Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Prior to and after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the president had been compared to Abe Lincoln: Both were from Illinois; both had a rough start in life; the Great Emancipator – a Republican, by the way – has done his best to make possible the election to the presidency of the nation’s first African American; so Lincoln and Obama were, some in the press said, bookends of a kind, one opening the struggle against slavery and the other closing it. All this is true. And we all should be glad whenever the nation is able to shuck off the tattered remnants of a debilitating Jim-Crow politics. It has been a long time coming. Lincoln, had he been alive in our day, would have rejoiced. At this point – so it seems to some of us – it only remains for the president now to decide whether he wishes to be Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, with whom he’s also been compared. Some have also seen in Obama a likeness to President Jack Kennedy. I have no doubt that someone will come along in the near ...

The next shot heard round the world may be a simple “No.” Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, here appears before the US Congress to give testimony on the federal bailout and utters the forbidden word, causing faces to collapse, hearts to break and Charlie Rangel to reach for the smelling salts.

Progressive Connecticut is the Eden of the Obama era. Whatever President Barack Obama has or will propose in coming years, it can justly be said that Connecticut has been there, done that. Does Washington have a Democrat controlled legislature? Been there, done that. Is the US treasury splashing around knee deep in debt? So are we. Does Washington believe that the nation does not have a spending problem, rather it has a revenue problem? That is and has been for decades the operative position of Connecticut Democrats in the legislature and their enablers in Connecticut ’s supportive media. Right on down the line, on nearly every important point in the Obama program, Connecticut has been tried in the fire. And we can report from Hell that few of the solutions to economic problems adopted by the Obama homunculi that populate our state legislature will work to enhance either our liberty or our prosperity. It would be helpful if some champion of free enterprise in the state, perhaps our gov...

Every newspaper in the state should be challenging every elected official to cite four ways to reduce spending. It is no longer possible, or even advisable, to think about these matters inside the usual spending box. Connecticut has for so long thought exclusively in terms of increasing revenue that the state has lost the virtue of prudence in spending. What is needed is a method that will force legislators to curb a habit that threatens to bury the state in debt. A way to reverse the state’s decline has been offered by the Yankee Institute , the best libertarian-conservative think tank in Connecticut. Two economists for the YI, J. Scott Moody and Wendy P. Warcholik, have suggested the adoption of a “ Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights .” The bill the two have in mind will set statutory limits on spending, “which would grow no faster than the increase in inflation and population. Since spending drives taxes, the speed limit is meant to ensure that growth in government does not exceed taxpayers’...