Redstate

This is the problem faced by conservatives today. We elect politicians for their conservative stances on issues, then once elected these very same politicians try to out socialist the democrat party.

...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...

---Thomas Paine---

It never ceases to amaze me how people can sit back and tolerate this continuous growth of government.

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The truth is, the more you tax profits, the more you undermine the American work ethic and the incentive structure that goes along with it. In fact, you demoralize the very system that has made this country great.

Chris Dodd has said that he will not run for re-election in 2010, and I naively thought that Jodi Rell might be a great choice for the GOP to fill his shoes.

It's a sad day when I have to endorse Christopher Shays for any office, but this move by Rell convinces me that Shays is the best Republican that we'll ever get from Connecticut - so I hope that he runs for and wins Chris Dodd's seat in Connecticut in 2010.

As a movement conservative who lives in CT, I am extremely disheartened by this. Our state ranks near the top in education achievement, an educated labor force, and quality of life - but near the bottom in most 'business friendly' measurements - cost of labor, regulatory environment, etc.

Out of the past 17 years, we have been in a "slow-growth" or "no-growth" mode for about 15 of them. Rell's proposals, which will be adopted - or made worse - by the Dems who are loudly cheering in the background - will doom Connecticut to years, if not decades, of this economic morass.

The commentary is dead on that Rell happily collected conservative campaign funding by promising to hold the lines against the big-spending Dems. It seems to me that once she got elected, it was Legacy Time - defined as how much praise she can get from the Dems and the Hartford Courant (but I repeat myself).

The only positive is that we will continue to lose population to the Sun Belt. We lost one House seat (electoral vote) last time around, and perhaps we can lose another one. Dems have veto proof majorities in both houses here in CT - and they just added one more member to their ranks.

I am seriously considering changing my registration from R to I. "Connecticut Republican" is an oxymoron.

About half of Texas' budget for a state with one-SEVENTH the people.

I guess you need the money to pay for the extra police to ticket you for talking on your cell phone in your car.

Seriously though, this is sad. I am a Connecticut refugee living in Texas. I had to get out and leave my home state behind because people like Rell ruined it. It doesn't look like it is ever going to get better.

Governor is proposing a 24 percent increase in state general fund spending for the 2007-2009 biennium. Economy doing well, revenues up, spend away!

No tax increase proposed. Too bad. At least that might incite the public.

While spending at the K-12 level is high, per-student spending on higher education in Connecticut is severely lacking. Mississippi, the poorest US state, spends more money than Connecticut.

I'm not surprised by this at all. I got to know a lot of Hartford insiders in my three years in Connecticut, and it's small-state politics in the extreme. Rell has probably been given an ultimatum by the veto-proof Democratic legislature: Spend this much, or else!

"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock."

--Thomas Jefferson

...it takes.
One of the laws of economics states that if demand becomes infinite, the price for the object of that demand rises to infinity as well.
In few other segments of our economy has that been demonstrated more clearly than prescription drugs. In 1974 the retail price for Eli Lilly's prescription cephalosporin, Keflex 500mg, was $17.49 for the full bottle of 100 capsules. In 1999 just as the Eli Lilly brand name cephalosporin was about to, in effect, dissappear from the marketplace due to market inroads by its generic competition, it was priced at four dollars a capsule, nearly the same price as the newest of the fluoroquinolone antibiotics recently entering the marketplace.
This pricing behavior has been a major trait of the pharmaceutical industry oligopoly since the introduction of the first 'blockbuster' drug Tagamet by the manufacturer Smith, Kline, and French in 1978.
In 1974, less than roughly two or three in ten prescriptions dispensed from a pharmacy were covered by prescription drug insurance. In 1999, prescription drug coverage was rapidly approaching 100 per cent of all prescriptions dispensed.
In 1974, prescription drug coverage was not a necessity, but a luxury, since the cost of a normal persons medications was relatively affordable. A month of any prescription oral contraceptive was $1.49, 100 tablets of the brand name cardiac glycoside Lanoxin .25mg was $.99. The minimum wage in 1974 was around three dollars per hour. In between then and now, as prescription drug coverage became more prevalent, drug prices began their near exponential rate of increase. Infinity here we come.
When questioned about what appeared to be irresponsible manufacturer price increases, most drug manufacturer's representatives standard reply was "So what? Nobody really pays for them anyway today!"
In 1933, at the very beginning of the government's massive intrusion into it's citizen's everyday lives and it's massive extortion from it's citizen's means of livelihood, the amount extracted from its citizens was meager, and the uses the extracted funds were put to were fairly significant, Social Security, The Hoover Dam, the TVA. In a country mired in financial depression, the moneys spent for these and other government projects, through the multiplier effect, began to ameliorate some of the economic distress that pervaded the country.
There's a rule a beginning student in organic chemistry learns:There's a limit to the amount of finished product that one can obtain through a series of two phase solvent extractions. Beyond that limit, no significant further product is obtained. The tendency in welfare spending is to look back and say, look what we gained when we spent money on this or that. Look at how much life has improved for these people! Think of what we can do with a little more money spent here or there today!
Today the State of Connecticut spends some of its extorted moneys insuring that its HIV positive welfare recipients have free access to the drugs Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra.
In the 19th century, Public Health Services expended a great deal of energy trying to find a person known only as "Typhoid Mary" in order to stop the spread of an incurable disease.
Today, the State of Connecticut spends a great deal of the money extorted from its citizens to aid and abet the spread of an incurable disease. Most of the state's citizens who are unfortunate enough to find themselves host to the HIV organism eventually end up as clients of the State's Welfare System supported by funds extorted from the still working citizens.
When my mother showed up for her first day of school early in the last century, freshly scrubbed and powdered, attired in a nicely starched dress, she was told to go home and not return until she had learned to speak English. She did, she learned, and she returned. She learned perseverance also as well as sel respect and personal responsibility as well as enough citizenship to stand up to and vanquish the enemies of this nation when it was threatened during the last century.
The products of todays well funded education system usually have no clue as to the origin of the Memorial Day Holiday, "Its the day we celebrate taking the covers off of our swimming pools". They cannot give you who was president during the Second World War, they cannot give you one battle, one general, one reason for it, or the year it ended, yet the Second World War has more to do with how we live and why the world is as it is today, the jet plane, television, radar, penicillin,the Arab Israeli Conflict,nuclear power, than anything that has happened since its end, yet the product of this lavishly state funded system know nothing of it. The only thing they have learned is to surrender to any external threat.
Government spending, like the extraction process, is also approaching its theoretical point of diminishing returns, but the politicians still feel that nobody will notice the abysmal results "since nobody really pays for it"

What the hell happens to people in politics that they look at something as big and bloated as a state (or federal) budget and say, "Well, we need it all, nothing to cut here, guess we just have to make it bigger"

What the hell?

"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle