Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

In an illuminating piece in National Review Online , editor at large Jonah Goldberg points out that President Barack Obama’s “change” is hoary with age: “There’s an old saying: The oldest word in American politics is ‘new.’ Only in that sense is there anything new to Barack Obama.” Obama’s “vision” parallels that of Woodrow Wilson, a progressive president and “… the first to openly disparage the U.S. Constitution as a hindrance to enlightened government. His new idea was to replace it with a 'living constitution' that empowered government to evolve beyond that document’s constraints. The Bill of Rights, lamented the progressives, inhibited what the government can do to people, but it failed to delineate what it must do for people.” In an essay on style, journalist Henry Mencken let loose on the twenty-eighth president (1913-1921), whose speeches Mencken found stirring but vacuous: “Two or three years ago, at the height of his illustriousness, it was spoken of in whispers, as i...

2) Every action has a consequence – the one we want. Of course, we know this is not true. An action may have two consequences – or more. When one strikes with a cue ball the triangle of balls in billiards, all the balls move, some in unwanted directions. Translated from billiards to politics, this means that when I raise a tax to satisfy a need, my action may have unintended consequences. I may satisfy the need and create a dependency that may prove to be unappeasable; or the tax may create another problem; or raising the tax may have been an inefficient solution to the problem; or … There is also a point of diminishing returns that comes into play when taxes are raised. At some point, and at some wage levels, even a reasonable tax may be the straw that breaks the camels back. Just as one might not be able to afford a new Jaguar, so one might not be able to afford high priced taxes. What happens when a taxpayer cannot pay the tax? Pretty much the same thing that happens when a renter ...

1) We can afford things we really can’t afford if we can get a millionaire to pick up the tab . Here is an illustration of the fallacy plucked from a story written by Paul Bass for the New Haven Independent, a blogpaper: “John DeStefano is not waffling when it comes to Gov. Jodi Rell's plan to wipe out the estate tax and further enrich the state's richest 2 percent. DeStefano's opponent for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, Dannel Malloy, has been waffling on the issue. (He's from Stamford, after all.) So DeStefano continued pressing the issue Monday at a senior center in Hartford; he called for tax breaks to help seniors afford long-term care instead of an estate tax rollback. Click here to read Christine Stuart's report. The issue, first raised on this site, represents the one real policy difference between DeStefano and Malloy.” New Haven Mayor DeStefano wants to give tax breaks to seniors – a political group both more numerous than millionaires in Connect...