Connect The Dots

Ron 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.”