“New York’s government is too big, ineffective and expensive,” says the candidate’s website. We must spotless up the state’s fiscal house by immediately imposing a cap on state spending and freezing state public employee wages as part of the annual emergency funding plan, committing to no increases in personal and corporate income taxes on sales taxes, and imposing a cap on local property taxes.”
Tea Party candidate? Some right-wing Republican? No, that’s Andrew Cuomo, son of three-term Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo. Interestingly, he is the only Democrat with a significant lead in the polls for governor in the eight largest states, which together account for 48 percent of the country’s population.
It is a poorly kept secret that government is growing not only at the federal level, but also at the state and local levels. Particularly in some of the largest states, public employee unions have successfully pushed for higher wages and generous pensions (one Illinois school principal’s pension is valued at $26 million) to the point that public employee salaries and benefits are higher than salaries and benefits of private employees. sector taxpayers who pay for them.
So while 8 million private sector jobs have disappeared, the number of layoffs in the public sector is close to zero.
Barack Obama’s solution is to send borrowed federal dollars – a third of last year’s $862 billion stimulus package and now another $23 billion proposal for teachers – to states and localities to support the wages of unionized public workers. One reason: Labor unions gave Obama and the Democrats $400 million in the 2008 cycle.
State governors can’t resort to deficit spending without risky moves, and what’s more, as Andrew Cuomo’s platform suggests, voters don’t want it.
As a result, Republicans are leading or even running in governor’s races in seven of the eight largest states. In California, Democrat Jerry Brown – at age 72, running for an office he first won at age 36 – has less than 50 percent of the vote over eBay billionaire Meg Whitman. In Texas, Tea Party favorite Rick Perry leads Democrat Bill White, who had a moderate record as Houston’s mayor.
All polls in Florida show Republicans leading the only Democrat in statewide office.
In Pennsylvania, Republican Tom Corbett appears likely to regain his party’s governorship in a state where party control has changed every eight years since 1950.
In Illinois, would-be tax hiker Pat Quinn, elevated to governor after Rod Blagojevich’s resignation, is following in the footsteps of a little-known downstate Republican legislator.
In Ohio, Democrat Ted Strickland, popular during the first two and a half years of his term, faces only John Kasich, former chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee.
Perhaps most surprising is that in Michigan, which has the nation’s No. 1 unemployment rate, voters are leaning toward replacing tax-raising Democrat Jennifer Granholm with one of four Republicans running in the August primary instead of either of the two Democrats.
That’s pretty good evidence that in times of economic hardship, voters don’t want to keep feeding the government beast, but think it should tighten its belt a little more like most Americans do.
We observe this phenomenon not only in large American states. As former editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, notes in the Times of London, left-wing parties are under attack across Europe, and most recently in Great Britain.
One wonders whether spending cuts will prove as unpopular as large spending programs. It’s unclear, but there is an engaging test case in the nation’s 16th largest state, Indiana.
In 2008, even though Barack Obama voters voted 50% to 49% in Indiana, they re-elected spending-cutting Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels by a 58% to 40% margin. For Daniels, adolescent voters were 51% to 42% and college-educated voters were 62% to 34%. He overtook Ronald Reagan’s 1984 showing in Indiana’s richest county, winning 25% of the black vote and 37% of the Latino vote. Of all these groups, he was ahead of John McCain by double digits.
Daniels’ instincts were unpopular with both Republican and Democratic members of Congress when he headed the Office of Management and Budget during George W. Bush’s first term. But they seem to have struck a chord with Hoosiers of all stripes.
His performance is proof that polls showing voters in our largest states favor smaller government need not be just a passing fancy. Congress could pass more money for public unions. In New York, however, Andrew Cuomo appears to have gotten the message.
