THIS YEAR, my 13th in Rhode Island, may prove to be the one during which the state finally forces my family out. Whatever lingering superstitious reflexes still exist from my vague, atheist days, however, are calmed by indications that I’m not alone. (Would that my stress and sore back had such straightforward remedies.)

The sour note on which the state ended 2007 came with a U.S. Census report that noted that Rhode Island leads the nation in losing people. Back in September, I pointed out on this page and on AnchorRising.com that Rhode Islanders’ median wage dropped from 2005 to 2006 despite improvements at the low end because around 30,000 fewer people inhabited households with income over three times the poverty level (that’s roughly $60,000 for a family of four).

These are but two causes of low morale: The catalog of categories in which Little Rhody falls on the wrong end of the list is as long as a Providence commute on a snowy day. Residents as yet uninfected by the local habit of taking silver linings as justification to ignore that it’s raining will have noticed that the legislature shows little sign that it understands the nature or magnitude of the problem. (The assumption of ignorance being the charitable option.)

Prominent members of the General Assembly have been making the news rounds lately to talk about efficiencies and to forswear tax increases. Read closely, however, their words betray the deceit: They may even lower the sales-tax rate, they say, just applying it to more things, thus increasing revenue. The transparent reality, of course, is that increasing revenue from taxes equals increasing the taxes paid by an already over-taxed population. The only way it can be an indicator of economic improvement — rather than a disincentive to trade — is if the strategy is to encourage more commerce, not to more heavily tax what already exists.

Therein lies the difference between what Rhode Island ought to do and what its leaders will almost definitely attempt. To offer a nod to Rhode Island silver-lining-ism, I’ll admit that the legislators don’t necessarily disdain the intelligence of all Rhode Islanders — just those not covered, politically, in some other way.

The state’s underlying problem, after all, is a surfeit of people who fall into one or more of four groups:

1. Powerful insiders. These are the folks who benefit most directly from Rhode Island’s system and represent what might be termed the power base: legislators, judges (and magistrates), union executives, activist leaders (such as the crew at the Poverty Institute who get their say in just about every Journal article), and other heads of “important” institutions in the state.

2. Budget-bought political commodities. 630AM talkers Dan Yorke and Matt Allen often point to what they term the “rub ’n’ tug” system, whereby the legislature hands out non-itemized grants to community groups as offerings of endearment, but from a certain perspective, rubbing ’n’ tugging is the core function of the state government. Unions and the social-service industry can turn out people to vote and to demonstrate (often while everybody else is at work) in an industrial rub ’n’ tug with the powerful insiders.

3. The unaffected rich. Think Sheldon Whitehouse. Small in numbers, perhaps, but huge in wealth, a significant number of people in Rhode Island (which my father, in New Jersey, calls “a playground for the rich”) are free to experiment and pay ideological homage to their vanity, because no conceivable policy could have so detrimental an effect as to do more than create the possibility that some future generation will have to sell the Newport summer manse.

4. Affianced ideologues. With some substitutions of kind, but not of essence, the above groups could stoke corruption across the political spectrum. However, in Rhode Island those who give the state its blue hue are wedded to the Democrats, as are the many, generally apathetic, citizens who have somehow imbibed the notion that a vote for the Democrats is, simply by their role in the natural order of the universe, a vote for the good guys.

Thus stands the state, and if Rhode Island is going to begin its turnaround before calamity is inevitable, it must experience a historic upset this year at the polls. Otherwise, the habitual stop-gap, high-tax solutions for which trial balloons are already aloft will simply keep the four horsemen of Rhode Island’s apocalypse in league for a few more years of burning our resources, mortgaging our future, and making residents realize that it doesn’t have to be “our” future just because it’s Rhode Island’s.

Justin Katz, an occasional contributor, runs Anchorrising.com, a public-policy think tank.