The Urbanophile has a blog post entitled The Urbanophile » Blog Archive » Indiana’s Bridge Deal Boondoggle, Part 1: A Financial Fiasco. The upshot: Indiana got out-negotiated on the Ohio bridge deal by Kentucky, giving away, in effect, between $850 million to $1.7 billion, depending how you count it. The shame of such a thing outweighs even the financial burden.
Pence Campaigning as the Fiscal Disaster Candidate
In his run for governor, Mike Pence is floating the notion of cutting Indiana’s income tax rate and eliminating its estate tax. Not really a rational plan for a state with a $2 billion debt to the feds caused by a years of a weak economy and even more years of underpaying into the unemployment insurance fund. State pension funding has also been less than sufficient for probably decades.
And, I’ve been over my aversion to getting rid of estate taxes while we still have other sorts of taxes. As taxes go, in my opinion, the estate tax is less objectionable than an income tax. I figure a guy has a greater claim to all of his income at the end of a work week than an heir has to someone else’s estate.
Promises of tax cuts are just a version of the old campaign game of “everyone can have what they want and we never have to pay for it.” It works because people can’t or won’t do the math to see that these things rarely add up.
Help Us, Mike Pence, You’re Our Only Hope
Let’s not put too fine a point on things. Mike Pence is a blowhard. He’s the worst kind of politician. Full of hyperbole. Useless in practical, economic matters. Actively harmful on social issues. This is not the kind of language I use lightly or often, but Pence seems to represent the worst in our public servants; the kind who talks a lot, often in superficial, cartoonish terms, but doesn’t seem to actually do anything except poison the political discourse.
Dan Carden of the Northwest Indiana Times reports that Mike Pence warns of a descent into totalitarianism if he is not elected governor.
Pence warns that
[P]olitics is not about choosing right or left but up or down: “Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”
“That’s the choice Indiana faces today,” Pence said.
“That’s the choice Indiana faces today.” Individual freedom or the ant heap of totalitarianism. Really? I can’t imagine he actually believes that. Particularly when he embraced and continues to embrace the Patriot Act. It’s just something he says for money and votes.
As for legislative accomplishments, I Googled “Legislative accomplishments of Mike Pence,” and turned up a GovTrack page:
Mike Pence has sponsored 62 bills since Jan 3, 2001 of which 59 haven’t made it out of committee and none were successfully enacted.
Reminds me of the scene from Office Space when the Bobs ask Tom Smykowski to describe his function at Initech.