"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time" -- attributed to Abe Lincoln The slam on Ryan Fazio, running for governor of Connecticut on the Republican ticket, is that he is a political nerd. Some, managing to cough up a chuckle, have compared him to Clark Kent, without bothering to ask whether he is a political superman as well. His superficial critics may have underestimated him. It is true that Fazio is a master of detail, as may be seen in virtually all his comments on budget and spending matters. As a general rule, the voting public on both sides of the aisle tend to drowse when budget figures are produced, largely because budget makers have introduced into their calculations a welter of confusing detail that allows quite a few rhetorical escape hatches. A politician not interested in “fooling most of the people most of the time,” Abe Lincoln’s formation, will deploy ...
Antisthenes I: You’ve said there is no political problem that does not lend itself to a political solution, and yet problems associated with improvident spending that are everywhere politically caused – such as inflation, excessive spending and state debt, and seemingly endless political campaigning – are rarely addressed. Why? C: It does not benefit an incumbent party in power committed to ever-increasing spending to settle such problems. In Connecticut especially, but throughout the nation as well, automatic spending increases, so called “fixed costs”, strip legislatures of their constitutional obligations. Constitutionally, legislatures are tasked with getting and spending. That means that every dollar drawn into the treasury through taxation and every dollar disbursed by the legislature should be voted up or down by small “r” republican legislators. Fixed costs loosen such constitutional obligations. If fixed costs are not unconstitutional, they most certainly are...