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| DeSantis -- Sun Sentinel |
State government in Connecticut is missing some dots and failing to connect others.
The most obvious dot is that connecting getting and
spending. These have always been causally connected. The more state government
spends, the more state government must tax its citizens.
The federal government may escape the necessary connection
by simply printing money. This devalues the currency and causes inflation,
another dot politicians find convenient to gloss over, especially during
election periods.
States may avoid crushing tax increases by passing the debt
to future generations. Connecticut, which has the highest
taxpayer debt of any state in the nation, has perfected this method. It is
first in the nation in debt production and, at the same time, tax exodus. The
state’s debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio is 20 percent. Nutmeggers may escape
future tax debt by leaving the state, and they do, according to figures
supplied by North American Moving Services.
At the same time, Connecticut’s ruling party, or rather its
ruling Democrat Party caucus in charge of passing the debt to the unborn in
Connecticut, and the national progressive Democrat Party on the Potomac, has championed
a “bill” – so called because all bills involve money appropriations – to relieve
college students of their own contractual debts.
The irony has passed us by without much comment from our left
of center media. Here is a federal government swimming in debt, paying the debt
with borrowed and inflated dollars, while creating a debt escape trapdoor for
college students whose education bill is inflated partly because their tab is
financed through tax dollars. The words of Milton Friedman seem more prophetic
every day: “If you think a college education is expensive now, just wait until
it’s free.” The kings and administrators of the Old Testament stoned their prophets.
We are more merciful. We simply vote them out of office.
Payment, in this scheme, will fall on the shoulders of, say,
the poorly paid staff of a Connecticut restaurant about to be closed. The wait
staff, none of whom likely have degrees from Harvard or Yale, will be tapped to
pay for the high priced college educations of young future captains of industry
blithely unconcerned with rising taxation and state spending.
Millionaires in increasingly progressive Greenwich
Connecticut, home to both Governor Ned Lamont and U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal,
can well afford high taxes, a burden that falls inequitably on the rich and the
poor.
Realist appraisals are the key to winning elections, most
especially for the Republican Party in Connecticut, which has for decades been
outflanked by the key-keepers of the state’s Democrat Party hegemony.
A realist politician will tell the voting public what they already
know to be true, often overwritten by artful politicians who somehow
have mistaken the wealth of the people, sadly diminishing in Connecticut, for
the wealth of the state’s political superstructure. The state of Connecticut,
as the Democrat majority in the General Assembly never tires of reminding us,
is rich in surplus tax money, while the state’s tax paying public is growing
poorer by the day. Inflation, everyone but proselytizing politicians seem to
know, is a hidden tax, particularly destructive because it is a tolerated fraud.
Postmodern progressivism has many children: confiscatory
taxation, imprudent spending, cultural wokeism – the triumph of political
propaganda over reality -- the brutish denial of the doctrine of subsidiarity,
which holds that larger political structures should only play a subsidiary role
in political decision making, facilitating decisions made by what G.K.
Chesterton calls “the little platoons of democracy.” The role of Big Government
in a healthy republic should be to act always so that smaller more democratic
political entities such as families and towns survive the increasing centralization
of political power. Postmodern progressivism is by its very nature a radical
assault on small “d” democracy – more, it is an assault, thus far indifferently
resisted, on the very roots of small “r” republican governance.
In a mid-term election in which a fantasized “red wave”
turned out to be a blood blister for Republicans, Governor Ron DeSantis crushed
his opponent by an astounding 20 points. In Ohio, the Washington Examiner reminds us,
Governor “Mike DeWine ran away with a 25-point victory. Governor Chris Sununu
took New Hampshire by 15 points.”
Remarks made by DeSantis in his victory speech are
instructive: “We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We
have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers. And we
reject woke ideology.”
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