Recent articles in the New York Times on New York, the Wall Street Journal on California, and Reuters on Illinois demonstrate in exhaustive and excruciating detail how the three states that have been governed for decades in a manner that most closely resembles what the Democrats have done to and have in mind for the nation as a whole are rapidly approaching economic ruin.
Progressives used to regard the states as “laboratories for democracy,” as expressed by Justice Louis Brandeis in an often-quoted passage:
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
Any reasonable observer looking at the putrid contents of the economic petri dishes produced by the “novel social and economic experiments” in New York, California, and Illinois must conclude that their long experiments with kowtowing to public employee unions, massively growing public debt, billions of unfunded liabilities, year after year of spending far in excess of revenues, and higher and higher economic growth-curdling taxes have resulted in decline to the point of impending disaster.
Unfortunately, “reasonable observer” seems to exclude most Democrats these days, who seem intent on providing evidence of their own to support the accuracy of Albert Einstein’s famous definition of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
UPDATE [14 March]
Also see California: The Sick Man Of America, which concludes: “The political class can’t stop taxing, spending, regulating and harassing business. Until the attitude is changed, the number of companies that give up, check out and leave will just keep growing.”
