got to happen. I think that’s what we’re for individually — when we see need to collectively come together.
“We’ve got to decide, that on our own initiative that we will build this state doing all the kind of things we’ve talked about but we will do it individually, we will do it by building the business community that will employ the people that grow the wealth and grow the opportunity,” Carcieri said. “From that will flow all the charity and all the good works that we all want to see happen.”