PolicyGuy

Thursday, July 31, 2003


In the Land of Tax-and-Spenders
The National Conference of State Legislators is a group of state legislators across the country. It's also the home of spend-happy legislators, as David Hogberg relates in his travelogue to the group's annual meeting last week. Fiscal problems were discussed as a "revenue problem," not a "spending problem," even though, during the last fiscal year, state spending increased 1.7 percent--outstripping revenue growth of 0.7 percent. Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, was, according to Hogberg, booed and hissed when he suggested that states cut spending. And we call these people "honorable"?

"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve

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