In Dan Carter, who is challenging Dick Blumenthal for a seat
in the U.S. Senate, the State Republican Party may have found its “happy
warrior,” a title the Democratic Party once bestowed on Hubert Humphrey.
Looks and presence in politics are not everything, but they
are not nothing. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, whether he is debating or
attending a garage sale, manages to look like the Old Man of the Mountain before
the slide. Stiff, foreboding, resolute, unbudgeable – most especially on the
matter of partial birth abortion, parental notification and the selling of baby
parts, all issues that place him very far from his Connecticut constituents.
And he is preachy, the very image of a Harvard-Yale educated aggressive
Attorney General on the hunt for delinquent business owners, thought abortion
in its grosser forms is the one profitable business in the United States that
Blumenthal adamantly refuses to regulate.
Perhaps the best line in the recent debate between the two
on WFSB Face the State was delivered by Mr. Carter following a windy discourse
by Mr. Blumenthal explaining how a solicitous government produces jobs. Mr.
Blumenthal thinks it is proper for Washington Beltway politicians to take a
dollar from successful company A and give it to company B, which invariably is
less successful: Why else would company B be soliciting tax money from crony
capitalist politicians in Washington? Mr. Carter thinks it is the role of the
U.S. Congress to promulgate general and equitable laws that spur business
activity, which in turn increases federal tax revenue, c.f. President John Kennedy’s address to the Economics Club of New York in 1962.
After Mr. Blumenthal had finished describing his Rube
Goldberg economic policy, which does exactly the opposite of what he would wish,
the “happy warrior” smilingly observed that he was having “a Deja vu moment,” a
reference to Mr. Blumenthal’s forgettable answer to a question put to him in an
earlier debate by billionaire Republican challenger Linda McMahon: “How is wealth
created?” Mr. Blumenthal’s answer showed he knew less about the economy than
the Old Man of the Mountain.
“Better to remain
silent and be thought a fool,” said Abe Lincoln “than to speak and to remove
all doubt,” good advice now twice spurned by Mr. Blumenthal.
Connecticut is
suffering a chronic economic downturn largely because Democrats who have
pledged their troth to employees unions, much in the way Blumenthal has married
himself to the baby parts merchants, simply do not know that business best
flourishes when the withering hand of government – high taxes and unnecessary
regulations – only lightly and equitably touches it. Not for nothing did George Washington say “Government
is force,” which is and should be restrained by the U.S. Constitution and the
Bill of Rights.
Obamacare, now
failing, is for all practical purposes an alternative insurance company; it’s
failure will almost certainly drive authoritarian
Democrats to “fix” the wreck by transferring to universal healthcare system – Democrat
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has hinted as much -- at which point already reeling Connecticut
insurance companies will find themselves in competition with a national
insurance company far removed from a competitive marketplace and supported through
tax dollars. Connecticut is heavily invested in its insurance companies, and
there is little doubt that a national “investment” in a government driven universal
health care system will transform many of Connecticut’s insurance companies
into boutique insurance providers. As a necessary consequence, jobs will be
lost, tax revenue will diminish, and Connecticut’s crony capitalist Governor
Dannel Malloy will find it even less possible to bribe Connecticut insurance
companies to continue to provide employment in a market that has been so
substantially transformed.
Following the Blumenthal-Carter
debate, one paper reported that there were “notable areas of philosophical disagreement. Asked about
efforts to spur job-creation, Carter spoke of the need to reform the corporate
tax code and control government spending. Blumenthal called for investment in
strengthening national defense, rebuilding transportation infrastructure and
investing in job-training as well as offering tax credits for research and
ending special tax breaks for companies that take jobs overseas.”
Philosophical
indeed! One does not spur job creation in a private marketplace by taking from
the marketplace dollars used to create business activity and jobs, then distributing
those dollars to projects that never will be self-sustaining. Connecticut
itself is flush with jobs created by government; the public employee marketplace
has exploded. But every dollar used to pay for salaries and underfunded benefits
that are 25 to 46 percent more costly than those provided in the private marketplace,
according to the unimpeachable Yankee Institute,
is a dollar lost that otherwise might have been used to create jobs now
purchased with bribes in the form of grants and temporary tax cuts offered to
ailing Connecticut companies. And why, pray tell, are companies in Connecticut
ailing – or worse, moving out of state?
We know why. The
great rush from Connecticut has little to do with philosophy and everything to
do with a government wearing ideological blinders that prevent it from drawing
logical obvious conclusions from events politicians would prefer to ignore – in
order to win elections so that the reigning power might continue to execute
failed policies.
Blumenthal, the
third richest Congressman in the Senate and as imperishable as the Old Man of
the Mountain before the slide, will not allow more debates between himself and “The
Happy Warrior” because it is not in his interest to do so. Absent a great
awakening among Connecticut’s voters, Blumenthal at least has a good chance of
retaining his job.
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