A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

The Midwesterner has a blog post worth reading on the subject of state job growth experiments.

A couple of notes:

#States may well be too small to fight against the global current within their own borders. Regionalism may be the way to go. Otherwise, they’re mired in the zero-sum game and downward spiral of poaching existing companies from one another.

#Colorado’s “economic gardening” experiment may have merit — try to nurture start ups and hope they grow into something bigger. Throwing money at big companies, hoping they’ll stick around doesn’t seem to be working and these big companies probably aren’t going to grow domestically anyway.

#Most experiments are worth trying; if only because the alternative is giving up which some States (he picks on Florida) seem to be doing already.

Maybe I’m too hard on the state folks because I see the hard work the local folks do; but it’s hard to escape the feeling that state legislators would prefer to get credit for cutting taxes and balancing their budget while making the local folks do the hard stuff; like cutting services or raising taxes locally to provide services mandated by the state or expected by constituents.

College tuition increase hearings by the state budget committee are another round in this. Seth Slabaugh, writing for the Muncie Star Press, has an article on Ball State’s President Jo Ann Gora pushing back a little bit against the state.

“Tuition is going up because the state’s share of the cost is going down, and in Ball State’s case it has gone down dramatically,” Gora said. “The point we’re trying to make here, and it may be the most important point that we make, is that tuition is not going up because our spending is out of control.”

We saw similar accusations when the State was balancing its budget on the backs of local government. Rather than acknowledge that fact, state lawmakers would accuse local government of being out of control with its spending.

Parents trying to send kids to college absolutely don’t want to hear that they have to pay more in tuition because State government has other priorities. State lawmakers likely don’t want their constituent parents to hear that either. So, they hold these hearings to hold college administrators’ feet to the fire a little bit. Probably nothing wrong with that, in and of itself; but we shouldn’t believe that state lawmakers aren’t contributing in a relatively direct way to these tuition increases.

Former Representative Tom Kromkowski has passed away. From the South Bend Tribune:

Tom Kromkowski, a Democrat who served 26 years in the Statehouse representing District 7, passed away about 5 a.m. today at Lakeland Hospital in Niles, his daughter Julie McSweeney of Atlanta said. He had celebrated his 69th birthday Sept. 2.

Doctors admitted Kromkowski to the hospital late Thursday night, McSweeney said. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer several years ago.

She describes her father, who first headed to Indianapolis to represent South Bend in 1980, as a man who loved politics.

Mike Lofgren, a now-retired staffer for Congressional Republican budget committees, has a piece on his disillusionment with the national Republican party which seems to me to be essential reading.

He is not kind to the Democrats, by the way, but he seems to see them as merely feckless. He sees the Republicans as transitioning from the more or less responsible Eisenhower model to something increasingly toxic. This sort of thing resonates with me because I agree with it — I’ve never been terribly excited about the national Democrats myself (except Howard Dean – I loved that guy); but I was raised as a Republican and think of myself as basically the same guy, but the national party has moved too far away to be agreeable.

Lofgren identifies three pillars of modern G.O.P. thought (1. Protection and enrichment of the wealthy; 2. Militarism; and 3. Religious fundamentalism) and suggests politicized religious fundamentalism as the key ingredient in the rightward lurch:

It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes – at least in the minds of followers – all three of the GOP’s main tenets.

He traces the drift through Iran/Contra to the 1995 Government shutdown to the Clinton Impeachment to Obama birtherism. He also makes clear that he doesn’t think that racism is a critical component in the antipathy toward Obama. It’s any Democrat. If Hillary Clinton had won the election, we’d probably be hearing more about her role in murdering Vince Foster.

I don’t know anything about Lofgren. The angle generally is to promote his credibility by saying, “this guy was a Republican forever, and look what *he* thinks.” But, I expect he’s already being attacked as a RINO or with some other calumny. I have no basis for judging what axe or axes he has to grind.