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The State of The Prodigal States




February 3, 2003
 
IRVINE, CA'The Democratic rebuttal to the president's State of the Union address, given by Washington Governor Gary Locke, was yet another attempt by state governments to shift the blame for their budget crisis onto someone'anyone'except themselves, says Robert W. Tracinski, senior writer for The Ayn Rand Institute.



Noting that state general fund spending from 1996 through 2001 jumped by an average of 39 percent Tracinski says, The simplest solution to the states' budget problems is to roll back the new spending. But that goes against the basic assumption that caused the spending orgy in the first place: the premise that it is the job of productive citizens to make money, while it is the function of government to seize their earnings and spend it on their favorite causes.



Therefore, most states favor a second option: raising taxes, says Tracinski. If there is a crisis, they conclude, then we must not be seizing quite enough money from the state's producers.



Tracinski continues: But tax hikes can be unpopular with the voters, so there is a third, safer option: you can shake your fist at reality, blame everyone else, and wait for someone to bail you out.



But running to Congress to fix this problem is like going to a wino for advice on how to stop drinking, Tracinski says. A few years ago, when analysts were predicting surpluses as far as the eye could see, Congress went through hundreds of billions of dollars in new pork-barrel spending. Then came recession and war. The surplus disappeared, and Congress blamed the war, the stock market, the tax cuts'everything except their own spending binge.




Ayn Rand Institute senior fellow Robert Tracinski is available for interviews on this topic.



The Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization established in 1985, seeks to advance novelist-philosopher Ayn Randıs philosophy of Objectivism and its principal tenets: reason, rational egoism and laissez-faire capitalism. For further information, contact ARI Media Relations.  Phone: (949) 222-6550 ext. 213; fax (949) 222-6558; e-mail: interview@aynrand.org or visit ARIıs Web site at: http://www.aynrand.org.


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